The most creative part. It is there that you use your instruments, both external and internal. The external instruments, of course, are your voice with which you speak the words, and your body, your appearance with which you enter, sit down, get up, walk to the window, turn around and exit. Thats all an actor has, just his voice and his body. But inside, of course, he has his own temperament, his own character, his own likes and dislikes, his own prejudices, his background, his education, the lessons hes learned from other actors and from directors and the experiences of his life, which he can draw on in parallel situations in the play. Now, you will see in these rehearsal scenes coming up, a number of very interesting things. Mr. Patrick stewart is first seen in character, in costume. And then suddenly, there was a rehearsal scene, and the same man who appeared to be a young servant, suddenly appears to be a man in early middle age. Hemr. Stewart has no hair. Mr. Stewart does not wear
Now, your host, mr. Jose ferrer. Henrik ibsen, the author of the wild duck, was called idealist, skeptic, reformer, even pornographer. Audiences of the 1880s were shocked by topics which wellbred people avoided. In an age which prized gentility, ibsen was scandalously provocative. He would not allow the appearance of respectability to conceal truth. At the same time, he recognized the danger of such revelations. A few years before the wild duck was written, he had aroused so much public hostility against the frankness of his play ghosts that he was labeled an enemy of the people. Upon reflection, he turned that accusation against himself into the title of still another play. In the wild duck, some of the most severe attacks are directed against the socalled idealists. Though ibsens subjects contemporary corruption in clergy and business, sexual inequality, prudishness and other victorian unmentionables were considered dangerous, his method of presentation was conventional. He used melo
The play for this program, oedipus tyrannus by sophocles. Now your host, mr. Jose ferrer. The play you are about to see is oedipus tyrannus or oedipus rex by sophocles. This play was first performed in athens in the theater of dionysus about 24 centuries ago. Aristotle, who might be called the first drama critic, considered it the perfect tragic drama. The rest of the world has more or less gone along with that down through the centuries. Sophocles wrote some 120 plays in his lifetime, but only 7 have survived. When his first play was chosen for competition, he was in his early 20s and he won first prize. His last play was written when he was 90 years old. Sophocles was an artist of the noblest genius, whose art transformed the severe truth of life into theater reality while tempering it with the beauty of poetry. Standing at the very apex of the golden age of greece, he was recognized by his contemporaries as one of the glories of that epic. From aristotles discourse on tragic drama,
Begins with an empty stage. This stage represents the artists blank canvas, the musicians instrument before a single note is played. It was the bare stage that caught pirandellos imagination and became the catalyst for six characters in search of an author. He himself wrote that he wanted an audience to feel they had just happened to enter an auditorium and stumbled on to a rehearsal. They see unplanned events take place and develop accidentally into a play performance. At this given time in this given space, identities, actions, meanings evolve between the characters and the actors, between the real and the imaginary, between life and art. And therein lay the challenge for pirandello, for all playwrights who seek to create a specific atmosphere in which an audience participates in the illusion of reality. Our guest is both a playwright and performer, who, through his work, has created magical moments of artistic reality, mr. Ossie davis. Only if the characters about which hes trying t
Within the specialized conditions of theater. You hear a lot about what theater really is. In fact, the comparison most often heard has to do with a mirror. The comparison, of course, is borrowed from shakespeare, when hamlet says, to hold as twere a mirror up to nature. For many, theater is a reflection of life, an imitation. Now, certainly, there can be a mirroring effect in the theater. As with any artist, if the dramatist or playwright holds up a mirror to nature, it is the mirror of that individuals own mind. What is reflected is a specialized point of view quite as unique as that same artists fingerprint. The art of theater, however, encompasses much more than can be reflected in the mirror. Think of it for a moment not as a mirror but rather as a prism. A prism reflects light, breaking it down into Component Parts, casting first this image, merging with another image, this shadow, that shadow, this color, that color. And curiously, each component is recognizable. Even so, the th