A Brief History of Theatre (or, Theatre as Culture)
“I can’t wait til four o’clock,” Kyle said, rubbing his hands together with anticipation. “Football!” I groaned. Russ hollered,
“I HATE FOOTBALL!” Everyone stared at him. “Well, I do!” He has that comical high-pitched voice when he gets excited.
“Don’t worry, Russ,” I said. “I hate football, too.” Everyone else stared at me, too. We glared back. Russ looks at me and grumbles.
“You can go anywhere and say ‘I hate theatre’ and be uncultured,” he said. “But if you say ‘I hate football,’ you get burned at the stake.”
It’s true. Here in the South, in the Bible Belt, football comes a very close second to beer in terms of recreational activities. In fact, it may even be first, considering that nobody in their right mind goes to a football game without a beer or six.
Russ makes an excellent point. People are perfectly fine with branding theatre as boring and not worth their time. They would rather watch two teams of 12 people in tights wrestling over a ball on a field. There are, naturally, some appealing aspects to football, but by and large, Russ and I would rather be stimulated in the ways that live theatre moves us.
Live theatre is more than just a movie on a stage — it’s an experience. It’s more than people walking around reciting lines or poetry, it’s a mirror to life. Theatre shows us the facts of life — the ups, the downs, the middles — and amplifies them. Theatre hails from the earliest, most primitive forms of entertainment — rituals.
Way back in the day, back before iPods and Coca-Cola, before cars and debit cards, before Broadway, before Shakespeare, and even before King Tut’s personal ball-scrubber was born, there were cavemen. Kinda like the Geico cavemen, but not quite. They didn’t have insurance back then, either.
The tribes in prehistoric times lived from day-to-day. They didn’t have much time to think about the future. The furthest ahead they thought was probably when they were predicting when the weather would be favorable enough to move from camp to camp. They were nomads. They hunted and gathered, and they traveled across the lands, following the herds for food. The tribes were scattered about, generally living as an autonomous unit. There was no Medicare, there was no FEMA, there was no government to help in times of trouble. The tribe was on its own.
A single storm could flood their cave and drown them all.
A single earthquake could open up the ground beneath their feet and swallow them whole.
A single hunt gone wrong could cause them to starve through the winter.
A single screw-up, and the whole tribe could potentially die.
So, in order to take precautions against those kinds of disasters, they did what most people do today — they prayed. The tribe shaman would dress up like a lion, a tiger, or a bear (oh my!), or whatever their totem spirit or target prey was. The shaman-turned-beast would dance and chant, while the hunters staged a mock fight against him. When the shaman-beast had been “killed,” the tribe understood that the hunt was blessed by the totem spirit.
The first theatrical productions were these rituals — matters of life or death. They were deadly serious. They didn’t have time to play games — they were trying to survive. This was the beginning of the form of tragedy.
Fast forward thousands of years to the ancient Egyptians and Greeks. These peoples had settled down, formed farming communities, and allowed for specialization of craftsmen. These civilizations were no longer on the brink of destruction. They could survive an earthquake, a failed hunt, or a flood. They were secure. The rituals didn’t go away, but a new form of ritual was developed — comedy.
Finally, people had the ability, to borrow a cliche, to stop and smell the roses. They could have fun. So theatre developed into an entertainment exercise, rather than a survival-based one. Comedy eventually followed tragedy, and so on and so forth.
So, to the dear savages of the Bible Belt, I say this to you: theatre wins. Theatre is more culturally important than football. It was here first, it is far more enduring, and it actually means something. Football, on the other hand, is… boring.
“So,” I say to Russ. “How bout them crazy Danes?”
Tags: culture, football, theatre history