Theater of Social Action

From Christopher Maurer's introduction to Three Plays... by Federico Garcia Lorca, translated by Carmen Zapata and Michael Dewell (NY: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 1993):

"... by 1935 Lorca had declared himself an 'enthusiastic, devoted follower of the theater of social action,' and defined theater as

a school of laughter and lamentation, an open tribunal where the people can introduce old and mistaken mores as evidence ... The theater is an extremely useful instrument for the edification of a country, and the barometer that measures its greatnesss or decline. A sensitive theater, well oriented in all its branches, from tragedy to vaudeville, can alter a people's sensitivity in just a few years, while a decadent theater where hooves have taken the place of wings can cheapen and lull to sleep an entire nation." (xii)

Such a definition does raise the question - in admirably poetic terms - as to which sort of theater we have in this country to work with. Have hooves taken the place of wings - or vice versa? And how can we tell which is which?

Theatre & Knowledge

"... in my view the great and complicated things that go on in the world cannot be adequately recognized by people who do not use every possible aid to understanding."

~ Bertolt Brecht