This one’s for extra credit. It’s from my 1999 Attaché piece excerpted here. Goes into the history of the three-act play in some detail.
Writing and producing plays in ancient Greece was, according the fragmented accounts that still exist, every bit as politically contentious and publicly competitive as is movie-making today. Prizes were awarded; fame and fortune gained and lost; the viewing public both courted and reviled by the producers. The Cannes Film Festival of its day was the Great Dionysia, an annual gathering to honor the god of fertility, wine and vegetation during which the greatest poets of the time each submitted four plays: three tragedies and a comedy. Aeschylus won in 458 B.C. with his great masterpiece Oresteia in which he tied his three tragedies together into a sequential and unified whole: The three-act play was born and it hasn’t changed much in structure since. And the world is still waiting for a better drama than Oresteia, on stage or screen.
About a hundred years after Oresteia, Aristotle wrote his Poetics in which he defined almost all of the elements of modern drama: tragedy, comedy, character, plot, reversal, discovery and catharsis; beginning, middle and end; and the concept of “unity of action,” which means that if a part of a play makes no difference to the play’s outcome, it should not be there. Substitute “movie” for “play” and it’s not hard to envision a bearded and be-robed guy in a private screening room in front of a gathering of Armani suits, lecturing the moguls on story structure and speaking to them in Greek. What, you think this doesn’t actually happen?
The problem with Poetics is that it disappeared for a few hundred years, lost or suppressed through the Middle Ages, and when it was rediscovered in 16th century Italy, nobody involved in theater had even read it. Viewing it as revealed truth, an academic named Lodovico Castelvetro set himself up as a sort-of reborn Socrates, gathering the best humanist poets and dramatists of Italy around him, teaching them his narrowly-read version of the story structure of Aristotle in which, among other inviolable attributes, the action of every play had to match real time minute for minute. Aristotle’s “unity of action” had become Castelvetro’s “The Unities,” a rigid story structure in which action, time and place had to occur on stage as if they were occurring in real time and place; anything else was not classical and therefore not art. Aristotle had only suggested that the best duration for a tragedy was one full revolution of the sun, but Castelvetro, having a low opinion of the audiences of his day, was convinced that they could not understand a play if its scenes took place in differing locales and if the time that passed from curtain to curtain was different from the actual time the audience spent in their seats watching it. His heavily-promoted misreading of Aristotle became the universal theatrical doctrine of the time, spreading to France where it took an even firmer hold. There, in the most celebrated controversy of the time — and a cautionary tale for our own — Pierre Corneille wrote a play called Le Cid, basing his story on the 11th century Spanish hero whose given name was Rodrigo Diaz de Bivar. In Corneille’s play, the hero Rodrique loves Chimene and she loves him, but he is forced into a duel in which he kills Chimene’s father. He then becomes a national hero by repulsing an invasion of the Moors and the king orders Chimene to marry him after a year of mourning for her father. She does, and all ends well. But in writing his story, Corneille had to stick rigidly to The Unities if he wanted his script — er, play — actually produced, so he compressed several years of history into a 36-hour time frame. That got him the green light, but the audience was outraged: You mean Chimene marries this guy less than 24 hours after he kills her father? And it’s okay because she loves him? Are you kidding? Get me rewrite. The Academie Française agreed, declaring the play both morally and artistically defective, a pronouncement that — does this sound familiar? — failed to prevent Corneille from going on to become the day’s preeminent dramatist in his country.
The Unities gradually gave way to less rigid dramatic structures as audiences became more sophisticated and set design got better, allowing for easily-recognized changes of scene. The big technological breakthrough was picture-frame perspective staging, using painted backdrops to simulate in 3-D any locale the play needed; this was a quantum leap every bit as impressive then as computer-generated special effects are today and its result was to bring wider audiences to the theater. Wider audiences meant more varied tastes and fewer classically-trained viewers buying tickets; by the 19th century, drama had passed through any number of styles and theories, up to and especially including the Theater of the Absurd, so that today, in the live theater, absolutely anything can — as art absolutely should — go. You want a bunch of guys in blue paint making weird effects, you got it: Blue Man Group. A Disney cartoon cloned into a simultaneous worldwide musical epic: The Lion King. A traditionally-mounted Hamlet: almost anywhere. And even Aeschylus: the Oresteia stills finds a stage somewhere.
Art thrives wherever it can find a niche audience. Live theater has escaped the shackles of required artistic conformity for the simple reason that each production doesn’t need a very large audience to be successful. An off-Broadway show can be happy with 50 paid seats a night. But the audience needed to recoup a 100-million-dollar movie budget is, what? Twenty million ticket purchasers? More? That’s nobody’s niche.
Big-studio movies aren’t art, they’re commerce. And commerce deplores risk. Which is why McDonald’s® sticks with burgers, Coke® doesn’t stray far from cola, and Hollywood is sticking with Aristotle.
