Mason Barber

THE 301A

Dr. Kelty

Theatre & History Notes and Questions

 OED: and – simply connective

 Theatre artist uses or manipulates embodied traditions of theatre art

 to impart stories on the stage and more often than not those stories or plays come from

the time before the present moment of production

 OED: history – A written narrative constituting a continuous chronological record of

important or public events or of a particular trend, institution, or person’s life

 Historicity – The fact, or quality, or character of being situated in history; especially

historical accuracy or authenticity

 Theater history can help you be, and remain, flexible

 Historical discourse gives itself credibility in the name of the reality which it is supposed

to represent, but this authorized appearance of the real serves precisely to camouflage the

practice which in fact determines it

 As people we compose an understanding of ourselves, even learn to be human, through

mimetic and representational practices

 What happens, when it happens, in the theater, is, as Shakespeare’s Polixenes might say,

art. But the art itself is nature.

 The document belongs to the past, where as feelings belong only to the present moment

of the person experiencing feelings

 Oral is not here approach there’s already an archive, a performance based or embodied

archive

 Oral histories are constituted a new, recorded and saved through technologies of

recording in the name of identicality and materiality

 The “father of history“ is the title of generally conferred Herodotus, though he has also

been called the “father of lies“

 Evidence is not only, never only, the object or image at a remove, but the very hands or

torso or eyeballs that come into contact with the object, text, artifact, or gesture…now

 Theatre can be called an art of time, and also an art of passage – the passing of one

person, thing, or idea into another person, thing, or idea or person, thing, and idea are in

play

 The alignment of theater with fakery runs deep in a habits of anti-theatricality within the

art world at large

 To study Elizabethan England would be, in part, to study the way Rome had been passed

down in history as history

 The future is often carved out by manipulating faults and crafting errors and recall

 Distinguish the fake from the real to get at a true story

 Doing our best to account for when and where the blood was fake or the blood was real is

essential to our endeavor

 Take account of displacement and replacement as the mode of any and all

communication

1. Is a period piece still a period piece if it is played by contemporary actors?

2. Do we keep notice of the conventions of staging and theatre at the time of the original

production? How indebted are we to the original?

3. What records have been stripped from our history? What are we excluding? Are we

educating people with a false sense of the truth?