a third blog post

Once again, I'm sorry I'm always the last to post these things! I also apologize in advance for any incoherence in my writing, as I'm quite exhausted...

I too enjoyed Boal’s history of the changing nature of theater and its relation to society. It made sense to me except where he attacked individual playwrights. I mostly understand where he’s coming from when talks about the development of theater as a method of defining the place of the individual in society, and how it reflected and influenced the social norms of the day. It made sense that overall theater might have a dehumanizing effect—what I don’t understand is, as David said, how Ionesco can be classified as “[overshadowing] the achievements of all his fellow playwrights in the enormous task of dehumanizing man.”

It’s like Boal switched from arguing that theater works to oppress people, as in the audience, to arguing that a certain character in a certain play was somehow restricted and “oppressed” because he was constructed as an “[abstraction] of a psychological, moral, or metaphysical nature”. This is a difficult leap for me to make, especially when I feel like Ionesco’s characters are created very precisely for the purpose of social commentary. The only explanation I can think of is that perhaps Boal is suggesting that this increased denigration of the individual came about without Ionesco’s noticing it; that maybe Boal is saying that though Ionesco’s intentions were good, he unknowingly perpetuated this sequence of dehumanization Boal sees in theater.

On a different note, I found his characterization of the influence Hollywood has interesting, especially because of the nature of the influence. I’ve always found that it’s not the didactic, Aristotelian plays that influence people the most, but rather the subtly manipulative ones. In this sense, if we extend Boal’s “theater” to the media today, we see how people are no longer following prescribed outcomes, ie “you should feel this after watching this play;” instead we find audiences influenced by, as in his example, what characters are wearing and doing, how they’re talking, etc.