Breaking Through the Fourth Wall
With most Realist and Naturalist plays the audience is "safely" concealed behind the invisible 'fourth wall' of the proscenium. A play that utilizes this technique is A Doll's House written by Ibsen. Yet, many later plays do not provide the spectator this same degree of distance and detachment, as seen in Six Characters in Search of an Author written by Pirandello, which his labeled as Metatheater. As a Realist play, A Doll's House utilizes the "slice-of-life" take to theatre where the play is to mirror life. Instead of emphasizing the cast or the script itself, Realism tries to emphasize life and its hardships; a universal truth that all humans can agree with. To accomplish this for the audience the play itself must look and act like the life they know. In the case of Ibsen and many other Realist playwrights, he "adopted a critical posture toward the pieties of the middle-class audience whose attitudes were embodied in the 'realistic' vision of the world" (W.B Worthen 583), thus the controversial plot line of A Doll's House was received with much passion and understanding in the 1880's when it was first published and produced. Yet, unlike life itself, Realist plays had a formula to them: "the well-made play". This inclu
This is unlike that of Realist Theatre where the notion of characters are to be a parallel with life, not a ironic model that one must understand as fake and thus unreal. Worthen 702) moment of philosophical thought. Yet it must stay untheatrical, or at least not looked "staged" and it must stay true to the "real world" that we, as an audience can define as the world that one lives in everyday to have the appeal of our universal sympathy and understanding (W. Krogstad, which is a hugely unorthodox thing to happen in the late 1800's, as women are not seen as full citizens. Third is the crisis, which obviously has to do with the rising action: money. By breaking through that "fourth wall" Pirandello has made the audience part of the show by becoming actively aware that illusion and reality is conflicting every time a line is given on stage, they must decipher what is being presented: either reality or illusion, to understand the next line spoken. Second a rising action, which can be seen as the tension of money even in the first pages of the play. Metatheater is the exact opposite of Realist Theater. Worthen put it: "the confrontation between the Characters and Actors explores the nature of theatrical representation itself" (701). ded five distinct steps that the script should follow from beginning to end as a structure: first a detailed introduction to the characters, as seen in the very detailed opening stage directions (Ibsen 601). This tactic of breaking through the fourth wall into the audience and into their working, coherent minds will result in disorientating "the audience from the stable categories of 'reality' and 'illusion'" (W. Thus, the objective of a Realist play is that of a storybook: to watch but never get involved.
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