Play is Play by Peter Yang

Synopsis

As one of the closest disciples of Brecht and Wilder, Frisch created in his Chinese Wall a play, in which the narrator and other characters supposedly destroy dramatic illusions by means of their appeals to the audience, their distance from other dramatic characters, and their temporal manipulation of dramatic events.

This book reexamines classical examples of “epic” plays to demonstrate that the so-called “epic” theater goes in fact far beyond being narrative, historical, distancing, and alienating. Just as in plays by other “epic” dramatists, the dramatic illusion in Frisch's play is far from being eliminated. Rather, it is intensified by an additional, yet different kind of, gripping illusion, a “theatrical illusion,” or an illusory theatrical “reality,” which involves the audience to the highest extent and with which the audience can hardly refuse to identify. The book concludes that the success of “epic” plays results from their characteristics as “theatrical” plays with modern multidimensional perspectives as opposed to neoclassic “dramatic” ones with a monolithic perspective.