Tynan's Anger

Allison Krogan at The Guardian poses a question that's trickier than it initially seems: what is the difference, from a semantic standpoint, between "theater" and "drama"? She uses an interesting quote by Edward Bond to launch the debate:

"I went back to see it after it had been playing for a week and the actors were doing it as if it were Tom Stoppard. They were doing 'theatre'. But drama is not 'theatre'."

Her thesis, which I'm inclined to agree with, is that "the implication usually is that, while "theatre" is a vacuous, commercial or essentially trivial enterprise, Drama transcends theatre's vulgar origins and leaps into Art." One would be hard pressed to find someone who would call The Little Mermaid "drama (Ben Brantley certainly wouldn't), but it's certainly theater. I'd also add that unlike, theater, which usually implies "performance," "drama" is a text-based term, as if it could be a category along with novels and poetry. Krogan's use of Eugene O'Neill here is a particularly good example, although for the wrong reasons. O'Neill was a dramatist first and a playwright second. Of course, as many have argued, that made his plays much more forceful when read than when performed.

Now that I'm taking W.J.T. Mitchell's Theories of Media class, these kind of discussions interest me a lot more.

Labels: ben brantley, edward bond, eugene o'neill, the guardian, the little mermaid, theater vs. drama