On Realism in the Theater

by Arthur Hopkins (1878-1950)
an excerpt from "Capturing the Audience"

As to the "new" scenery, much has been said and written, and most of it beside the point.

One's position in the matter is entirely determined by which mind he thinks the stage has to do with, the conscious or the unconscious.

Realistic settings are designed wholly for conscious appeal. An attempt at exact reproduction challenges the conscious mind of the audience to comparison. 

Unfortunately, while the audience has been doing its conscious checking up , the play has been going, and going for nothing, since any form of conscious occupation must necessarily dismiss the play.  Further than that the result of the whole mental comparing process is to impress upon the auditor that he is in a theater witnessing a very accurate reproduction, only remarkable because it is not real. So the upshot of the realistic effort is further to emphasize the unreality of the whole attempt, setting, play and all.  so I submit that realism defeats the very thing to which it aspires.  It emphasized the faithfulness of unreality.

All that is detail, all that is photographic, is conscious. Every unnecessary article in a setting is a continuing, distracting gesture beckoning constantly for the attention of the audience, asking to be noticed and examined, insisting upon its right to scrutiny because it belongs...

Detail has been the boon of the American theater for twenty years, detestable, irritating detail, designed for people with no imagination - people who will not believe they are in a parlor unless they see the family album.

And on the other side of the world the unenlightened Chinese for centuries have been presenting drama to unimaginative people wherein scenes were never changed, and places, forests, legions and hordes were summoned by the wave of a property man's bamboo stick.

What is all the discussion about?  How can there be any discussion?  Isn't it a palpable fact that the only mission of settings is to suggest place and mood, and once that is established let the play go on?  Do we want anything more than backgrounds?  Must we have intricate woodturning and goulash paintings?  If so, we have no right in the theater.  We have no imagination.  and a theater without imagination becomes a building in which people put paint on their faces and do tricks, and no trick they perform is worth looking at unless they take a reasonable chance of being killed in the attempt.