willy loman and his tragic fall

Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman, Four Tragic Elements

Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman, Characters

Death of A Salesman - Introduced by Arthur Miller

Death of a Salesman is NOT about the American Dream

Death of a Salesman: Arthur Miller and the American Dream

Death of a Salesman and the American Dream

Aurthur Miller, Salem, MA (1991): Crucible & Trials

History of Theatre 1 - From Ritual to Theatre (Subtitles: English and Es...

Death of a Salesman: Arthur Miller and the American Dream

Arthur Miller: Death of a Salesman: A long incubation

Death of a Salesman Act 2 and Requiem

Act 2

Section 1

1.    Willy goes to see Howard concerning a none travelling job.

2.    Happy music opens the act- Loman optimism- Willy looks relaxed, slept in and wants to buy some seeds for the yard today.Linda has to dress him in his jacket.

3.    Daydreams about a house in the country- relate this to Biff’s dream( which Willy condemns)

4.    Willy is sure things will go his way very positive psyching himself up to meet Howard. Linda adds he needs an advance to clear some outstanding bills- final payment for the mortgage- Linda mending stockings-

5.    Linda tells Willy he is to meet the boys for dinner this evening after the meeting

6.    ‘A little boat looking for a harbour’- very aware of her husband’s failings and weaknesses

Section 2- Willy fails to persuade Howard and loses his job

1.    Howard’s office in New York with the new tape recorder. Greeting??? Totally ignored!

2.    Willy –(people delighted to see him???)

3.    Willy and Howard discuss the chances of another position for Willy and clearly this is not going to happen. (Miller wants Howard has to appear unsympathetic here)

4.    Willy talks of his career- Dave Singleman selling in his 80’s- liked and admired- this is what Willy seeks above all else. What evidence is there that Willy is well liked? Delusional?

5.    Begs for a job and cuts his salary- shouts at Howard- who leaves the office and Willy addresses his father Frank (Howard’s)

6.    Howard was aware of a previous ‘breakdown’ by Willy and tells him he must no-longer work for the company- rely on his son’s to help him now.

7.    Is Howard the only one who will speak the truth to Willy? Echoes of the Depression when jobs just couldn’t be made if the need wasn’t there.

Section 3-Willy dreams of the old days when Biff was a sporting success and Ben appears

1.    Ben comes on to the stage and discusses an opportunity in Alaska but Linda comes in and says Willy has already got a good job with prospects. Linda believes Willy’s boasting. Time is very confused now as it must be the past. Ben accuses him of building nothing substantial but Willy refers to the building on his house (not his career) Play on the word building here

2.    American Dream- pioneers settle down and build their own home- Dave Singleman story again. Ben leaves and Biff and Happy appear

3.    Flashback within the daydream---‘A man can end up with diamonds here on the basis of being well liked’ p.68 Willy say footballers earn more than Ben will in Alaska. Biff is well liked he will do well in business

4.    Charley teases Willy about Ebbet’s Field and the game.

Section 4- Bernard has become a successful lawyer- visiting his father

1.    Charley’s office and Willy comes to borrow money

2.    Bernard’s- successful, married and athletic (tennis racket)

3.    Bernard talks about the maths exam and Biff’s failure to get in the summer school and retake the exam

4.    Bernard describes Biff’s return from visiting his father in Boston and their fight. Willy doesn’t get it and this leads the audience to see how deluded he has become. Willy is unable to face the truth about Boston.

5.    Willy starts to boast an lie about Biff as he realises how successful Bernard is.

6.    Charley gives Willy the money he wants but doesn’t understand why Willy won’t just accept a job from him- says he is worth more dead than alive. Charley says no one is worth anything dead. Actually says Charley is his only friend.

Section 5- Biff tries to talk to Willy in the restaurant but Willy won’t accept the truth and tells his sons that he has been fired.

1.    Restaurant scene in which Happy chats up a pretty girl with terrible chat up lines. She also appears totally insincere- magazine cover- champagne salesman!

2.    Sexual remarks about her appearance

3.    Biff- famous football star from New York Giants- make believe but Biff won’t continue with the lies- who is Happy like?

4.    Biff talks about his failure with Bill Oliver and that he stole a pen off his desk- thief

5.    Happy tells him not to tell Willy- pretend a lunch date tomorrow-

6.    Willy arrives and tells them he has been sacked and wants good news

7.    Biff tries to tell Willy the truth- trumpet blares to emphasise the differences between the characters

Section 6- Willy daydreams of the time Biff failed his math exam

1.    Lighting changes back in time- (leaves) young Bernard on stage- one long list of disasters for the family- played behind the restaurant scene Bernard talks to linda front stage Willy and Biff having a conversation about Bill Oliver

2.    So why this daydream? Is Willy feeling guilty?

Section 7-Willy thinks Biff failed to cut the deal to spite him-violent argument-memory of Boston comes into his mind

1.    Willy notices the pen and blames Biff’s failure on failing his maths exam.

2.    Tannoy heard- Standish Arms Hotel- and Willy starts shouting that he is not in his room-

3.    Willy thinks Biff is worthless but then Biff tries to change his story- Willy is very upset

4.    Willy and Biff continue to discuss Bill Oliver but a woman is herd laughing- ambiguity of this

5.    Willy seems to think that Biff is deliberately spiting him. Guilt for discovered adultery?

6.    Biff tells the girls that Willy ‘is a fine troubled prince’ whilst Happy says- he isn’t his father’

7.    Peter denying Christ biblical allusion- trial of faith and Happy fails. Could Willy be seen as a Christ like figure? Gives his life for others?

8.    Willy refuses to listen to Biff and typical male turns to violence

9.    Sexual desire makes all the men feel guilty too.

Section 8-The full recollection of the scene in Boston

1.    The woman accuses Willy of ‘ruining’ her(Happy Act 1)

2.    Knocking at the door- bathroom- and Biff enters to explain the maths situation

3.    Making fun of the teacher- the woman begins to laugh too

4.    She comes out- stockings- Biff begins to cry as realisation hits him about Willy

5.    Woman’s laugh is very ambiguous throughout the play- laughing at Willy-appreciative laugh of lover- impending doom

Section 9-Willy left alone at the restaurant and becomes increasingly disturbed

1.    Stanley the waiter comes to collect Willy from the bathroom- the boys have gone and he is a pathetic old man here

2.    He asks Stanley where he can buy seeds-symbolic- the future

Section 10-Boys return home- furious Linda

1.    Linda greets the boys and makes to throw them out of the house.

2.    Tells Happy to pick up the flowers she had thrown on the floor

3.    Happy doesn’t understand Linda however Biff acknowledges his faults.

4.    Willy is banging around in the yard

Section 11- Willy in a very disturbed mind discusses the pros and cons of suicide

1.    Willy uses a torch in the dimmed yard area to read the seed packets- he is not making any sense

2.    His life insurance policy of 20,000 dollars would help Linda and he discusses this with Ben.

3.    Ben- dead brother debates the pros and cons. It may not be honoured (if it is proven that it was suicide)

4.    Who is right? Ben says its tangible and Willy says its better than ‘ringing up a zero’

5.    Willy sees his funeral on a par with David Singleman’s and that his family would finally understand that he was well liked!

Section 12- Biff tries to talk to Willy who is consumed with anger over Biff’s ‘spite’ of Willy. Biff tells him to stop trying to build dreams that Biff can’t make come true. Biff tells Willy that he loves him. Willy kills himself to leave the money to Biff.

1.    Biff tries to make his peace with Willy and get him to accept that Biff is a bum.

2.    Biff appreciates how ordinary he is as is Willy- never destined for great things

3.    Willy denies this- he sees all the opportunities for Biff

4.    Biff crying asks Willy to ‘discard his phony dream’- Willy is beyond understanding saying that Biff ‘is going to be magnificent’p.106

5.    Ben reappears and talks to Willy and they continue to discuss the money and the death- he wants to achieve the American Dream by giving Biff money to live the dream

6.    Happy talks about his future

7.    Willy talks to Ben then is back to a coaching scene - Willy goes out and drives the car away….

Requiem-Family and friends at the funeral

1.    Celebration to honour the dead=requiem

2.    Only family and Charley and Bernard there- delusional idea of being well liked

3.    Happy wants to stay in his job to beat the system for his father

4.    Biff despairs of Happy’s views and of his father’s dreams

5.    Charley’s line- definition of ‘a salesman is got to dream- it is the nature of the job’

6.    Linda’s ambiguous phrase: ’we’re free’

Death of a Salesman Notes- Act 1

Act 1 Death of a Salesman:

Section 1

1.    Willy returns home extreme weariness and Linda is obviously worried about him; the audience is faced with several possibilities- tired or going mad? Later he kills himself while driving so is this just setting up the final action.Is he just setting Linda up by saying how badly he has been driving lately?

2.    Willy’s first line,’It’s alright I came back’. Ambiguity of this line- one day he won’t?

3.    He appears to be a pathetic old man- arch supports and Linda mothers him- shoes and jacket.

4.    One hand he talks about selling to Brown and Morrison and the next he is resolved to control his life.

5.    Willy shifts his anger to the loss of greenery around his house.

6.    The audience is introduced to the constant contradictions he makes ‘ mountains out of molehills- Is Willy inventing his own difficulties or is he the VICTIM of a terrible fate(tragedy of the common man.

Section 2

1.    Biff and Happy awake to overhear the conversation between Willy and Linda.

2.    They are aware of his forgetfulness-but are aware that Willy is beginning to live in his own distorted world.

3.    Biff and Happy show that their attitude to women is extremely lacking in maturity and that they are openly sexist.

4.    Biff loves his life in the open country

5.    Happy’s life doesn’t seem so good even though he has the trimmings of the American Dream. Neither married

6.    Happy’s conquests with engaged girls ‘ruining them before their weddings’ cruel and unethical – what other sexist attitudes come through this conversation?

7.    Bill Oliver an ex-employer is mentioned and Biff unrealistically sees himself able to get a business loan from him-American Dream

8.    Boys are heard even though Willy is continuing a conversation with himself and expresses his concern for Biff. He loves Biff

9.    Can the boys prevent themselves making the same mistakes and ending up like Willy?

10.  Biff’s farmwork equates to Willy’s DIY projects. Happy has gone for a whitecollar job but is still unhappy.

Section 3

1.    Willy is lost in a daydream and the lighting changes along with the music. Dreamstate- characters enter through the walls.

2.    Willy watches Biff polish the car and condones the theft of the football.

3.    Willy hopes to have his own business- he is well liked where ever he goes- the importance of popularity and looks over hardwork and study- (Bernard and Charley)

4.    Linda tots up the commission and Willy’s exaggeration is noted.

5.    Willy contradicts himself-well liked to not liked – appearance is not conducive to sales.

6.    Woman’s laughter off stage. Whenever this occurs the ambiguity of the words/ meaning on stage are highlighted here.

7.    Willy has increasing difficulty in differentiating between reality and dream and the past and the present. Miller interleaves the use of time to add to the drama and tensions on stage.

8.    Willy’s belief that his son’s looks and popularity will help them succeed in business.

9.    Willy ‘s boastfulness is undermined by the fact that he has not earned enough money to pay his bills.

Section 4-Willy remembers his lover in Boston.

1.    Willy continues to talk as if to Linda but it is clearly the secretary in Boston. Lighting changes and Willy returns to this scene in Boston.(Changed location from the house)

2.    Willy talks of loneliness on the road and the woman tells him that she had singled him out of all the salesmen. This shows Willy’s lack of integrity as he cannot stay faithful to the one truly loyal character of Linda.

3.    Willy is still talking about his wife and her understanding of him whilst the woman thanks him for the stockings.

4.    Lighting changes and Linda is mending her stockings- guilt demonstrated here. Unsuccessful as she is wearing mended stockings.

5.    Willy throws these out in a temper.

Section Five- Willy remembers Biff being unsuccessful in school

1.    Bernard and the Regent’s exam- Willy’s recollections are no longer idyllic as before

2.    Petty theft and failure to study maths

3.    Willy pushes Biff’s sporting success above all things

4.    Willy seems oblivious to the unethical behaviour he condones – his self deception is obvious here

Section 6

Willy daydreams about following Ben and his life-Charley plays cards with Willy

1.    Willy discusses achievement in life- laments not going to Alaska with Ben(American Dream)

2.    Willy rejects financial help from Happy and rejects the job offer from Charley.(pride)

3.    Discusses handling tools- Willy identifies tools and physical work with being a man-masculinity

4.    ‘The world is an oyster but you cannot crack it open on a mattress’. You have to work to succeed/going to bed with people is not the way to economic and social success.

5.    ‘The woods are burning’ –seen as a metaphor for the jungle disappearing and the elm trees which were cut down in the garden-the very land of opportunity is going up in smoke.

Section 7

Willy plays cards with Charley but talks to Ben

1.    Ben’s entrance is made through the walls to ensure that audience realise Ben is the dead brother and its imagined- unreal event

2.    Charley leaves as Willy talks to Ben and argues with Charley over the aces

3.    Ben is the only one who had all the answers- flute- connected to Willy’s father rather than Ben-Linda and Willy have a conversation with dead Ben

4.    Biff and Ben spar but Ben trips him up-never fight fair with a stranger-why?

5.    Willy wants to rebuild part of the property and sends the boys off to steal some building material- Ben and Willy agree how manly it is to steal- Charley and Bernard – can’t hammer a nail- despised for this

6.    Willy feels: ’kind of temporary about myself’-reveals Willy’s insecurity about himself.

7.    Ben and Willy are positioned at opposite sides of the stage- they are opposites in life- Ben confident- Willy not

8.    Willy cannot distinguish truth from imagination- Ben is imagined not a remembered character.- Is Ben arrogant and scathing about Willy’s behaviour?

9.    Willy comes across as naive- Ben substitute father figure?

10.  When I walked into the jungle, I was seventeen. When I walked out I was twenty-one.

Section 8

Willy’s plans to commit suicide are discovered and the Loman brothers decide on a business plan.

1.    Linda talks about Willy to Biff and Happy. Very pertinent quotes in this section

2.    Biff’s lines; ’spewing out that vomit from his mind’.

3.    Linda; ’Attention must be finally paid to such a person.’(The common man).Is he potentially a tragic figure a fallen hero? Could he have changed this fate?

4.    ‘he’s a human being and a terrible thing is happening to him

5.    Her conversation with her sons  ’and one a philandering bum.’ p.45

6.    The fake accidents and the length of hose/piping to connect to the gas in the cellar- suicide

7.    Is it true that the son’s have been responsible for the way Willy behaves? Do you agree or disagree?

8.    Happy and Biff review Biff’s work patterns and his whistling in the lift

9.    Willy blames Biff for never growing up but the conversation moves to Bill Oliver and the business proposition to enable Biff to ‘stay home’

10.  Willy gives advise but it is again contradictory in nature- to joke-to be serious etc.

11.  Happy relates commercial success with sexual success

12.  Willy loses himself in the memory of Biff’s football achievements-golden glow bathes Biff on the stage to show the warmth and idealised memory of Biff- totally unrealistic.

13.  Biff calls Willy a fake, which worries Linda but it is not explained.

14.  Biff discovers the pipe behind the gas heater in the cellar and realises that Linda has been speaking the truth that Willy is a suicide risk

15.  Willy failed to recall that he had pawned the diamond Ben had given him for Biff’s course- Willy’s memory is also failing him and his grip on reality is surely going.

16.  Biff decides to start a business to appease the family- but this will not help Biff

17.  Biff is being altruistic here yet Willy blames him for never growing up

18.  Biff does take responsibility for his father- moves the piping.

19.  Willy originally mocked Bernard and encouraged Biff to do the same- now he says he is childish- whistling in the lift. Difficult to know what Willy wants from Biff

Realism in Drama

REALISM -- THE FIRST PHASE

The theoretical, technological, and social changes that affected the nineteenth-century theatre led to an unprecedented outpouring of dramatic creativity across the continent of Europe. Henrik Ibsen, generally considered the first modern playwright, wrote in Norwegian; August Strindberg, Ibsen's rival and contemporary, wrote in Swedish. Anton Chekhov, perhaps the most influential of early modern playwrights, wrote in Russian. Despite the linguistic and cultural diversity of this disparate group of writers, in the aggregate they forged a new theatrical world.

The Father of the Modern Drama: Henrik Ibsen

Henrik Ibsen was born in Norway in 1828. During his early childhood, his family lived well, but when he was eight years old, his father was disgraced in a business scandal and went bankrupt. Embittered by their loss of status, the young Ibsen felt estranged from his distraught parents and isolated himself. By the time he reached the age of twenty, he left home, never to return. As a child, Ibsen withdrew from these domestic tensions by playing with his toy theatre; thus the theatre may first have attracted him because it offered an escape from "real life." Yet his mature work may be read as an effort to come to terms with reality, the reality of his early life and the reality of society as a whole.

When the adult Ibsen began to write, his first performed play won him a contract to write for the theatre company of Bergen, a Norwegian town. Before beginning this job, however, he was sent abroad to Denmark and Germany, to gain some practical theatrical experience. In the l850s and '60s, he was responsible for producing plays, many of them by the popular French playwright Eugène Scribe, for several provincial Norwegian companies. Since these well-made plays of modern life seemed shallow, Ibsen persisted in writing historical and romantic verse drama,(1) thinking that only such heroic subjects would allow him to address serious subjects. However, the work that made his name demonstrates that he had absorbed thoroughly the technical methods of the Boulevard drama he deplored.

Ibsen is perhaps best known for eight plays he wrote in Italy and Germany between 1877 and 1890. By separating himself physically from his homeland, he gained the freedom and perspective to criticize it. Dissatisfied with the heroic and mythic poetic dramas he had been writing, Ibsen embarked on a series of realistic prose plays exposing contemporary problems in contemporary Norwegian settings. Concentrating directly on bourgeois Norwegian society, he nevertheless addressed universal concerns, for the social problems that provide the context for these plays -- among them the question of women's rights in A Doll House (1879), hereditary syphilis inGhosts (1881), and municipal corruption in An Enemy of the People (1882) -- were instantly recognizable to audiences throughout Western Europe and America.

Realism in the Modern Theatre

The early modern dramatists, including Strindberg, Chekhov, and George Bernard Shaw, knew Ibsen's work intimately and acknowledged its significance in their own development. One of the great practitioners of psychological realism, the American-born novelist Henry James, commented on the first London production of Hedda Gabler in 1891, scarcely one year after its original Norwegian production. James explains the power of Ibsen's theatrical realism by pointing out that "the ugly interior on which his curtain inexorably rises" provides a visual equivalent of "the pervasive air of small interests and standards, the signs of limited local life." (2) In Ibsen's realistic drama, detailed and specific props and scenery were not devices to sweep the audience away to exotic foreign locations or distant historical eras; instead, they encouraged viewers to contemplate the petty possessions, the furniture and bric-a-brac, which an acquisitive middle class accumulated in order to stake its claim in the modern world.

Ibsen's realistic plays take place in three-dimensional rooms, rather than against flat painted or architectural backdrops. What James (whose own practice as a novelist in some ways resembled Ibsen's in drama) and others perceived was how Ibsen manipulated this realistic stagecraft to create a new species of poetic symbolism. The French plays that Ibsen studied in his apprenticeship used decor as window dressing; in the intricately written stage directions of Ibsen's texts, however, decor becomes symbol. When a second-act curtain rises on an altered stage picture -- a piano has been removed in Hedda Gabler, for example, and a Christmas tree stripped of its ornaments in A Doll House -- the audience must read the significance of such alterations, for the Heddas and the Noras of the modern world reveal through their belongings the motives and passions which they have been taught to repress in their speech and actions. The genius of realism, in the novel as well as on the stage, is not merely to mirror faithfully the "real world," but also to demand that we scrutinize and judge the details that we often ignore because of their surface familiarity.

The great plays of the past tend toward generalized settings, although the psychological implications of place were not unimportant. In a Shakespearean play, for instance, a change in scene often reflects a change in mood; the forest typically creates a special mental freedom that is not available in the court. But Ibsen and his colleagues rarely set their characters free in any undefined territory. On the contrary, their modern insight told them that human beings are never free. Indeed, it is significant that most early modern drama is played out in domestic sets. The smaller size to which the modern world seems to reduce its inhabitants dictates that crucial actions occur in enclosed architectural limits. In Strindberg's Preface to Miss Julie, written in 1888, he complained of flimsy old-fashioned canvas-painted sets still in use that prevented audience involvement. A one-act play of searing intensity, daringly staged not in the drawing room but the kitchen of an aristocratic home, Miss Julie demanded authentic production. Strindberg insisted that "there is nothing so hard to find on the stage as an interior set that comes close to looking as a room should look. . . . There are so many other conventions on the stage that strain our imagination; certainly we might be freed from overexerting ourselves in an effort to believe that pots and pans painted on the scenery are real."(3)

Yet modern dramatists knew that realism in the theatre transcends set design and involves more than real pots and pans. Ibsen's mid-career decision to abandon poetry for prose signals his conviction that the key to characterization lay in authentic speech. By replacing brilliant soliloquies with the conversational rhythms of everyday expression, Ibsen began to write in a way that audiences accept as "true to life." Although dramatic dialogue is always artificial, nevertheless, every important playwright and every theatrical era must find a strategy for tailoring that artifice to seem as real as possible. Early modern drama, it should be remembered, was written while Sigmund Freud was developing a psychoanalytic treatment that asked patients to speak in their own everyday voices until unwittingly they revealed their unconscious feelings. Ibsen and his contemporaries exploited a similar insight. They created dramatic characters whose routine-sounding dialogue divulged the truth about themselves as surely as and more "realistically" than an explicitly self-revealing soliloquy. Every hesitation, every slip of the tongue, every euphemism, for Ibsen and for Chekhov, as for Freud, has profound meaning. Moreover, the modern writer saw that the prose of daily life can be as shrewdly manipulated as the verse of Aeschylus or Shakespeare to yield a consistent structure of imagery. In A Doll House, for example, every apparently random reference to an audit contributes to a tightly structured plot and builds a convincing poetry from the commonplace. If where we choose to place a desk in a sitting room may betray our unconscious desires, how much more may the words we choose reveal about our character.

Thus ordinary speech and mundane settings, originally manipulated by the likes of Scribe and Sardou to serve a facile melodrama, provide realistic instruments to probe psychological and social truths in the work of the early modern dramatists.

Similarly, the underlying structure of "Sardoodledom," as George Bernard Shaw called the well-made play, was transformed by Ibsen into an almost Sophoclean device. As Oedipus interviews messengers who possess pieces of an old puzzle that he painstakingly fits together, so the hidden secrets of Ibsen's realistic drama gradually come to light through coincidences, lost letters found, and old love affairs unveiled.

All of these devices, finally, rest on a belief that the past predetermines the present. In the late nineteenth century, as narrative artists already had, dramatists trained the lens of realism on human behavior, viewing it under the influence of the materialist legacies of Darwin and of Marx as the sum of genetic and financial inheritances. Most important, perhaps, the early modern drama provides intellectual satisfaction, as does Freudian analysis, by promising that once the crucial genetic, financial, and emotional clues are unearthed, the process of understanding human experience can begin.

Modern Drama after Ibsen: Shaw, Strindberg, and Chekhov

Oddly enough, the biographical circumstances of all these early modern dramatists inclined them to criticize and challenge society. The plots of Ibsen's best known plays revolve around buried shame that must be uncovered to release the true self. It may be more than coincidental that Ibsen struggled to separate himself from his own parents' shame. Not only Ibsen, but also Strindberg, Chekhov, and Shaw in early childhood experienced the humiliation of watching their fathers sink into financial failure. Ibsen and Shaw wanted so much to distance themselves from paternal disgrace that each entertained fantasies of illegitimacy, refusing to believe themselves the sons of their nominal fathers. Perhaps we may fairly conclude that their childhood disillusion with authority contributed to the force of the dramas they publicly displayed when they became adults, exposés of collapsing social structures undermined by false pretense.

Shaw, Strindberg, and Chekhov each found a different dramatic model potential in the realistic mode evolved by Ibsen. Of the three, the Irish-born George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) most fully acknowledged his debt to Ibsen. The author of one of the earliest appreciations of Ibsen, The Quintessence of Ibsenism (1891), Shaw believed that Ibsen fundamentally had transformed the theatrical formula drawn from the French Boulevard plays by incorporating a new intellectual vigor in them. "Now the serious playwright recognizes in the discussion . . . the real centre of his play's interest," Shaw observed. Shaw's own witty plays explore the possibilities ofdiscussion, as he calls it, and today seem a bit dated because the social problems that he attacked often have less significance for us than for his own audience.

For August Strindberg (1849-1912), the social questions raised in plays like A Doll House were only of superficial interest. A neurotic and troubled person, Strindberg responded more to the emotional tangles in which Ibsen's characters struggle, and in his own drama, probed the disfigurations of family life even more scathingly than did the man he regarded as his rival. In his domestic plots, a category that includes Miss Julie and The Dance of Death (1901), the thrice-married Strindberg, son of a debased aristocrat and a servant woman, showed men and women trapped in cruel and all-consuming sexual relationships. These plays, more naturalistic than realistic in their depiction of the unrelenting pressure of heredity and physical impulse, leave little room for the possibility of remaking the self to which Ibsen's characters at least could aspire. In other works, like A Dream Play (1902) and The Road To Damascus (1898, 1904), Strindberg experimented with a phantasmagoric style that may have influenced Ibsen in his final, less realistic plays, a style that pointed to the theatrical expressionism that the next generation of modern dramatists was to explore.

Despite his early death, Anton Chekhov (1860-1904) left a major body of short stories and plays, and in both forms continued to examine the minutiae of everyday experience. Less schooled than Ibsen in the conventions of nineteenth-century French theatre and less morbid than Strindberg, Chekhov used realism more delicately than they did. The characters in his four great plays -- The Seagull (1896), Uncle Vanya (1897), The Three Sisters (1900), and The Cherry Orchard (1904) -- rarely experience definitive revelations of truth. However dreadful the events encompassed in his plays, including lovers separated and families dispossessed, and death by duel and by suicide, Chekhov maintains so fine an emotional balance that his characters are simultaneously tragic and comic, pathetic and ridiculous.

In a way, Chekhov's achievement brought the early modern drama to an impasse. Like Ibsen, Shaw, and Strindberg, he identified a series of social and personal problems that defined a seemingly worldwide collapse of central authority as the twentieth century evolved. His work, however, proposes neither a rationale nor a resolution for that collapse. In fact, the short stories and plays of Chekhov convince us that, no matter how intimately we may probe character, the human condition remains mysterious. To that sense of mystery, lovingly and realistically examined yet unexplained, only one word can be assigned: "Chekhovian."

The Stage Director Par Excellence--Stanislavsky

Chekhov's plays, scrupulously observed depictions of ineffectual lives endured in dreary provincial towns, were produced in extraordinarily detailed sets by one of the most important acting ensembles of modern times, The Moscow Art Theatre. Under the direction of Konstantin Stanislavsky (1863-1938), this group introduced a new acting method(4) that confirmed the real source of energy in nineteenth-century realism. Although Stanislavsky did not stint on stage reproductions of reality, he knew that external realistic portrayal in and of itself lacked value. The true subject of the great realists was the human soul. Convinced that the brilliantly artificial acting styles required by high poetic drama did not fit the differently scaled speeches of unheroic dramatic characters, Stanislavsky resolved to re-train his company. Stanislavsky-influenced rehearsals require that cast members focus on emotional exercises designed to arouse within them personal feelings that replicate the characters'. The goal of theatre was no longer, as Aristotle had described it long ago, to imitate an action but literally to enact it. Ultimately, the development of theatre in the twentieth century reveals that in the very success of Stanislavsky's method lay the seeds of its rejection. As with every art form, once theatrical realism totally fulfilled its mission, the genre began to seem obsolete, and gradually gave way to a new phase of modern theatre.

Footnotes

(1) Notable among Ibsen's early poetic dramas are Brand (1865) and Peer Gynt (1867), and almost cinematic fantasy very highly regarded today, proved difficult to stage when new. Dissatisfied, Ibsen gave up this mode of playwriting as a dead end; in his final plays, however, he muted the realistic detail of his middle style n favor of more overtly symbolic textures.

(2) "On the Occasion of Hedda Gabler (1891)," The Scenic Art: Notes on Acting and the Drama: 1872-1901 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1948), p. 249.

(3) Trans. Arvid Paulson, Seven Plays by August Strindberg (New York: Bantam Books, 1960), p.73.

(4) In the United States, a "method actor" owes some debt to this Stanislavskian creed.

Reference:

http://www.baruch.cuny.edu/library/alumni/online_exhibits/digital/2000/c_n_c/c_09_modern_drama/realism_txt.htm