NOTES ON STYLE - BURLESQUE, VAUDEVILLE, THEATER OF THE RIDICULOUS

BURLESQUE Any imitative work that derives humor from an incongruous contrast between style and subject. A burlesque literary performance is intentionally ridiculous.

VAUDEVILLE
A light often comic theatrical piece frequently combining pantomime, dialogue, dancing, and song.

THEATRE OF THE RIDICULOUS
(from Cambridge Paperback Guide to Theatre)
Theatre of the Ridiculous, American Movement.
A self-consciously wild production style, full of witty word-play, sexual ambiguity, and bad taste.

In 1967 the Play-house of the Ridiculous opened in OFF OFF Broadway with The Life of Lady Godiva, written by Ronald Tavel.

(from Factory Made:Warhol in the Sixties, www.factorymade.org)
Parading across the tiny stage were a shoe fetishist, a fat sheriff, a local s & m nobleman, angels, a lewd horseman. There was also a singing nun chorus whose hit song was "Morning Horniness," sung in counterpoint to a chorus of angels.

In these first "official" Ridiculous productions, the hallmarks of the Ridiculous style were already apparent. The casting, for example, drew not only from New York's pool of trained actors, but also from natural unschooled performers. Ron Tavel (www.ronald-tavel.com) described them as "the crazies coming off the street who are so phenomenal that when you see them walking down the street you say, ‘That person has to be onstage: they were born to it.'" These neophytes offered John Vacarro a group to mold into his own stage vision, fueled by the fresh intensity of amateurs.

LYSISTRATA

Loosely translated, Lysistrata means "she who disbands armies."

Lysistrata was written in the final decade of the Peloponnesian War in which Athens and its allies fought against Sparta and the Peloponnesia League.

The title character engages the support of women from Sparta, Boeotia, and Corinththe to barricade the public funds building and withhold sex from their husbands in order to end the war. The other women are first against Lysistrata's suggestion to withhold sex, but finally agree and swear an oath of allegiance by drinking wine from a phallic shaped flask.

This action is ironic, because Greek men believed women had no self-restraint, a lack displayed in their alleged fondness for wine as well as for sex.

The play was originally performed in 411 BC at either the Dionysia or the Lenaia festival.

A different comedy by Aristophanes, Women at the Thesmorphoria, was also produced that year, and it is not clear which play was produced at which festival.

Lysistrata is perhaps the first completely positive female leader portrayed in theatre (who was a mortal and not a goddess).

Professor Elizabeth Scharffenberger (Columbia Classics) points out Lysistrata, "releaser of war," sounds remarkably similar to an important priestess in Athens at that time whose name, Lysimache, meant "releaser of the battle." The connection would have encouraged the association of Lysistrata with the goddess Athena.

The dialogue for the female characters is too compelling not be recognized as a belonging to a pro-female work. A central metaphor of the play is weaving. The idea that woman are better at going hither and thither and pulling together the strands of society positions women as essential to "weaving the fabric of a nation." The idea of a domestic skill being core to uniting a war-torn nation may seem unconvincing, but weaving was at the center of Athenian life.

Lysistrata touches upon the poignancy of young women left with no eligible young men to marry because of deaths in the wars: "Nay, but it isn't the same with a man/Grey though he be when he comes from the battlefield/still if he wishes to marry he can/Brief is the spring and the flower of our womanhood/once let slip, and it comes not again/Sit as we may with our spells and our auguries/never a husband shall marry us then."

As with all Greek comedies, the actors portraying male characters wore phalluses, but since audiences of the day were accustomed to this convention, there would be little shock-humor in seeing a comic phallus. Aristophanes' innovation seems to be in making the usually floppy huge comic phalluses stiff and erect.

Lysistrata has inspired musicals, avante garde films, and at least two operas.

The Lysistrata Project was a reaction to the Iraq disarmament crisis. On March 3, 2003 readings of the play were held on world-wide.

A present-day Lysistrata played out in the town of Pereira, Columbia in September 2006 when a group of gangsters' wives and girlfriends declared sex strike to force their partners to participate in a disarmament program.

In 2007, the play was staged for PBS and directed by James Thomas as part of a series on "Female Power & Democracy" that explored how female participation in civic life is moving from comedy to reality.

OLD COMEDY

The earliest Athenian comedy, from the 480s to 440s BCE, is almost entirely lost.

In order to impress the refined and cultured community of Athens in the democratic age of Pericles the dramatists of Old Comedy borrowed the features of tragedy; choral dances, masked actors, poetic meters, scenery and stage mechanics and then infuse them with pungent political satire, audacious personal invectives, and sexual and scatological innuendo.

The most important dramatist of the Old Comedy was Aristophanes.
Aristophanes lampooned the most influential personalities and institutions of his day, as can be seen in his buffoonish portrayal of Socrates in The Clouds, and in his anti-military farce Lysistrata.

He was accused by other poets of his time of trying to degrade Athenian society, but his thoughtful examination of politics and culture would ultimately prove their accusations inaccurate.

The legacy of Old Comedy can be seen in contemporary times in political satires such as Dr. Strangelove and in the televised buffoonery of Monty Python and Saturday Night Live.

BRIEF NOTES ON GREEK COMEDY PERFORMANCE

Actors were usually all men and played more than one role.
Tragedy leaned toward idealization; comedy toward burlesque.

The Chorus for Old Comedy was usually 24 people and made up of amateurs who were put through months of training.

Functions of the chorus included:
-giving advice, asking questions of character and audience
-establishing ethical framework
-"ideal spectator" reacting as playwright hopes the audience would
-adding movement, spectacle, song, and dance
-adding rhythm, pauses and pace to the action so that the audience can reflect.

Music was considered integral to performance.
No record of composers or quality of the sound exists.

Dance was usually mimetic, expressive of character or situation.
In comedy dancing was usually less dignified with more jumping, spinning, etc.

Costumes were adapted from everyday Greek life.
Chitons made too short to emphasize comic elements.
Male characters wore a phallus.
Slaves and old men wore comically exaggerated costume.
Comedy masks were stylized and varied and often resembled birds and animals. Not naturalistic.

ARISTOPHANES

The place and exact date of his birth are unknown (perhaps Aegina, sometime around 450 BC).

His obviously high level of literacy suggests that he was from a relatively wealthy family, although not apparently from a theatrical one.

He wrote forty plays, eleven of which survive. He is considered by many to be the Father of Comedy.

Many of Aristophanes' plays were political, and often satirized well-known citizens of Athens and their conduct in the Peloponnesian War.

Aristophanes appears as a character in Plato's Symposium, in which he offers a humorous mythical account of the origin of Love.

The date of his death is unknown.