Even those dramas that did not exhibit the lives of the royalty or nobility held situations outside the ordinary. Once again Maeterlinck’s words are noteworthy, “What do these creatures, who have but one fixed idea and no time to live because they must put to death a rival or mistress, mean to me?” (Brandt 117). All too often characters would commit murder, be framed for a crime, or be a traitorous rebel. These are not the events that we encounter in everyday life. The realists, for the most part, tried to move past these issues and focus on our lives. “The genius of realism [… is to] demand that we scrutinize and judge the details that we often ignore because of the their surface familiarity” (website). By presenting the audience with the ordinary, the writers meant to find meaning rather than entertainment.
Strindberg subtitled his most famous work, “A Naturalistic Play”. Miss Julie follows this heading very closely. All of the events within the play could exist within our own realm. Miss Julie, while an aristocrat, presents all of the weaknesses of a common woman. Jean, though his cruelty is severe, is not unbelievable. Whereas many plays would choose a theme to center the story on, Miss Julie has no such focus. In real life, of course, our days do not revolve around class struggle, death, or love, and the disjointed way in which themes are introduced is much more realistic. The fact that the story was taken from a true story most likely served to make it seem more real.
Lorca took a different approach to playwriting in his Blood Wedding. He preferred surrealism to realism, and the movement flows through much of the play. Surrealism was born out of the desire to “express the workings of the subconscious” (website). The point was not to entertain with beautiful yet meaningless dialogue or elaborate sets through its often fantastical workings, but rather to let the audience loses themselves in the magic and be more open to the message. Guillaume Apollinaire likened the recreation of life on stage to the invention of the wheel, “When man wanted to imitate walking he created the wheel, which does not resemble a leg. In the same way he has created surrealism unconsciously.” He went onto agree with Lorca’s style of theatre: “After all, the stage is no more the life it represents than the wheel is a leg. Consequently, it is legitimate, in my opinion, to bring to the theatre new and striking aesthetic principles which accentuate the roles of the actors and increase the effect in production” (Brandt 167)
Some people have tried to classify Blood Wedding as “magical realism”. That style, based almost primarily on the works of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, was originally defined as random and unexplained acts of the supernatural in seemingly realistic art. Today the term is often used very loosely to describe almost anything that might fall under the headings of science fiction or fantasy (Selhman). Lorca’s play might more honestly fit with the phrase. The first two acts of the play are written in a fairly realistic manner, but suddenly in the next act the moon speaks, death appears, etc. Marquez himself, however, dismissed “magical realism” and described them, according to Kevin J. Maroney, as, “realistic events depicted as if they were magical.” Those happenings that seemed out of the ordinary were purely symbolic (Maroney). Perhaps this convenient heading for Lorca does not work as well as it would seem in defense of his “life reflecting” drama.
Miss Julie differs from much of the “realistic drama” of the early modern period in that many of those plays left the revelations of truth to very commonplace dialogue. The author said himself, however, that, “The monologue is nowadays abominated by our realists as being contrary to reality, but if I motivate it I make it realistic, and can thus use it to advantage” (Brandt 96). Strindberg’s play contained a vast monologue on almost every page. These speeches never seemed quite as contrived as in other theatre and always existed within dialogue. Even with his own thoughts on the subject, though, it is hard to see how he could say they were truly realistic. No matter what the circumstances people rarely deliver three-minute monologues. They are key to understanding the characters of Miss Julie and Jean, but not effective in terms of realism. The dialogue, when it occurs, does not encounter the same problems. Strindberg’s comments were, “I have avoided the symmetrical, mathematically constructed dialogue […] and have allowed their minds to work irregularly, as peoples do in real life […]” (Brandt 95). The characters speak to each other in disjointed and often random way. His words let us into the minds of Miss Julie, Jean, and Christine, and their thoughts are regularly conceivable.
The dialogue of Blood Wedding is radically different. Nowhere does Lorca attempt to be realistic in the way his characters speak. The conversations in many scenes may seem conventional enough, but a closer look reveals a strange solemnity and uniformity of speech. By act I scene ii, the Wife and Mother-in-law are delivering their monologues in song. Lorca placed less emphasis in the words than in the sounds and the music of what’s being said. This was not a new technique, of course, playwrights for centuries had used drama as poetry. Yeats’ comments are of interest: “Realism is […] the delight today of all those whose minds, educated alone by schoolmasters and newspapers, are without the memory of beauty and emotional subtlety” (Brandt 129). Lorca sought to create a melodious world where the reality of his words would float like a mist through the audience.
The staging of these plays is a key factor in understanding them. Miss Julie is presented in such a way as to depict the utmost realism. It is performed entirely within the kitchen. Strindberg gives specific instructions as to how the set should be decorated, wishing for the stage to look as realistic as possible. The biggest problem with his arrangement, however, is something that he admitted himself: “to turn the stage into a room with the fourth wall missing so that some of the furniture would have its back to the audience, would, I suppose, at this juncture, simply serve as a distraction” (Brandt 97). Besides this, however, he tries to keep the blocking quite reasonable. Although they do play to the audience throughout, Christine is instructed to turn her back on the audience if necessary, something that was quite radical at the time, even among the realist school. Strindberg has Christine go about her kitchen activities while Julie and Jean are upstairs. Most likely this was meant to be played out over a considerable time, to keep the play in real time. This is a method that is novel even to us today, and most productions speed this up to show only the lapse of time, rather than the time itself. Through the real time and realistic blocking, Strindberg truly made Miss Julie seem like a “slice of life”.
Blood Wedding was not set in any identifiable domestic environment. One scene takes place within a “yellow room” and the next in a cave. The set could conceivably become more realistic. A production designer could choose to make a fully equipped kitchen and paint it yellow. This design, however, would not fit with Lorca’s intentions. A note of a “yellow room” allows room for creativity as well as showing the abstract nature of the piece. A creative version of the play would see many scenes turned into dances. Very little is realistic about the way the play looks, residing in the world of surrealism, but Blood Wedding actually incites more questions within the viewers soul than Miss Julie, where life is portrays so accurately.
Through every argument, no clear answer has arisen to answer the “which method is best” question. Undoubtedly the plays that we call “realistic” might demonstrate life as it is physically, but why is it necessary to see it? Maybe the best conclusion that can be made on the subject is a comparison of two giants of contemporary culture: Reality television, being represented by the aforementioned Big Brother, and the controversial American cartoon South Park. Big Brother shows people living their lives as entertainment. We watch because of our inane passion for voyeurism, but essentially it is the most realistic form of entertainment available. Conversely, South Park is a cartoon that contains a group of badly drawn children who never age, Kenny who dies in every episode and yet returns the next week, and a character who is actually talking defecation. The one program shows life and the other parodies it. We don’t learn anything about ourselves from watching Big Brother. Everything we see there is what we see in our own lives. However, South Park shows us things about human nature and the state of our society that we don’t observe everyday. Maybe the question isn’t what is the best way to show life, but what in life needs to be shown.
