Russian theater that Stankislavksky and Danchenko founded in 1988.

Venue for naturalistic theater.

The theater became famous when it staged Anton Chekov’s four major plays. 

It's purpose would be to bring new serious and experimental playwrights to the stage, and the audience would be able to concentrate on the drama before them, produced with attention to period accuracy and detailed realism in sets, costumes, and props.

Russian  director and actor (realism). Wrote An Actor Prepartes, Building a Character, and Creating a Role. 

Hated "phoniness", which includes overacting and pomposity. 

The “Method”:  An Actor must find the inner truth of the character, as opposed to an "external" or rhetorical style of acting.

Inner truth: Inner motivation behind what the person says and does.

Physician who early in life was diagnosed with tuberculosis.

Wrote short stories.

Russian playwright.

Works staged at Moscow Art Theater.

Writer of The Seagul, Uncle Vanya, The Three Sisters, and The Cherry Orchard. 

Return of Lyubov to her anestral home- the Cherry Orchard- which is set for destruction unless she takes some practical means to save it.

Lyubov (Madame Ranevskya) and brother Gayev: members of an older aristocratic generation that cannot cope with changig Russia.

Lopahin (wealthy family friend)and Varya (Madame's oldest daughter): Mature adults who stand prepared to take on the challenge of a changing world.Varya wants Lopahin to propose to her. Lopahin buys the Cherry Orchard. 

Anya (youngest daughter) and Trofimov (teacher): Younger generation wiling to cope with the changing world. They end up falling in love. 

Symbolism was a literary and dramatic reaction to the previous two movements: Romanticism and Realism. 

Took place 1880-1915

-Too look "deeper", more subjective

-In symbolist writing drama, settings characters and actions become metaphors for a spiritual reality. 

Alfred Jarry and The Ubu King

Known for his Ubu plays.

Began writing in 1888 at age 15.

-First prophet of the theatre of the Absurd.

The Ubu King: Parody of Shakespeare's Macbeth. Pa Ubu, a foul old man set on conquering Poland by any means necessary- and a personification of all this is base and stupid in mankind. 

Lunge- Poe: Founder of symbolist theater

introduced the works of several great contemporary playwrights in France and Belgium

-Actor at first at the Theatre Libre, and Theatre d'Art, where he was introduced to symbolist theater.

-Later managed Theatre de L'oeuvre, where he staged the plays of Maeterlink, Ibsen, and Strindberg. 

-Sought to create a unified nonrealistic theatre of poetry and dreams through atmospheric staging and stylized acting.

-Won Nobel Prize for literature in 1911 for his outstanding works in Symbolist theatre. 

-Major plays: Pelleas et Melisande, The Blue Bird.

-Used poetic speech, gesture, lighting, setting and ritual to create images that reflect his protagonists' moods and dilemmas. Often the protagonists are waiting for something mysterious and fearful that will destroy them. 

-Writing was blends of mysticism, occultism, and interest in the world of nature.

-Play by Maeterlinck 

-basis for an opera by Claude Debussy

-Set in a nebulous, fairy-tale past, the play conveys a mood of hopeless melancholy and doom in its story of the destructive passion of Princess Melisande, who falls in love with her husband's younger brother, Pelleas. 

-play by Maeterlinck

-An allegorical fantasy conceived as play for children, it portrays a search for happiness in the world. 

-Performed at Moscow Theater

-Can be compared to The Wizard of Ox

-A stage craft of simplification and suggestion. 

-A single Gothic pillar can create in the imagination of the audience the physical reality and spiritual force of the church.

-Created by Adolph Appia and Edward Gordon Craig

-Architect and stage theorist on lighting and decor

-Sketches (La mise en scene de Drame [Wagnerien], Die Musik and die Inscenerung, and L'Oeuvre d'Art Vivant) indicate a plastic, three dimensional set (steps, columns, ramps, and platform) revealed in light.

-He believed that shifting light should create an inner drama which flows and changes with texture of the music, that the intensity, color and direction of the light should reflect the changing atmosphere or mood of the work.