Word: bentley
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...authority on the contemporary theatre explained the breadth of dramatic appeal to a highly appreciative audience of over 400 last night. While keeping the group at Lowell Lecture Hall constantly amused with a string of quips, Eric Bentley opened the Charles Eliot Norton lecture series with a talk on "Theatre and the Human Emotions...
...emotions explain the need for dramatic art," Bentley stated in discussing the psychology of identification with characters on the stage, and tracing the roots of this identification to infancy. Referring to Bertolt Brecht at the conclusion of the lecture, Bentley described the aims of the playwright's epic theater" as an attempt to break down emotional identifications and create an intellectual distance between the audience and the stage...
...When this 'alienation effect' is successful," Bentley said, "the audience cannot forget that the play is a play," and thus emotional identifications are limited. "This," he concluded, "is why epic theater represents the most 'adult' drama conceivable...
...promise of the Loeb Dramatic Center, but warned that millions of dollars do not necessarily produce good theater. Theater and young people go well together, however, he observed, because enthusiasm is "a prerequisite for successful drama," and young people are so often stagestruck," Think of the term "stagestruck," Bentley advised. "Notice that the theatre 'strikes' like lightning. You can be struck by the truth, but you're never 'truthstruck.' Indeed, the truth only 'dawns,' while the theater 'strikes...
...Oxford graduate, Bentley, who received his doctorate from Yale in comparative literature, and has been active in both the professional theater and the academic communities as anthologizer, producer, and translator. He is perhaps be a known as an adaptor and translator of the works of Brecht...