One of the themes discussed by Kovarik in Chapter 2 is the flourishing of a new type of news media. Prior to the 1800s, “newspapers and books usually focused on great deeds, great ideas and the lives of great men. The daily lives and concerns of ordinary men and women ‘were not dignified by print'” (Kovarik 48-49). The penny press and the advent of papers like The Sun marked a change in publishing, focusing on the drama of the every day, stories that were accessible to the common man both in gaudy interest and in price point. This gained instant popularity with the masses (although still looked down upon by some. It is interesting, then, that this movement in the 1830s seems to have been contemporaneous with the popularization of more accessible theater and the publication of The Importance of Being Earnest in 1895. Theater has always been the media of the masses, but it has gone through many different phases historically. Greek tragedies focused on the deeds of great men in elevated positions (much like Kovarik’s description of early newspapers). They focused on large dramas, often with actions by the gods—things far from the realm of day to day experiences. Moliere and Shakespeare were markers of the movement toward the farce and an enjoyment of the more absurd and mundane, but they were still often written in verse. The Importance of Being Earnest, by contrast, is written in plain text, accessible to all viewers. The characters are not poor or quite common folk, but they are figures that are recognizable. The plot itself hinges on interpersonal dramas, not on the actions of kings and gods. Here viewers could recognize their own lives as the characters undergo romantic tribulations and Cecily drops lines about the “agricultural depression” of the 1870s that viewers would know all too well (Wilde Act II, line 615, page 804). Oscar Wilde made the popular media viewers wanted, and they ate it up. Wilde upturned the order of the Victorian world and created a world of fun and absurdity, almost an escapist world. Sadly for Wilde, he himself was caught up in just the type of scandal that the penny presses loved to exploit. As he wrote Earnest, he wrote about people hiding their identity, just as he was ultimately unsuccessfully hiding his own identity as a gay man. His career ended sadly, as he was arrested and imprisoned for his sexuality and his name was stripped from his most popular plays.

Questions:

1. Why were audiences so charmed by Wilde’s work? How does Earnest set itself apart from other comedies of the time?

2. Why were audiences so quick to turn on the playwright they loved when scandal ensued? For the masses of the time, was any scandal one to be enjoyed, regardless of the target? Or was Wilde an even better target given his success and subsequent status?

-Axis Fuksman-Kumpa

In Anne Washburn’s play Mr. Burns, we encounter a world post-nuclear apocalypse where the remaining scattered population is desperately trying to hold on to the last vestiges of normalcy from their old lives. We see them mimetically trying to reproduce episodes of The Simpsons in an effort to find unity and recreate the joy they found in the original episodes, much like Zarrilli et al.’s description of early mimetic communication (Zarrilli et al., pg. 5). As the reproduction of the Cape Feare episode goes from being a story told verbally (Act I) to becoming a full-fledged production (Act II) to becoming a warped, grim facsimile of its original source material (Act III), we begin to see the transmission of the episode as a giant game of Telephone. With each reiteration, Cape Feare becomes less and less like its original script and more a creation of the people performing it. Kovarik wrote that “recorded history represents our collective memory,” and much in this way, the oral record of The Simpsons become gradually combined with the real world memories of the people living through a nuclear apocalypse (Kovarik, pg. 2). By the time we reach Act III 75 years in the future, the version of Cape Feare is so far removed from its original script that only the bare bones may be recognized. As the original comedy is joined with the tragic world narrative, the play becomes strongly reminiscent of a Greek tragedy where, despite all the hero’s best efforts, he cannot avoid his downfall predicted by the chorus.

One other significant theme is the commodification of theater. In Act II, we see that the characters are buying and bartering for lines and episodes in a marketplace which is both competitive and violent. Why is it that in times of desperation, when we may assume that resources are few and far-between, theater is what people cling to most desperately? Why is recapturing the past so important? Additionally, what does it mean something produced as media becomes both a live performance and part of our own history?

-Axis Fuksman-Kumpa