Chekhov vs Shakespeare

[mcjulie]

I had a major aha! moment when I read this quote in the Stranger: "you can split the world of theater between people who prefer Chekhov and people who prefer Shakespeare.I realized that this aesthetic scale, with the Chekhovian (restrained, thoughtful, subtle, naturalistic) at one end and the Shakespearean (larger-than-life pulpy exuberance) at the

Comments

[fenmere]

I think I may have just witnessed this dynamic at play in a strange way last night. The iDiom theater puts on something they call Serial Killers once a year, where 6 serial plays compete to perform all five nights. Each night, one of the plays is voted off. The last two plays standing this time were Spacetronaughts and Lay Me Gently On The Floor. Strictly speaking, all the plays competing were Shakespearean in nature. But Lay Me Gently..." was a surreal parody of labor issues and romance while Spacetronaughts took place in space. Spacetronaughts was definitely the better play, it's wit, humor and message were on par with it's competitor, but it had a much more coherent plot, and far more successful allusions and pop culture references. By all rights it should have won, but instead the night ended in a dead tie

[fenmere]

Oops. Sorry about the broken italics.

[fenmere]

Oh, God, and the apostrophes! I really should pay LiveJournal so I can edit my comments again.

[mcjulie]

Yes, that does sound like exactly what I'm talking about.

[frabjouslinz]

This is so much more cogent than I would have put it. You rock. I'm stealing this explanation in the future. :)

[mcjulie]

Thanks! It helped me clarify something I've been struggling to put my finger on for a really long time. I imagine as an English lit major/genre fan you encountered the same kind of thing.

[red_satin_doll]

I've been out of academia for a while, so this is a wonderfully clear explanation of the high art / pop culture divide.

When my partner was in art school a while back, she was somewhat scornful of places that called themselves "art galleries" or "art festivals" that were filled with what she calls "crafts" rather than painting/sculpture, etc; and yet at the same time considered what she does now (easel painting) as opposed to what she did in the past (carpentry, woodturning, blacksmithing) "useless" and "merely decorative". Now some of this - maybe a lot of it - has more to do with self-imposed judgements she's making about herself, about who and what she's doing it for; but I think her schizophrenic reaction has a lot to do with a similar split in the world of visual arts, not all that different from what you're talking about here. (And a lot of her professors had very narrow views of realism vs abstractionism, and thought that making art for money bespoiled the artist and so forth.)

In other words, theory is mired in a lot of

[mcjulie]

Academia can have that ivory-tower feel, where everything is just so rarified and insular.

I got a whole English Lit degree without ever really warming up to most modern "literary fiction" and with my preference for "genre" firmly intact. I'm sure there are academics who would consider that a woeful failure of the system.