Camus: "You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life." Camus on Dostoevsky: Main Stage 2003 SHOWS: 12th Night 2003-2004 * Modern Drama (textbook): This comprehensive and balanced anthology offers a collection of 25 works of modern and contemporary drama from the 1870s through the early 1990s. Features twenty-five plays that often demonstrate a significant breakthrough in maturity of expression and style for each playwright — important leaders in the development of modern and contemporary drama. Summary Existential idea of Freedom: This concept of freedom is related to Jean-Paul Sartre's concept of existentialsim, in which the basic tenent is that "man is what he does." The burden of decision to act, the loneliness, and angst, the alienation, and often even the terror that an individual confronts in this world view, explains a character's conflicting emotions regarding what it means to be free. The Possessed 2003 German Existentialism is represented by three thinkers: Barth, Heidegger, and Jaspers. Their common source of inspiration is Kierkegaard's thought, of which there was revival in Germany shortly after World War I. Heidegger and Jaspers are also dependent upon some significant motives found in the writings of Nietzsche. Heidegger felt, in addition, the influence of his teacher, Husserl. Questions Camus: “A world that can be explained by reasoning , however faulty , is a familiar world. But in a universe that is suddenly deprived of illusions and light , man feels a stranger. His is an iremediable exile , because he is deprived of a lost homeland as much as he lacks the hope of a promised land to come. This divorce between man and his life , the actor and his setting , truly constitutes the feeling of absurdity.” Notes 200 Words Post (after reading each play): Paragraph 1: Plot Summary -- Describe in one paragraph the storyline of the play (six or seven sentences). Paragraph 2: Theme(s) (Meaning or premise) -- What is the playwright saying to us? What is the point of the story or plot? What comment is the writer making about society? Support your theme statement from an action, dialogue or scene from the play. Paragraph 3: Form -- tragedy, comedy, melodrama, or tragicomedy? Why you believe it is a particular type of play by using examples from the play (refer to definitions in texts to justify your selections). Paragraph 4: Conclusion -- Discuss the play's universality. Will it withstand time? 100, 1000 years? Why? Peronal Opinion (Summary). Basically, the Existentialist assumes that existence precedes essence, that the significant fact is that we and things in general exist, but that these things have no meaning for us except as we through acting upon them give them meaning. The ramification of the theory is this: that one must imagine a world in which man is set adrift in a sea of chaos and expected to find his own way through it. That is, there is no real meaning in any event or group of events except what the individual gives it. Existentialism Absurd: Just as Ibsen and Strindberg and Chekhov reinvented theater at the end of the nineteenth century, so Beckett and a handful of avant-garde playwrights did so again in the middle of the twentieth. What are some of the characteristics of this new kind of theater? A rejection of plot, narrative, conflict, rounded characters-all the conventions of the drama that Ibsen had reinvigorated. Instead, an emphasis on situations rather than events, on stasis rather than change, on inertia and entropy rather than action and development. "What passes in these plays are not events with a definite beginning and a definite end, but types of situation that will forever repeat themselves" (Martin Esslin). A rejection of realism, especially the "fourth-wall" naturalism of the middle class drawing room. Far from striving for realism, this theater strips away layers of reality. Beckett’s style is radically minimalist. It substitutes image for action, leaving behind the socially oriented conventions of traditional drama to expose an underlying reality or condition of the psyche. Language is no longer an instrument for the expression of the deepest levels of meaning. Beckett and friends are more interested in patterns of images rather than argument and discursive speech. Sometimes language takes on a musical quality, as in the discussion of "all the dead voices" in Godot. When we do find argument in Beckett’s play it is reduced to absurdity. Silence is often more important than speech. Characters with whom the audience fails to identify are basically comic, even if the conditions they confront are somber. There is a great deal of clowning in Beckett’s work. In an absurd world with no discernible purpose, how else should one pass the time. Moreover, these characters are never fully conscious of who they are or where they are or what they are supposed to be doing. So there is no moment of truth here, no full recognition of the true nature of things, as there is in tragedy. Another way of saying this: characters who were once comic relief, like the gravedigger in Hamlet, now occupy center stage. Tom Stoppard recognized this feature of the new theater when he rewrote Hamlet in the style of Beckett with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern as his protagonists. And because these characters often appear as inseparable pairs, it’s possible to interpret them as polarized parts of a single consciousness or psyche. There is no separation between the mundane and the lofty: common talk of boots and hats, of bodily functions, goes on simultaneously with dialogue about the nature of existence, solitude, desire, disappointment, grief. "It was his singular, though also profoundly Irish, cunning to bring into shaping collision the sphere of the Divine Comedy, King Lear, Timon of Athens, and the metaphysicians Augustine, Spinoza, Berkeley and Descartes with that of barroom bawdy, the circus, the music hall, and the Tour de France. Music-hall cross talk and the slapstick of both the circus and silent film underlie the choreography of syllable and gesture. But the landscape in which Gogo and Didi mime their own rhetoric is that of the Irish tinker, sleeping it off in a ditch" (George Steiner). http://www.vahidnab.com/absurd.htm Roots (century before): Soren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) The Dane Soren Kierkegaard gave an account of his own life in his writings. His is a drama of a soul tormented to the point of desperation by its consciousness of sin. Because of this sense of desperation, the soul abandons itself to God and in God finds its salvation. The predominant motives of Kierkegaard's thought may be summed up as follows: To exist as an individual, it is necessary to be withdrawn from the entire world. The individual then is aware of himself -- that he exists -- and this is the greatest and most terrible thing. Indeed, on one hand, the individual recognizes that he is created by God, and hence that he comes from nothing. But at the same time this is the most terrible thing, for to exist -- as the etymology of the word indicates -- is "to stand out," "to emerge from"; the finite existent being is detached from God. Thus I must recognize that my existence denotes a detachment, an opposition to God. In consequence of this, my existence is in itself a mystery: on the one hand I cannot be nonexistent, and on the other, my existence is bathed in sin; I exist, and I am necessarily a sinner. (Kierkegaard, as a Protestant, accepts the doctrine of Luther that man, inconsequent of the original fall, is essentially a sinner.) The consciousness of this contradiction causes anguish, and anguish ends in despair -- the individual accepts existence as a mystery which he cannot hope to fathom. But because of the coincidence of opposites, from despair rises faith, and faith gives the individual the hope of redemption by means of grace. I abandon myself to the grace of God; I pray, and the prayer gives me the "presentiment" that time will be changed into eternity and death into life. Karl Barth (1886-1968) Theory of the Theological Crisis Karl Barth, in his Commentary on the Epistle of St. Paul to the Romans, centers his attention on the question of the opposition between the finite and the infinite, which was the basic point of Kierkegaard's writings. The problem Barth tries to solve is this: God is in heaven, and man is on earth. What is the relation between such a God and such a man, between such a man and such a God? Barth observes that the infinite and the finite -- i.e., God and man -- are in perfect antithesis. There is a "line of death" dividing God from man, and any attempt to overcome this line is vain, as well as sacrilegious. Man lives in a world which is the opposite of that of God. The world of man, "flesh," is the world of nature, which is the framework for man's history, his culture, and his civilization -- all things that are completely under the domination of death. Man -- as an existent being, subject to death -- is conscious of his own nothingness and of the nothingness of his culture and civilization. Even religion cannot help man to overcome this sentiment of nothingness, for any attempt to cross the line of death and to come close to God is destined to fail. But precisely because of this wreckage of culture and religion -- this general theological crisis -- faith arises in man. (Barth, like Kierkegaard, was a Protestant.) Faith is due completely to God. It is the despotic domination of God over man. Now, because of faith, the line dividing time from eternity and man from God, disappears. Under the absolute domination of God, the existence of man is transformed into an achievement of the eternal plan of God (Predestination). Time and man's sinful and imperfect activity in the world are absorbed in eternity. In short, the "no" of man corresponds to the "yes" of God. Essays: Plays:

Camus

[ short bio ]

Albert Camus was born in Mondovi, Algeria on November 7, 1913. He would learn early the sometimes senseless nature of life. Within a year of Camus' birth, his father, an impoverished agricultural worker of Alsatian origin, was killed in Europe fighting at the first battle of the Marne. His mother moved the family to the Belcourt district of Algiers where they lived with her mother who had also been widowed.

In primary school, Camus was fortunate enough to cross paths with a teacher, Louis Germain, who recognized the young boy's intellectual potential and encouraged him in his studies. By the time Camus received his baccalauriat in 1930, he was reading the likes of Gide, Montherlant and Malraux.

After taking a short break necessitated by a bout with tuberculosis, Camus continued his education at the University of Algiers. During this period, he supported himself by a wide variety of jobs which included giving private lessons, working for the Meteorological Institute, and selling spare parts for cars. It was also during this period that he, along with a number of other young left-wing intellectuals, founded the Theatre du Travail in Algiers. Camus' first experience as a playwright came when this group created a "collective play" entitled R§Ûvolte dans les Asturies.

After earning a degree in philosophy, Camus relocated to Metropolitan France and took up journalism. In 1938, he accepted a post with the left-wing newspaper Alger-Republicain where he served alternately as sub-editor, social and political reporter, leader-writer, and book-reviewer. After World War II broke out, Camus used his literary talents to support the French Resistance, taking on the editorship of Combat, an important underground paper. After the war, however, he gave up politics and journalism and devoted himself to writing. He soon established an international reputation with such works as The Stranger (1946), The Plague (1948), The Rebel (1954) and The Myth of Sisyphus (1955).

Although known primarily for his novels and philosophical works, Camus was also a man of the theatre. He served at various times as actor, director, playwright and translator for the stage. The themes of Camus' dramatic works hinge around man's realization of the "absurd" nature of the universe, and the inevitable clash of this realization with his desire for understanding. However, Camus' dramatizations of the "absurd" are very different from the "theatre of the absurd" of such playwrights as Ionesco or Beckett. Like Sartre, Camus prefers characters who are capable not only of perceiving their plight, but of articulating it clearly.

The two most important of Camus' plays are Caligula (performed 1945, written 1938) and Cross Purpose (1944). In Caligula, a young Roman emperor comes face to face with the terrible lack of meaning in the universe after the senseless death of his beloved sister Drusilla. In order to teach the world the true nature of life, Caligula goes on a murderous spree, killing his subjects indiscriminately. After this act of rebellion fails, he chooses to court his own assassination.

In Cross Purpose, Camus' second play, a man returns home after travelling the world for 20 years. His mother and sister keep an inn where, unbeknownst to him, they murder and rob rich travellers so that they will one day be able to move to the sea-shore. Unable to find the right words to reveal his identity, the prodigal son decides to spend the night in his family's inn posing as a stranger, thus becoming the next victim. When his identity is discovered, a string of suicides is set into motion--a theme which Camus would later explore in his philosophical work, The Myth of Sisyphus.

Camus wrote two other original plays, State of Siege (1948) and The Just Assassins (1949). After this, his work for the stage consisted solely of translations and adaptations. The most brilliant of these were adaptations of Faulkner's Requiem for a Nun (1956) and Dostoevsky's The Possessed (1959). In 1957, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. He responded with characteristic humility, insisting that he would have voted for Malraux.

On January 4, 1960, Camus was killed in an automobile accident while returning to Paris with his friend and publisher Michel Gallimard. He was only forty-six years old and had written as recently as 1958, "I continue to be convinced that my work hasn't even been begun." Adding to the tragedy was the fact that Camus disliked cars and had intended to return to Paris by train until Gallimard convinced him to change his mind. The return half of a rail ticket was found unused in his pocket.

Interview with Glucksmann + Dostoevsky in Manhatten

ShowCases -- selected playwrights!

Useful Questions to Ask Yourself about a Script Under Review
1. Is there anything special about the title? Does it focus on a character, the milieu, or a theme? Is it taken from a quotation or is an allusion? Does it contain a point of view or suggest a mood?
2. Make a note of unrealistic elements and consider their meaning. Does it include documentary material and, if so, to what effect?
3. Is there a main theme? Consider the tempo of the various sections?
4. How many acts and scenes are there? What motivates the divisions of the play and how are they marked (curtains, blackouts, etc.)?
5. What are the retrospective elements of the play and are they explicit or implicit?
6. Is there secondary action and what is its relationship with the main action?
7. Consider the characters entrances and exits and how they are motivated?
8. Is there any difference between playing time (the time it takes to perform the play) and illusory time (the time the action is supposed to take)? What is the relationship between the two, if any?
9. Where is the play enacted? Is the playwright vague or exact about the environment? Is this important?
10. How does the playwright economize with the number of roles? Could any be omitted or doubled? What function do the various secondary characters have?
11. Who is the protagonist? The antagonist?
12. What are the relationships among the characters and how do they change?
13. Is the play in verse, prose, or a mixture?
14. Is the play a translation? Can you compare it to the original? With other translations? Are there significant differences?
15. Is the playwright making significant points of interpretation with the use of punctuation? With breaks and overlaps? With silence?

The Stranger

The Plague

The Myth of Sisyphus

Next: theatre theory

I. Absolute Individuality and Absolute Freedom.
Existentialist conceptions of freedom and value arise from their view of the individual. Since we are all ultimately alone, isolated islands of subjectivity in an objective world, we have absolute freedom over our internal nature, and the source of our value can only be internal.

II. The Existentialist View of Human Nature. Existentialism is defined by the slogan Existence precedes Essence. This means:

We have no predetermined nature or essence that controls what we are, what we do, or what is valuable for us.
We are radically free to act independently of determination by outside influences.
We create our own human nature through these free choices.
We also create our values through these choices.

The Existentialist View (We create our own nature.): We are thrown into existence first without a predetermined nature and only later do we construct our nature or essence through our actions.

Facticity (throwness): We find ourselves existing in a world not of our own making and indifferent to our concerns. We are not the source of our existence, but find ourselves thrown into a world we don't control and didn't choose.
Anxiety: We are faced with the lack of any external source of value and determination. We are faced with the responsibility of choosing our own nature and values, and, in doing so, we are faced we must face the awesome responsibility of choosing human nature and values for all men in our free choices.
Despair: In seeing the contrast between the world we re thrown into and which we cannot control and the absolute freedom we have to create ourselves, we must despair of any hope of external value or determination and restrict ourselves to what is under our own control. A. What is Freedom?

The problem: How can we be free if our bodies, our abilities, and our environment are determined?
The solution:
Even though all these factors may be determined, we are more than simply these things. Our real self lies beyond the reach of external determination in virtue of its absolute individuality.
Our freedom is a freedom of synthesis: even though the many factors that go into making us and our experience are determined, we can arrange them as we like. We are free to make of them, and ourselves, whatever we will.

B. What is Happiness?

The problem: How can man be happy in a world devoid of external significance and meaning?
The solution: The loss of external value allows us to get value from within ourselves, a value that is greater because it cannot be taken away by external forces.

C. How ought we to act?

The problem: If our only moral rule is to act authentically, to choose our own values instead of taking them from external sources, can't we really do anything we want, no matter how evil or selfish?

The solution:
In choosing our own nature we must choose human nature for all humanity. In order to act freely, we must not let our action be determined by any of our particular desires or interests. We must act as any free agent would act, hence we must act as we would like other people to act.
In order to be free ourselves, we must desire the freedom of other people. To treat another person merely as an object for my use is to make an object of myself. To be free I must respect the freedom of others.
Even though my actions are free, they are not completely arbitrary. Just as the artist, while free to create, follows the constraints imposed by her medium, so our actions, while not governed by rules, are constrained by the choices we and others have made.
http://www.anselm.edu/homepage/dbanach/sartreol.htm About The Book * Preface * Overview * Table of Contents * About the Author * What's New * Feature Summary * Supplements * PageOut * Credits * Existentialism and Human Emotions Jean Paul Sartre [translated by Bernard Frechtman, from Existentialism and Human Emotions, Philosophical Library, 1957, pp. 9-16. ]

"Atheistic existentialism, which I represent, is more coherent. It states that if God does not exist, there is at least one being in whom existence precedes essence, a being who exists before he can be defined by any concept, and that this being is man, or, as Heidegger says, human reality. What is meant here by saying that existence precedes essence? It means that, first of all, man exists, turns up, appears on the scene, and, only afterwards, defines himself. If man, as the existentialist conceives him, is indefinable, it is because at first he is nothing. Only afterward will he be something, and he himself will have made what he will be. Thus, there is no human nature, since there is no God to conceive it. Not only is man what he conceives himself to be, but he is also only what he wills himself to be after this thrust toward existence.

Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself. Such is the first principle of existentialism. It is also what is called subjectivity, the name we are labeled with when charges are brought against us. But what do we mean by this, if not that man has a greater dignity than a stone or table? For we mean that man first exists, that is, that man first of all is the being who hurls himself toward a future and who is conscious of imagining himself as being in the future. Man is at the start a plan which is aware of itself, rather than a patch of moss, a piece of garbage, or a cauliflower nothing exists prior to this plan; there is nothing in heaven; man will be what he will have planned to be. Not what he will want to be. Because by the word "will" we generally mean a conscious decision, which is subsequent to what we have already made of ourselves. I may want to belong to a political party, write a book, get married; but all that is only a manifestation of an earlier, more spontaneous choice that is called "will." But if existence really does precede essence, man is responsible for what he is. Thus, existentialism's first move is to make every man aware of what he is and to make the full responsibility of his existence rest on him. And when we say that a man is responsible for himself, we do not only mean that he is responsible for his own individuality, but that he is responsible for all men."
http://www.anselm.edu/homepage/dbanach/exist.htm

http://www.segnbora.com/justes/ 1949