MODERN PLAYS: (1920-1950)

INTERNATIONAL ISLAMIC UNIVERSITY
ISLAMABAD

FACULTY OF LANGUAGES AND LITERATURE
DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH

MODERN DRAMA

Assignment no. 02

Assignment Topic: Modern Plays: (1920-50)

Submitted to: Ma’am Saiyma
Submitted by:
Maryam Irshad
Maimoona Azam
Hasna Shabbir
Humaira Masood
Amenah Qureshi

Date of submission: 6th November 2012

MODERN PLAYS: (1920-1950)

Modern drama came as a reaction to the realistic drama of nineteenth
century. Taking its drift from the modern art movements, it adopted symbol, abstraction
and ritual. Thus, there were anti-realistic, expressionistic and absurdist theatres to be
found. However, realistic style drama continued to dominate the commercial sector after
the First World War, especially psychological realism. The plays of Arthur Miller and
Tennessee Williams use memory scenes, dream sequences, purely symbolic characters,
projections etc to achieve the end. The genres like ‘problem plays’ and ‘domestic
tragedies’ were also introduced. Similarly, Eugene O’Neill gave the concept of the
‘rebellious drama’.

The plays discussed in the work below are those published between 1920s and
1950s. This is the post-world war era which was mayhem of several ideologies, new
economic and political systems and confused philosophies about life. The works included
are:
• Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller (1949)
• Saint Joan by George Bernard Shaw (1924)
• Mother Courage and her Children by Bertolt Brechet (1938)
• The Iceman Cometh by Eugene O’Neill (1939)
• Six Characters in Search of an Author by Luigi Pirandello (1921)

Death of a Salesman: Arthur Miller

Death of a salesman is a famous play written by the American playwright Arthur
Miller. This play is a critique on the ‘American Dream’ of the American Capitalist
society. The plot reveals the last twenty-four hours of a sixty years old salesman Willy
Loman. His whole life was spent in the pursuit of ‘the dream’ but couldn’t achieve the
status. He also taught his two sons Happy and Biff the same thing that being ‘well-liked’
was all that mattered for being successful. He himself remains in the delusion that he is
known across the states. Even the moral values are ignored in the process. Willy Loman
ends up committing suicide.

Miller chose to write ‘social plays’ that re-introduced the issues of mankind so
which had been of interest since the ancient Greeks. Most of his plays aimed at social
reforms. He wrote plays for he common man to enjoy. In this play, he talks about the
problems of an ordinary man in the capitalist society. For this purpose, he chose his
protagonists from middle class society. Willy Loman also belongs to the same class
where everyone strives till the end of their lives to get the luxuries that the upper class
enjoys. Avoiding the use of literary devices for the common man, Miller’s plots contain
an equal ratio of action and speech. He introduces new techniques to where form of a
play is part of the message it conveys. Death of a Salesman is one of the similar plots.

In this play, Miller modifies the concept of tragedy which he calls ‘tragedy of a
common man’. He believes that a tragic hero may belong to some class other than royalty
too. What makes him a hero is his sacrifice to maintain his self-dignity. Similarly Willy
becomes a tragic hero where he turns down the idea of giving up his vision. His tragic
flaw lies in his faulty formula for being successful in life.

Innovations are found in Miller’s style that came to be known as ‘subjective
realism’. He combines the realistic and expressionistic devices to form an impression
about what is going on in protagonist’s mind. This form of drama gives the liberty of

being objective through realism with the glimpses of subjectivity through expressionism.
In this play, what happens to Willy outwardly is illustrated concurrently with how he
analyses events inwardly.
For Miller, the present of a person is rooted in his past. According to him, “the job
of the artist is to remind people what they have chosen to forget”. In this play, at several
places there are shifts between Willy’s past and present without even the change in scene.
For example, in act II, Willy is with his sons in a restaurant in Brooklyn while
simultaneously he is shown with a woman of his past in Boston. The dialogues simply
flow from present to past without any marked break. The time is dislodged throughout
the play.

Innovations may also be seen in the structure which is surrealistic. Miller says, “It
is told like a dream. In a dream, we are simply confronted with various loaded symbols,
and where one is exhausted, it gives way to another”. It shows the internal workings of
Willy’s mind. It also symbolizes his anxiety to justify his life which leads to the mingling
of the limits between past and present. This is successfully achieved by the use of
lighting, musical hints and delicate writing.

The play was first performed in 1949. Jo Mielziner designed a skeletonized set
that captured the mood of the play and serves the actors brilliantly. Mr. Cobb's tragic
portrait of the defeated salesman was acting of the first rank. Mildred Dunnock gave the
performance of her career as the wife and mother, plain of speech but indomitable in
spirit. The parts of the thoughtless sons were played by Arthur Kennedy and Cameron
Mitchell, who are all young, brag and bewilderment.

The effects were achieved through the careful use of light which shifted from
scene to scene on the same stage. The impact of the leaves was also given through light.
The music was played at the right time to foreshadow some information. For example,
the leaves depicted Willy’s inclination towards country life while playing of flute
suggests his father’s background.

It may be concluded that Miller revitalized the American theatre. He innovated
the terms of tragedy and subjective realism. He re-introduced the issues of family
dynamics and highlighted the importance of human values in the materialistic world of
capitalist American Society.

Saint Joan: George Bernard Shaw

Irish dramatist, literary critic, a socialist spokesman, and a leading figure in the
20th century theater, Bernard Shaw was a freethinker, defender of women's rights, and
advocate of equality of income. Saint Joan is a play by George Bernard Shaw, based on
the life and trial of Joan of Arc. Published not long after the canonization of Joan of Arc
by the Roman Catholic Church, the play dramatizes what is known of her life based on
the substantial records of her trial.

The subtitle of the play, A Chronicle Play in Six Scenes and an Epilogue has a
preface which begins with a section titled "Joan the Original and Presumptuous". Shaw
crafts his own romantic vision of Joan to rescue her tarnished reputation as a result of her
canonization by the Catholic Church in 1920. The key elements that support the play as
Shavian romance or satiric antitragedy include: the discussion of Joan's beauty (Shaw
argues that she was not beautiful), her anachronistic positions as both a "Protestant" and
champion of French "Nationalism," and Joan's "maidenhood. The play serves as a kind of
anti-canonization of Joan even as Shaw ultimately presents her saintly status as linked to
a miracle.

From the opening scenes, Shaw’s Saint has a sense of purpose. Instead the plot of
a play centered on a poor peasant girl (Joan) a simple and faithful French country girl
sees visions and hears voices that she believes come directly from God. Accepting the
visions and voices as God's direction for her life, Joan successfully drives the English
from Orleans and crowns the Dauphin as the King of France. She is burned at the stake
for her efforts. The epilogue takes place twenty-five years after Joan is burnt. Her case
has been reconsidered by the court, and she has been freed of all charges. When they
learn that she is to become of saint, the men that caused her early death now praise her;
Joan ends the play by asking God when mankind will ever understand and honor its
saints.

In Saint Joan, history, or rather character historically conceived, weighs a bit too
heavily on the living fluid objectivity of the chronicle, and the events in the play
somehow lose that sense of the unexpected which is the breath of true life. The
characters, whether historical or typical, do not quite free themselves from the fixity that
history has forced upon them and from the significant role they are to play in history.
Saint Joan_ has seldom been recognized for the odd ghost it is. Anomalous as it presents
issues of religious faith to a largely secular era, atavistic as its roots lie in medieval
drama, it resurrected the miracle play, otherwise known as the saint's play, proving that
despite a lapse of five hundred years a major play about a saint and miracles.

By rejecting outmoded theatrical conventions and championing realism and social
commentary in his work, critics contend Shaw succeeded in revolutionizing British
drama. He has been credited with creating the “theater of ideas,” in which plays explore
such issues as sexism, sexual equality, socioeconomic divisions, the effects of poverty,
and philosophical and religious theories. Moreover, his innovative dramas are thought to
have paved the way for later Symbolist drama and the Theater of the Absurd.

Shaw won the Nobel Prize for Literature with Saint Joan, and it was staged only
four years after Joan of Arc’s canonization in 1920.Duration of the play was 2 hours and
15 minutes. Shaw was a man before his time, foreseeing the role of women in society.
The twenties was an era when women were headed towards the glass ceiling at lightning
speed. It was the perfect moment to stage a play about a woman exercising leadership,
and dispelling ideas of women as “lesser vessels.”

The production itself is a celebration of minimalism. Saint Joan is staged with
only four actors playing 22 characters. Joan, magnificently embodied by Andrus Nichols,
is surrounded and juxtaposed by three other equally astute talents, Ted Lewis, Tom
O’Keefe, and Eric Tucker. It takes a moment to realize this is happening, but out of the
entire play, there was only one scene with two actors shifting in and out of the same role
that rendered the viewer confused.

In Conclusion, we must admit that Shaw in his epilogue draws upon his
imagination and his inventive powers par excellence. The scene is in some respect best in
the play as Shaw gets free from the confining framework of faith and becomes a genuine
creator. Shaw is here better planned to end the drama with the artistry of delineating
Joan's infinite cry of isolation. The play is well rounded off with the memorable closing
lines spoken by the ghost of Joan. Shaw is also innovative in structuring epilogue as it is
no ordinary solo speech uttered by any character; rather, it involves more characters and
farce, satire, irony and pathos intermingle in every twists and turns.

Mother Courage and her Children: A Chronicle of the Thirty Years War : Bertolt
Brecht
When crimes begin to pile up, they become invisible. When sufferings become
unendurable the cries are no longer heard. The cries, too, fall like rain in summer.”
Bertolt Brecht

Mother Courage and her Children by Bertolt Brecht is one of the most powerful
antiwar drama in history. The play is based on two works by Hans Jacob Christoffel: his
1669 novel, Simplicissimus and his 1670 play, Courage: An Adventuress. Mother
Courage was written in 1938-39, just as World War II was breaking out in Europe.
Brecht completed the play while living in exile. He fled from his native country in the
face of a rising fascist government. The play is subtitled as ‘A Chronicle of the Thirty
Years War’. The Thirty Years War (1618-48) began as a war between Catholics and
Protestants which gradually transformed into a struggle to determine whether the
Austrian Habsburgs would take control of all German speaking territories. In the course
of war, most of Germany was devastated. In contrast, Brecht’s play almost entirely
focuses on the lives of common people whose lives are perverted and ruined by war.

In Mother Courage, the normative and constitutive social attitudes of family,
religion and business are deployed within and against a generalized background of War
which itself comes to represent the natural condition of European Capitalism. Mother
Courage and her children foregrounds the bond between a mother and her brood as the
play’s apparently central concern; her badge of courage. The title of a play invites us to
infer her social protection of her children against outside threats. As far as the subtitle is
concern, it adds the comprehensive element within which the characters reside: Brecht’s
chronicle excludes War (that is War as battle), which action of the play has reformulated
into ‘War as Business’. It signifies that the battles of war are not fought in the fields but
in the market place and its battalions are commoners struggling to survive within the
economic conditions established by war.

It was manifestly one of Brecht’s ambitions for the play to expose the
transactional economic nature of war. A canteen wagon, bearing the infamous Mother
Courage, her dumb daughter, Kattrin and her sons Eilif and Swiss Cheese appears at the
opening scene of the play. The lady with a wagon makes war as her immediate mode of
living. The cart of Mother Courage refers to as the didactic vehicle Brecht’s uses to
represent the economic system. For Courage it is both house and business. The object that
allows her to live off the war and the space within which she aims to shield her children
from the same war that is feeding them.

The play revolves around characters, whose relationship to commodities, to
money and the market place, to the non human and inorganic, that prevents human
relationship are more dominant. Courage herself embodies Modern mutilated figure. The
characters in Mother Courage are mainly low level functionaries and peasants who have
no control over the larger patterns that define and encircle their lives. These characters
are forever talking about the war. They comment upon it, praise it and curse it. Most of
them are pathetically unaware of how thoroughly it disempowers them.

The plot of Mother Courage is organized in such a way that individual episodes
are easily noticed. In addition to this each episodes are titled with captions which
foregrounds Brecht’s abandonment of Aristotelian ‘unities’. Play encompasses vast
stretches of time: a year passes between Scene i and ii, three years passes between Scene
ii and iii and so on. Meanwhile Courage remains “ceaselessly on the move”, pursuing the
war as it threads its way across Europe. Thus Brecht’s violate Aristotelian unities of time
and place.

Staging arrangements on the other hand are not naturalist one. Characters in his
theatre were not meant to move about according to inner motives. Rather Brecht
employed “spacial narrative” which serves to encode social configurations. The position
of characters upon the stage reveals not private psychology but the “gestic content” of
their attitudes towards one another. Brecht develops a schema that can be articulated as
Mother/Family and War. He seeks to actualize this schema through stage blocking. About
Scene I he writes “The cart and the children are on the left, the recruits on the right”. This

allows the conclusions to be drawn about social circumstances “from the physical
attitudes adopted by the actors upon the stage”.

Similarly in Scene ii in exchange for Eilif’s rapacious “hacking to pieces” of a
group of peasants the General makes him his son. The heroism for which he is being
praised will later be redefined as barbarism when he makes the error of performing the
same act during a brief gasp of peace. Gestures, props and stage pictures continue to add
texture to Brecht schema as this scene moves towards its conclusion. When Eilif sings
“The Song of the Girl and the Solder, he dances a war dance with his saber” as his
mother beats “on a pot with her spoon”. Their respective props relegate them to opposing
positions on a gradually expanding graph. The plucked capon as well as the pot and the
spoon are signs of domesticity. Meanwhile saber signifies Eilif’s rejection of his mother’s
advice and his embrace of the trappings of war.

Brecht was a political playwright who wanted people to understand the political
and social conditions of the world around them. Mother Courage was a learning play
with the idea of educating as well as entertaining his audience. The idea of a “theatre for
the scientific age” was to investigate life, truth and evidence through theatre in the same
way that a scientist would experiment. Brecht valued the theatre as an instrument of
political instruction.

Brecht used theatre form that clearly acknowledges that the actors and the
audience were in same space. He introduced a new technique under the name of ‘Epic
Theatre technique’ in which actors would no longer seamlessly eradicate themselves in
their role and become their characters but perform both themselves and their characters at
once. Brecht acting bought the relation between actor and character to light, forcing in the
name of high realism. Brecht staging technique similarly aimed at such alienation, the
epic theatre making frequent use of unfamiliar settings, the interruption of actions and
dialogue, unsetting music, the use of banners to mark scenes changes and playing spaces
divided by half drawn curtains gave way to his new innovation.

Brecht also created the ‘Verfumdungs effekt’ or distancing effect. This was
created to stop the audience getting emotionally involved in the play, instead they were
supposed to think about the issues addressed in the play. Brecht did this so the audience
didn't suspend their disbelief and would leave the theatre thinking about how they could
apply the messages in the play to their own lives and not how upset they were when a
character died.

Brecht wanted people to examine the world around them, to see things in new
light, to ask questions about themselves and others, about the inevitability of their lives;
to take responsibilities of their actions and to be aware that there is always another way

“Art is not a mirror held up to reality
but a hammer with which to shape it.”
― Bertolt Brecht

The Iceman Cometh: Eugene O’Neill

Eugene O’Neill (1888-1953) began writing his plays in the 1920s the American
theater was about a quarter century behind that of Europe. Within only a few years,
however, O’Neill’s significant innovations in play-writing techniques, staging practices,
and treatment of themes and issues brought world recognition to American theater.
Winner of four Pulitzer Prizes, one of O’Neill’s greatest achievements was, in the words
of one critic, his dramatic depiction of “the anguish and turmoil that wreck the spirits of
sensitive people.”
Eugene O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh, the play selected here for study, was
written in 1939. The play was first published in 1940; Directed by Eddi Dowling, it
premiered on Broadway at the Martin Beck Theatre on 9th October, 1946.
The Iceman Cometh is a play based on dark realism. Harry Hope's grimy saloon is
often sad, pathetic place. And inhabitant’s routines, their tales of former glory, their
hopes that prosperity will be restored tomorrow are pitiable; and their cynical, well-
practiced routines of jokes with interplay of pipe-dreams are similarly sad and funny.
Hickey's story of a salesman's life and marriage and Don Parritt's story of a son betraying
his mother are the center-piece of the play. Story ends with Hickey's confession to the
murder of his own wife and tragic suicide of Don Parritt. All the characters in the play are
real to life. Forgetfulness on their part of life’s absurdity and wretchedness and
consequent action are comic; the awareness of it is deeply tragic.
The play is an antecedent of the absurd theater and is expressionist in thought and
technique. It is poetry expressed through the medium of dramatic action. The entire
setting, “wretched saloon where the flotsam and jetsam of society gather” itself is a
symbol, of state of man in a nihilist world which is woeful and wretched. Here these few
characters represent the whole mankind. They aptly express the turmoil and
meaninglessness of the modern humanity. The two important questions addressed here
are: why to live? and how to live? The pleasure-seeking character of Don Juan comes to
the conclusion that as man has no reason to live, he must make the gratification of
passions the aim of life. Larry also discovers there are no reasons to live so he is waiting
for the final Long Sleep. Hickey, the central character of this play, has taken

metaphysical and ethical nihilism for granted. There is only unruffled peace in his mind
and genuine feeling of freedom from all that strained his soul and held it in tension.
America was not ready for the play's dark vision. When it was staged in 1946, the
play received mixed reviews. Some critics praised the play's passion, suspense, and well-
drawn characters but complained about its prosaic language, redundancy, and excessive
length (the play runs for almost four hours); while others find hope in the characters'
camaraderie and endurance; Some consider such a reading too optimistic, believing
O'Neill's vision to be unremittingly dark. In 1956, The Iceman Cometh was revived and
this time, widely acclaimed as a masterpiece.
The dramaturgy of this play was a direct result of O'Neill's “obstinate artistic
experimentation.” The most obvious result of this experimentation is the length of the
play itself, his earlier plays were mostly one-act plays. His concern with the idea of
progressive, linear time as an illusion, finds its most detailed expression in The Iceman
Cometh. This he achieves through repetitions, depicting the circular nature of time, and
the characters' lack of awareness of their condition. Second is O'Neill's use of masks
illusion which the dramaturgy implicitly suggests. Majority of the characters share
quality of being “one-time”, hence they are immediately given two faces and a contrast
is created between what they are now (alcoholics) and "what they once were”. Hugo, for
instance, may "wear threadbare and frayed clothing, "but everything about him is
fastidiously clean". Despite Wetjoen's physical decay "there is still a suggestion of old
authority lurking in him". James Cameron's forehead is “fine, his eyes are intelligent and
there was once a competent ability in him". Similarly, they all share is a certain
mellowness. Larry's face has an "expression of tired tolerance". Joe's face would be hard
and tough if it were not for its good nature and lazy humor". Jimmy has the quality of a
"likable, affectionate boy who has never grown up" All of them in fact wear masks,
fashioned by alcohol and time. It is worth noting these initial descriptions because they
contain the gist of the themes formed in the play and provide a point of reference against
which the action can be measured.
The Iceman Cometh is a play concerned with time but unlike many previous
plays, the unities of time and place are closely observed. All action takes place within
thirty-six hours, while the setting for the whole of the play is the back room and a section

of the bar in Harry Hope's saloon. There is hardly any action in the traditional sense of
the word, for the play does not unfold any close-knit story. Detailed descriptions of the
setting are meant, in typical O’Neill fashion, to reflect the condition of the characters, for
most of whom the saloon is home. Thus O'Neill notes that the windows are "so glazed
with grime one cannot see through them" and that the lighting is artificial, having no
external natural source, gives the impression that no other world exists for these
characters and how unaware they are of the passage of time.
O’Neill’s visual and aural innovations (sometimes he replaces words with sounds;
at the end of the play, like having the actors slam their shot glasses down on their tables
in a round of percussion), encourages us to see and hear the play from new vantage
points. Yet his most influential innovations were freedom of expression for the theatre.
He liberated theatre writing from many of the strictures of form and technique inherited
from the past. In this play author coined new words like “Foolosopher”. He uses slang
language in this play, “I’ve let him get by wid too much”, “I wuz a pimp or somethin’
and “all of sudden dat he left her in de hay wid de iceman”. Through the vulgar tongue
and desultory dialogues of a few sleazy characters O’Neill has presented here the
spectacle of human life in general.
The importance of O’Neill’s dramas can also be measured in terms of his
influence on the succeeding generations of playwrights—the achievements and
contributions to twentieth-century drama made by Tennessee Williams (1911-83), Arthur
Miller (1915-2005), and William Inge (1913-73)—playwrights who influenced by
O’Neill’s groundbreaking work, brought new directions to the American theater in their
uses of psychological realism, vivid characters, “poetic” language, and expressionistic
staging.

Six Characters in Search of an Author: Luigi Pirandello

In 1921, in Rome one of the most brilliantly innovative pieces of modern literature
appeared; it was Luigi Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author. Premiered in
Teatro Valle, Rome, it was initially received to less than flattering slogans of
"Manicomio!" ("Madhouse!") from the audience. However, subsequent performances
improved in their reception and created such a stir that in less than three years it was all
over Europe, translated in many languages and staged in New York. It recounts the fate
of a family of characters left unrealized by their author. Desperate to come to life, the
characters interrupt the rehearsal of another Pirandello play and demand that the director
and cast stage their story. This Absurd and meta-theatrical play heralded the end of
realistic drama.
It still takes both audiences and critics by surprise as the originality of the innovations is
so exciting, that the play seldom fails to provide audiences with a fresh, cathartic
experience. For these reasons, 1921 became a most deciding turning point in modern
theatre. Professor Robert Brustein , does not exaggerate Pirandello's position in
contemporary literature when he says:
“Pirandello's influence on the drama of the 2oth century is immeasurable. In his agony
over the nature of existence, he anticipates Sartre and Camus; in his insights into the
disintegration of personality and the isolation of man, he anticipates Samuel Beckett; in
his unremitting war on language, theory, concepts, and the collective mind he anticipates
Eugene Ionesco; in his approach to the conflict of truth and illusion he anticipates
Eugene O'Neill; in his experiments with theatre, he anticipates a host of theatrical
dramatists including Thornton Wilder and Jack Gelber; in his use of interplay between
actors and characters he anticipates Jean Anouilh; in his view of tension between public
mask and private face he anticipates Jean Giraudoux; and in his concept of man as a role-
playing animal he anticipates Jean Genet; the extent of even this partial list of influences
marks Pirandello as the most seminal dramatist of our time..”
When the lights come up (no curtains are drawn as per convention, except where required
as part of the plot) on Luigi Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author (1921),
the first thing the audience sees is a spare stage, with no set and only a few tables and

chairs put randomly about. The producer and a company of actors arrive and begin
reading out stage directions for rehearsal; however before they rehearse, an attendant
comes up the central aisle of the auditorium and announces unexpected visitors. Six
characters, wearing masks, illuminated by a strange glow and identified only as Father,
Mother, Stepdaughter, Son, Boy, and Girl, follow the attendant up the aisle and beg the
producer to find them an author who can write a play about them, or to include them in
the play he is about to produce. They tell the rather melodramatic story of their lives. The
producer agrees to create a play about them. The professional actors start playing the
roles of the characters, but when they arrive at a pivotal scene, the characters interfere
however, complaining that they are not being fairly represented. The producer thinks that
the play will succeed, but decides to change a few details. The company’s leading actress
explains that audiences today are not as good as they once were at accepting theatrical
illusion. Pirandello toys with the conventional aim of the theater—“to create a perfect
illusion of reality”—and provokes the audience to regard the different levels of reality
existing in a stage production: In Six Characters, the fictional characters come to life and
insist on their own rights, seeking to take down the illusion of reality in favor of reality
itself, or rather in favor of illusion itself, which is their only reality.
Like the “high modernist” works The Waste Land and Ulysses, Six Characters seems to
take concerns of the futurists, dadaists, and surrealists to a higher level of seriousness and
thus transforms a series of obscure experiments into a tradition. The avant-garde
playwrights celebrated theatricality, while Bertolt Brecht, though influenced by the avant-
garde, promoted an anti-theatrical theater. Pirandello’s work has been described as
“metatheater.” In metatheater, the characters are “aware of their own theatricality.
Modern metatheater begins with the futurists and dadaists and reaches the mainstream
with Pirandello; the meta-theatrical impulse plays a particularly important role in the
works of later playwrights such as Samuel Beckett. His prose fiction deals with themes
related to the illusory character of personal identity, and it formed the basis of some of
his early plays. As a meta-theatrical work, Six Characters is is also a key example of
what Pirandello termed il teatro dello specchio or "the mirror theater," a play that turns a
mirror onto the theater itself. As critic Anne Paolucci notes, the result then is not a
reflection but a shattering of theatric spectacle, which forms the base of the play.

As a metatheatre, this play enthusiastically defies the creeds of Realism. Metatheatre, not
being its own form, includes variety of genres and movements of art and Pirandello as an
anti-Realist, blended these movements (expressionism, dadaism, surrealism) into this
play. Dadaism plays a role when we realise that the main purpose of this play is "to create
a dramatic tension", suggesting the meaning of the play is simply to create one question:
whether the play has a meaning or not. The depiction of the characters' need to tell their
own story to the acting company is expressionistic, the Father and the Stepdaughter will
stop at nothing to have their story told again and again, illustrating an expressionistic
need to free one's inner struggle and feelings. Six Characters is surrealistic when it
directly explores the multiple constructions of illusion in a place where illusions are
repeatedly manufactured; theater is the space where reality is re-created, where art
imitates life. Whether inclusion of multiple genres and artistic movements was deliberate
or not Six Characters is a collection of art forms.
Unsurprisingly Pirandello's masterpiece, Six Characters in Search of an Author, is
celebrated for its groundbreaking techniques of characterization, particularly in the
richness of character as displayed by the Stepdaughter and the Father. It is highly
admired for the brilliant staging techniques made use of by its author. Pirandello blends
the real and theatrical life, within the confines of the theater, using his innovative staging
techniques. One of the main innovations is the involvement of the audience in his stage
act; They become part of the action. The use of lines was the first of its kind, never before
had an author dared to ask the members of the audience to perform. Those lines make the
moment more impressive when the Director, clearly at the end of his patience with the
characters, shouts "Reality! Fantasy! Who needs this! What does this mean?" and the
audience, in unison, shouts back, "It's us! We're here!" The moment immediately after
that, when the whole cast laughs directly at the audience, pointing at them in glee, is
nearly unbearable for an audience, as shown by the riot after the first performance.
Pirandello also used a technique he inherited from the "Cirque de Soleil," involving a
trapeze hung from the catwalk. But though the trapeze was not in itself his own
invention, it was innovatively used to further disconcert audience during intermission.
The Stepdaughter's entry above the audience's heads, during the "intermission," no one
before Pirandello had dared to use it in the theater before. It not only symbolized the

problems with shaping reality intrinsic in the text into an act, but also prevented the
audience from actually getting a rest during the intermission, since they couldn't tell
when the play started and began. Last but not the least, would be Pirandello's use of
medieval circular staging, adapted from Brecht. Pirandello skillfully tied the audience
members inextricably in to the action, with the voices of the Actors, the Director, and the
Characters coming at them from all sides and the members of the cast actually scrambling
over the audience members as if they (or indeed their seats) were not there. For the chief
truth of Pirandello's play is that not only is there no difference between art and reality,
there is no reality, or perhaps more specifically, no art, at all. There are no members of
the cast anymore than there are members of the audience. Hence, the only difference
between the cast members in Pirandello's play and the members of his audience is that
former got paid to get in and the latter paid to get in.

Pirandello has had profound and far-reaching effect on twentieth-century drama and
especially on what would be called the Theatre of the Absurd. Pirandello remains one of
the most influential dramatists of the twentieth century having given eloquent testimony
to the issues of the relativity of truth, the instability of personal identity, and the nature of
stage illusion,

Conclusion:
The study of the five assorted plays, written in the score of years spanning from 1920-50,
of five vastly different playwrights reveals their shared literary history, as influenced by
the social, political, cultural and aesthetic movements of that era. Their contributions to
the literary tradition have profound inter-textual connexions; Even though they are
distinct, individualistic playwrights belonging to widely differing nationalities as Italian,
Irish, German and American, their works nonetheless are equally infused with spirit of
modernism. Each of them continuing the chain of modern literature especially, modern
theatre which was renovated and emancipated due to their brilliant innovations, whether
it was through creation of a precursor to “theatre of absurd” and introduction of
autonomous characters through metatheatre by Pirandello; creation of “theatre of ideas”
and emphasis on minimalism by Shaw; creation of educative “theatre for scientific age”
and introduction of 'Epic Theatre technique’ and 'Verfumdungs effekt’ or distancing
effect by Brecht; usage of psychological realism, vivid characters, “poetic” language,
and expressionistic staging by O'Neill; or Miller's modification of 'tragedy of a common
man’, ‘subjective realism’, surrealistic innovations in structure, re-introduction of issues
having family dynamics and re-vitalization of American theatre. Each of these inventive
devices and innovations revolutionized modern theatre and formed basis for the
subsequent dramatists who even today employ the techniques introduced by these five
avant-garde.

Bibliography:
http://www.nytimes.com/pages/books/index.html
www.literaryhistory.com
http://www.eoneill.com/index.htm
http://sixcharactersdramaturgy.weebly.com/related-isms.html
http://www.neh.gov/about/awards/jefferson-lecture

"Author Biography." Drama for Students. Vol. 4. Gale Cengage, .eNotes.com. 4 Nov,
2012 <http://www.enotes.com/six-characters/>

"Historical Context." Drama for Students. Vol. 4. Gale Cengage, .eNotes.com. 4 Nov,
2012 <http://www.enotes.com/six-characters/>

. "http://www.jeanne-darc.info/p_multimedia/theater/0_shaw/shaw.html."Jeanne d'Arc.
N.p.. Web. 5 Nov 2012.

Fisher, Jeffery CliffsNotes on St. Joan. 5 Nov 2012
<http://www.cliffsnotes.com/study_guide/literature/id-311.html>.

Stoichita, Alexandra . Joan of Arc in G.B. Shaw s "Saint Joan" and Friedrich Schiller s
́ ́
"The Maid of Orleans". GRIN Verlag, 2008. Print.

Manhiem, Micheal . Cambridge Companion to Eugene O'Neill. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1998. eBook.

Title: Arthur Miller
American Playwright ( 1915 - 2005 )
Author(s): Stephen A. Marino (Saint Francis College.)
source: Twentieth-Century American Dramatists: Fourth Series. Ed. Christopher J.
Wheatley. Dictionary of Literary Biography Vol. 266. Detroit: Gale, 2003. From
Literature Resource Center.
Document Type: Biography, Critical essay

INTRODUCTION TO PIRANDELLO
Virgilio Orsini
East and West , Vol. 4, No. 2 (JULY 1953), pp. 128-129
Published by: Istituto Italiano per l'Africa e l'Oriente (IsIAO)
Article Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/29758088
Accessed: 25/10/2012 04:36

Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author: A Comedy in the Making
Author(s): Antonio Illiano
Reviewed work(s):
Source: Italica, Vol. 44, No. 1 (Mar., 1967), pp. 1-12
Published by: American Association of Teachers of Italian

Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/477418 .
Accessed: 25/10/2012 04:02

C. Wilkins, Frederick. "The Eugene O'Neill Newsletter."Eugene O'Neill Newsletter. Vol.
XII.No. 2 (1988): n. page. Web. 5 Nov. 2012.

D'Alessandro, Michael "Shifting Perceptions, Precarious Perspectives in Two of O'Neill's
Early Sea Plays"Penn State University Press. Vol. 29. ((2007)): pp. 21-35. Web. 5 Nov.
2012. <http://www.jstor.org/stable/29784829>

Varieties of Epic Theatre in the Modern Drama
John Gassner
Comparative Literature Studies , Special Advance Number (1963), pp. 25-41
Published by: Penn State University Press

Post-War Iconographies: Wandering Women in Brecht, Duras, Kluge
Caroline Rupprecht
South Central Review , Vol. 23, No. 2 (Summer, 2006), pp. 36-57
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press on behalf of The South Central
Modern Language Association

Introduction: Being There: Performance as Mise-en-Scène, Abscene, Obscene, and
Other Scene
Kimberly W. Benston
PMLA , Vol. 107, No. 3, Special Topic: Performance (May, 1992), pp. 434-449
Published by: Modern Language Association

On the Experimental Theatre
Bertolt Brecht and Carl Richard Mueller
The Tulane Drama Review , Vol. 6, No. 1 (Sep., 1961), pp. 2-17
Published by: The MIT Press

Theatre for Learning
Bertolt Brecht and Edith Anderson
The Tulane Drama Review , Vol. 6, No. 1 (Sep., 1961), pp. 18-25
Published by: The MIT Press

MODERN PLAYS: (1920-1950)

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