Theatre App Exam 3

Happenings

Audience is part of the art

Performance art

Art & Performance

vaudeville

unrelated small acts

burlesque

og: parody of serious subjects turned into strip tease

extravaganza

melodrama with a bunch fo things added to it

revue

multi acts with no plot onnly overarching theme

book musical

trad musical theatre

jukebox theatre

theatre using preexisting popular songs instead of making their own tied witha fictional plot, theme or biographical plot

Important composers

Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, Richard

Rodgers, George Gershwin, and Harold Arlen

Steven Sondheim significance

Unlike older musical formats where songs paused the plot for standalone numbers, Sondheim wove lyrics and music inextricably into the action, famously viewing every lyric as a compressed dramatic scene

Jerome Robbins

testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), where he named fellow artists as Communist Party members under threat of being publicly outed as gay.

red scare

is a period of intense public fear, political panic, and moral alarm regarding the perceived threat of left-wing ideologies—particularly communism, socialism, and anarchism—in a non-communist society

lavendar scare

a mid-20th-century moral panic and government-sponsored campaign in the United States that targeted gay men and lesbians, resulting in the mass firing of thousands of federal employees

black list

primarily refers to the 1940s and 1950s Red Scare, when anti-communist hysteria targeted writers, actors, and directors across the American entertainment industry.

While Hollywood studios banned hundreds of artists from working, Broadway and the American theatre community famously resisted these efforts and served as a sanctuary for persecuted performers

Bob Fosse

small groups of dancers, sexually suggestive and gyrating

Chinese Opera

bare stage, men only og, intense battle sequences, stylized hight pitched singing, several character types and makeup indicated character type and elaborate costumes

Use of theatre by missionaries in South

America

used to colonize and show that indigenous should love colonizers

• passions plays made Bible accessible to illiterate

• used to convert

Origin of Cuban Americna Theatre in Florida

1st independence movement from spanish and anti-slavery = cuban writers kicked out to florida = uswed theatre to gain sympathy/ teach + protest plays and political satire (including black face)

• lectors: story tellers for industrial workers

Reasons for new audiences in 1950s

2nd indepedence wave: 1950s Cuban revolution after socialist takeover and created audience for cuban theatre in South Florida

Chicano Theatre

poor worker conditions = use of agitprop theatre

Luis Valdez

student @ san jose and talked ot chavez to write plays to join the union

• founded El teatro campesino = farm workers theatre

• actos: short improv skits based on farce and traditions

cesar chavez

founded united farm workers

• led strike of california grape pickers and formed national boycott for better worker conditions

El Teatro Campesino

Created by Luiz Valdez

• founded El teatro campesino = farm workers theatre

• actos: short improv skits based on farce and traditions

humanism

study of the human conditon - since no more religious theatre

• shakespeare was the first

Elizabethan/Jacobean theatre/ Elizabethan Worldview

Focused on English nationalism, pastoral settings, romantic comedies, histories, and classical Greek and Roman myths.

everybdoy has a master / hierarch to everything

Patrons

provided financial support, political protection, and social legitimacy to artists, writers, musicians, and-most famously-theater companies

The First Folio

the first collected edition of William Shakespeare's plays after shakespeare died

iambic pentameter

Five (penta) metrical feet in a row, making a total of 10 syllables per line (da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM)

blank verse

no rhyme poems

prose

everyday, conversational speech that lacks a regular metrical rhythm (such as iambic pentameter) or rhyming scheme

original dialect

drunken pirate

original practices

• spoken decor: told where we are

• universal lighting: same lighting source

• casting: Single-Gender Ensembles and role doubling

• costumes

not necessarily accurate to time periods depicted

Bull and bearbaiting

how many dogs itd take to kill a bear or bull

Against Theatre

• roleplaying a form of lying

• corrupts morals and ethics by example

• childish and that serious people dont do it

• unnecessarily stirs the emotions

• socially disruptive

Counter arguement to arguements against theatre

• emotionally therapeutic

• teach moral behavior (how we should live our lives)

• reveal important social issues

• builds community/empathy

Miller v California Supreme Court 1973

defining obscenity with a test

• adult ad mailed

Obscenity Test

would average person applying contemp comm standards find the work sppeals to an unwholesome interest in sexual matters

Federal Theatre Project dilemma

created by works progress admin = jobs program

• including entertainment:

  • congress eventually pulled funding because topics displeased law makers

    • racial integration

    • communist infiltration

Social Conscious Theatre

Living newspaper makes theatre out of news topics and criticized government sometimes

• 1/3 was about housing

N*gro Units

black theatre artists givern opportunities

Voodoo Macbeth

popular haitian macbeth where the witches are based on voodoo and haitian actors hired that believe in voodoo

national endowment for the arts (1965)

increased culture and appreciation of arts by citizens

Serrano Mapplethrope Controversey/ 1990 Ohio Museum Controversey “Culture Wars”

Serrano: piss christ artist

Mapplethorpe: photographer and eroticized male forum (sexuality)

• both outraged congress people

  • caused obscenity oath

Obscenity Oath (Congress

NEA must ensure artistic excellence and merit that aredecent, respectful of beliefs and values of American Public

NEA 4

4 performance artists sued gov and took to supreme court to fFirst Amendment rights, artistic freedom, and freedom of expression against government censorship

• lost

2025 New Restrictions to NEA

no DEI along with obscenity oath

• federal funds are NOT to promote gender ideaology (struck down 2025 bc went against 1st amendment)

• trump called for elimination of nea

• nea uses 0.0028% of gov budget