Storytelling and Its Methods in the Revolutionary Theatres

Theatre is one of the oldest forms of storytelling in human history. The traces of theatre can be found as ancient as the times of Athens. Since the sixth century BC, Athens built and performed at the Theatre of Dionysus Eleuthereus, which is considered as the first theatre in human history. Attic tragedians performed plays of the Greek myths on the stage for the as many as 17,000 people in the audience seats. Although it is a common feature for theatre to entertain and give pleasures to the spectators, the theatre also functioned as an autonomous activity that mirrors contemporary issues in the society outside of theatre and alludes to the demands on revolution. To urge calls for a change in the community, storytelling in theatre has used various tactics from the empathy to the estrangement. In the safe space of the stage, away from the reality, historical events of revolution could be often reenacted. Some of the reenactment was calling for the following movements from the spectators while some of them denounce the violence caused by the revolution. Some used surreal exaggeration for satire and some use realistic descriptions to disturb the audience with nonsensical reality. This opus will explore different strategies in storytelling that revolutionary theatres have adopted to seek changes in the community.

One style of storytelling that is commonly used in the revolutionary plays is “estrangement,” also called as “alienation effect,” that is first introduced by Bertolt Brecht, a German playwright. In the essay “Alienation Effects in Chinese Acting,” which is published in 1936, the Brecht describes the concept as “playing in such a way that the audience was hindered from simply identifying itself with the characters in the play. Acceptance or rejection of their actions and utterances was meant to take place on a conscious plane, instead of, as hitherto, in the audience’s subconscious (Brecht, 91).” By displaying the manipulative devices and fictive qualities of the play conspicuous, the play leads spectators to alienate themselves from any passive acquisition of the information or idle enjoyment of the play as entertainment. Rather, the play forces viewers to observe the play from a critical perspective and analyze the crisis that the protagonist is put in. By distancing themselves from the emotional attachment on the characters of the play, the viewers go through investigative questioning on the character’s decisions and eventually apply the same questions on the society that viewers belong to. Reminders of the artificiality of the theatre performances are repeatedly disclosed on the play to keep the audience be aware of the virtuality of the theatre.

Actors stepping out of the character to provide background information on the play or exposed lights or stage devices are some of the examples to devise the estrangement. Mother Courage and Her Children, a play written by Brecht in 1939, shows his use of alienation effect on the play. Although the play portrays the war, its reenactment of the war is to deliver an anti-war message, rather than advocating it. The play was written in response to the Nazi’s invasion in Poland in 1939. Brecht, rather than setting the times in the contemporary period, sets the plot in the war of the past, the ‘Thirty Years’ War,’ that happened in all European states from 1618 to 1648, as an analogy to the contemporary invasion by Hitler. The story is revolved around a canteen woman in the Swedish Army named Anna Fierling, who is called as Mother Courage. The story shows her persistent struggle to survive in the war and capitalize on the wars to make fortune. She loses all of her children one by one throughout the play by the violence and people’s greed in the war. The play does not provide enough elements to allow the audience to make an emotional connection with Mother Courage or any of the other characters. Furthermore, it uses minimalistic visual description on the stage such as using one prop of a tree to represent the whole forest so that it hinders the audience from being immersed in the story. It provides a clear barrier between reality and fiction on the stage. By doing so, Brecht attempts to let viewers observe circumstances given to Mother Courage and acknowledge her mistake of misinterpreting the situation she and her children in. Many of the storytelling in various genres emphasizes vivid and detailed depiction that allows spectators to be fully immersed in the story. However, Brecht’s alienation effect has its value in that it pursues the opposite effect from the theatre to demand the audience to seek an intellectual solution from the play as well as from reality.

While some theatre plays intend to alienate the audience from the play for an objective analysis on the problem, some plays force the audience to emotionally shocked and frustrated as a call for action. The concept of “Theatre of Cruelty” was introduced by Antonin Artaud in the early twentieth century, a French dramatist who is one of the major figures in twentieth-century theatre. Theatre of Cruelty pursues an intensive and grotesque style of storytelling to assault the senses of the audience. In its manifesto, it says that “Whatever the conflicts that haunt the mind of a given period, I defy any spectator to whom such violent scenes will have transferred their blood, who will have felt in himself the transit of a superior action, who will have seen the extraordinary and essential movements of his thought illuminated in extraordinary deeds – the violence and blood having been placed at the service of the violence of thought – I defy that spectator to give himself up, once outside the theatre, to ideas of war, riot, and blatant murder (Artaud, 3).' In the Theatre of Cruelty, the plays casually present violent conflicts in the action, destruction in the plot, and predictable tragedies. Through the intended discomfort, the audience is powerlessly trapped in the chaos and is forced to respond to the irrationalities of the society represented on the stage. In the book “Antonin Artaud: From Theory to Practice,” the author says that “Artaud sought to remove aesthetic distance, bringing the audience into direct contact with the dangers of life.” It continues that “By turning the theatre into a place where the spectator is exposed rather than protected, Artaud was committing an act of cruelty upon them (Lee, 2007, p.23).” One prominent example of the theater play that employs the style of Theatre of Cruelty is the “The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade”, often shortened to “Marat/Sade,” a play written by Peter Weiss and published in 1964. The play is about the French Revolution and the reverberation followed by it in the twentieth century. The play is set in the historical Charenton Asylum, a lunatic asylum founded in 1645 in France, that is known for its application of humanitarian art therapy for the patients to express their needs. On 13 July 1808, after the French Revolution, in the asylum, Marquis de Sade, one of the inmates, directs a play performed by the inmates. The play reenacts the assassination of Jean-Paul Marat that happened on 13 July 1793. The play not only explicitly shows the agony of the individuals through their expressed insanity, but it also shows anarchy, hedonism, and individualism through the intense conversational debate between Sade and Marat. An article, “History and Cruelty in Peter Weiss’s ‘Marat/Sade’ demonstrates the noticeable use of grotesque visual elements in the storytelling of Marat/Sade such as “ the antics of the lunatics at the beginning; Jacques Roux struggling in his straight-jacket; the appearance of the ungainly Duperret, dressed as an Incroyable, a dandy of post-revolutionary France, held back by a chain of whilst trying to make advances towards Corday; the mime of the guillotining, with severed heads appearing just above the stage boards, their tongues still quivering; Sade being whipped by Charlotte’s long hair; or the grotesque figures of Marat’s nightmare (White, 1968, p.443).”

Another tactic of storytelling in political theatre is to embrace audience members to be part of the storytelling. Forum theatre removes the fourth wall that traditionally separates the audience from the stage and allows the audience to engage in the storytelling by interacting with the actors and surroundings of the stage. Augusto Boal, a Brazilian theater practitioner first introduced the concept in the 1970s, initially in Brazil and in Europe, as a specific technique for Theatre of the Oppressed. In the forum theatre, spectators act as “Spect-Actors,” and have a pivotal role in creating and delivering the narrative of the story. They explore, analyze and transform the story as well as reflect that analysis on the reality they are living. Through the interaction in the play, audience members who personally are related to the issue of the event addressed in the story can have a therapeutic release of the trauma they have. In the plays, the protagonists go through a problem that represents the contemporary crisis in society. The audience is invited to suggest actions and solutions to solve the problem that both the audience and the protagonist have. In the states, Theatre of the oppressed in NYC was founded in 2011 by Katy Rubin, who trained with Augusto Boal in Rio in 2008. TONYC has been hosting forum theatres that invite the community to “perform plays based on their challenges confronting economic inequality, racism, and other social, health and human rights injustices. After each performance, actors and audiences engage in theatrical brainstorming with the aim of catalyzing creative change on the individual, community, and political levels (TONYC website).” Specifically, they have addressed issues in NYC including “homeless adults and youth, people living with HIV/AIDS, immigrants, veterans, formerly incarcerated people, and court-involved youth (TONYC website).” Forum theatre has its strength in storytelling calling for changes in the society in that it provides a safe place for the community to express its struggles and virtually explore possible solutions for them.

Another storytelling tactics that political theatre frequently uses, however, the form of theatre is, is satire. Satire is a literary genre that uses humor, irony, exaggeration, parody, burlesque and more for constructive social criticism. It is frequently used in political theatre calling for revolution because its use of humor alleviates the intense emotion embedded in the issue and allows to address the issue without shoving the trauma of those who are involved in the issue. The Secretaries is a satire play written by The Five Lesbian Brothers, an American theatre company focused on the plays on lesbian and feminism works from 1989. In the frame of satire, the play addresses the straight people’s stereotypes on women and lesbians and women’s act of corseting themselves with the social expectation of gendered beauty and behaviors. In the play, female secretaries in a logging mill company form a cult that secretly murders a lumberjack every month and disguises it as an occupational accident. The exaggerated use of violence and psychopathic behaviors of the characters such as collecting used tampons, slapping coworkers to help them losing weight, extreme diet dependent on protein shake all form a satirical nuance in the play. The final act of the play ends with the chant of the secretaries with a creepy smile saying that “We’re at the end. We should provide a moral for this story. But his is not a moral tale of complex allegory. No, we prefer you think of this as purely allegory. Remember, sitting next to you could be a secretary!” Such dark humor and satire to portray sexual harassment and misogyny both discomfort and entertain the audience, leaving them strong lingering imagery to ponder upon the issue.