Journal of American Studies of Turkey
13 (2001) : 3-11
Emergence of an Anti-Theatre for
the Youth in the United States: The Case of Punch and Judy by Aurand
Harris
The British pantomime, the Punch and Judy puppet show, and the
farce are three major dramatic genres that have been discarded by serious adult
playwrights to become children's artistic forms in the late nineteenth century.
Ironically, these devalued theatrical genres became the very basis for the
emergence of an experimental movement in American children's, a movement that
peaked in 1970s. A true avant-garde spirit in children's theatre thus bloomed
in the United States with children's playwrights who developed new styles drawn
from commedia dell'arte techniques, absurdist dialogue and grotesque
farce.
Aurand Harris, eminent playwright for
children’s theatre in the Unites States, creates in 1970, Punch and Judy, a
tragicomical absurdist play which reflects an important step in the history of
twentieth-century American children's theatre. This play, which draws its
techniques from the traditional British Punch and Judy show, is in continuity
with the well-known French theatre of the Absurd of the adult theatre that
traces its origin back to Alfred Jarry's Ubu plays during the 1890s. In Punch
and Judy, Harris uses the same popular tradition as Jarry the father of
French Absurdist theatre used. Namely, Harris presents children with a set of
techniques French playwrights in the vein of Absurdism adopted themselves for
an audience of adults: Adaptation of popular theatre genres such as guignols
or Punch and Judy puppet shows of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This
study will examine how the Punch and Judy puppet show becomes one familiar
source genre for the emergence of an absurdist play in continuity with its
homologue in the adult theatre, one that has been influential on a “growing
number of younger dramatists on parallel lines.” [1]
Also this study will assess the importance of this innovation in children’s
theatre in early 1970s against other competing visual mass media targeting
children.
Collier introduced the Punch and Judy puppet show in book form in the United States.[2] Children's books in series followed the same plot and characterization repeatedly. As a result of this dissemination, more children became familiar with this genre. Theatre historian George Speaight show in his book Punch and Judy: A History, rightly asserts about the Punch and Judy, that the Punch and Judy show acquired a new audience although the genre was gradually disappearing as one form of children's entertainment during the twentieth century. He admits that
Punch's
audience has gradually changed. In the first prints of his appearance in the
streets, his audience is composed of adults, mainly in the laboring class, with
a few children; this seems to have been the composition of the marionette-show
audiences at the eighteenth century fairs. But by the middle of the nineteenth
century the children outnumbered the adults, and by the end of the century they
practically composed the entire audience...Here, in the streets, on the
beaches, in the drawing-rooms, at the end of the long Victorian Age, with the
little children gathered around, Punch might seem to have run his course, to
have reached his second childhood, and to have had his say (124-125).
On
the other hand, Aurand Harris insists that traditions like Punch and Judy
puppet shows be re-introduced to his contemporary audience so that children may
become acquainted with theatrical forms that were then familiar to children of
the preceding century. As he explains in the Preface to his play about his use
of the Punch and Judy show,
When I started to
write the play, and I did feel that the Punch and Judy puppet show is part of
our children's heritage (one which many of them have never had the opportunity
to enjoy), I wanted to keep the essence of childlike slapstick fun that has
always been inherent in Mr. Punch in whatever country or whatever century he
performed. After researching many puppet scripts performed in America and
England, I found that although each puppeteer created his own individual play,
certain basic scenes and characters were usually included. It is upon these
that I built my play. I also found that musical, comical interludes were often
used, and I have included these between scenes. I purposely set the play in no
particular period...Punch and Judy is an action play, one to be seen and
heard, rather than read. The movement, the color, the music heighten the mood
and the meaning and the fun.[3]
Thus Punch and Judy achieves a major step in
the history of modern American children's theatre because it reflects the
desire of some children's playwrights to reclaim a tradition that was born out
of their sphere. Furthermore, the use of such techniques also signals an
intersection between the history of adult theatre on the one hand and the
history of children's theatre on the other, an intersection which occurred at
the initial of the 1960s with the innovation of children’s television shows and
which has continued to grow throughout many examples outside its national
borders.
The
play was received with much skepticism by the adult community in the United
States: Punch and Judy was even banned from performance in some schools
namely because of its subject matter -- the play presents a kind of
"Jarry-esque" stage according to which the stage becomes the
very place where absurdist theatre and children's theatre ingredients meet.
Premiered in March 1970 by the Atlanta children's theatre, Harris's Punch
and Judy's innovative qualities rely on techniques French Absurdist
playwrights used against the realistic stage, ironically the same qualities
that were altogether relegated to children's entertainment during the late
nineteenth century. Harris, like Jarry in the adult sphere, is in search of a
new type of theatre, one that abandons the conventions of the well-made plays
of the first half of the century which drew most of their subject matter from
familiar children's stories. Instead Punch and Judy is an attempt by one
playwright to re-position children's drama historically, aesthetically and
politically -- one against concurrent visual mass media for children of the
same era.
Punch
and Judy relies on a set of techniques adapted from the
adult theatre. In his own fashion, Harris is in the vanguard of a new trend of
experimental plays; plays that use dramatic genres originally geared towards an
all adult audience yet discarded by that audience and reclaimed by more
familiar avant-garde schools like the French Theatre of the Absurd. Regarding
experimental and avant-garde innovations in children's theatre, Harris is in
favor of innovative plays, according to him "a healthy sign in
theatre," although within a particular agenda and always in the light of
other concurring visual media such as children's television programs. Although
Harris’s position about his art is somewhat conservative, his play points
towards a new direction. As he explains about the avant-garde label:
I try to be
innovative by writing in new styles (new to theatre for young people)...If the
innovations are suitable for children and if they enhance the material, then I
say I try them. But if they are just to be different, then I say they have no
place in theatre for young audiences because they will only confuse the child.
I am suspicious of any play praised as avant-garde; too often it is an
ego trip for the writer or director who shows little respect for the subject
matter or for the child audience. Too often, I fear, avant-garde tends
to be 'camp' or imitates poor examples from television, or tries to shock, or
becomes too sociological and too adult.[4]
But before
we proceed to the labeling of Harris's Punch and Judy as one kind of
anti-play in the history of American children's theatre, one must first define
the concept of anti-theatre as one specific dramaturgy in the adult theatre.
Only then shall we assess its meaning in the history of children's drama as one
kind of innovation targeting a new type of audience in a new era.
In
the theatre for adults, and according to French Absurdist playwright Eugène
Ionesco, any anti-theatre is above all a theatre free of any conventions that
he describes in these terms: "Artistic creation (Ionesco tells us) finds
again the fundamental laws, rises up against desiccated theatrical conventions,
prudence, and what through an incredible misunderstanding has been called
Realism"(Pronko 113). Martin Esslin, British historian of the avant-garde
theatre, narrows down this rather broad definition of theatrical innovation and
matches the concept of anti-theatre with that of the French Theatre of the
Absurd. In his seminal study Reflections: Essays on Modern Drama he
concedes about the French Theatre of the Absurd that
In
its rebellion against naturalistic convention the Theatre of the Absurd entered
the
consciousness of its audience as an anti-theatre, a completely new
beginning, a total breach with the conventions of the past. Now that the first
and delicious shock effects have worn off, we can see that the absurdist merely
emphasized hitherto neglected aspects, stressed some forgotten technical
devices, and discarded some unduly inflated aspects of a long-existing
tradition of drama. Far from being anti-theatre, they were in the very center
of the mainstream of its development, just as revolutionary movements of the
past -- Ibsen, Strindberg, Shaw, or the Expressionists -- that were regarded as
the gravediggers of tradition can now be seen as its main decisive
representatives (190).
Thus anti-theatre, which is equated to absurdism,
expresses a new dramaturgy of an aesthetic rebellion against any attempt at
realism on stage. Nonetheless, Esslin points to an interesting paradox: all
anti-theatre draws their techniques from long-existing theatrical conventions
that have either been discarded or forgotten. Then the question that arises is
what are these discarded techniques French Absurdist playwrights reclaimed and
which in turn allowed for an avant-garde trend in American children's theatre
history? Certain dramatists like Harris have reclaimed the very techniques
precursors of Absurdism used to move away from theatrical norms the realistic
stage had imposed on their art.
Theatre historian Harold Segel in his
seminal study Pinocchio's Progeny informs us about these forgotten
techniques that confirm the many historical intersections between theatre for
adults and theatre for the youth. According to him, precursors of Absurdism
relied on children’s artistic forms of entertainment to escape from Realism in
theatre:
The world of the child
became newly attractive to artists as a source of opposition, and an antidote,
to the conservatism and traditionalism of bourgeois culture... The new
enthusiasm of artists for such popular entertainments as puppet shows,
pantomime, and circus routines can be seen as a convergence of the rediscovery
of both the world of popular culture and that of the child. The enthusiasms and
entertainments of children became in a sense those of mature artists (40).
We
are reaching an historical intersection although quite an anachronistic one.
Whereas the Absurdists like Alfred Jarry used these so-called
"forgotten" techniques drawn from the pantomime, the puppet theatre,
farces or even techniques drawn from circus routines, Aurand Harris reclaims
and reshapes the same techniques to create a new theatre. This new theatre
reflects a political stance because it is born out of its own history and
reclaims its legitimization as one particular theatrical practice in the
broader history of western drama and not just as a homologue of the adult
theatre.
The
emergence of an anti-theatre in the history of American children's theatre is
issued from three main reactions that run parallel to its homologue in the
adult sphere although in a different era. First, this anti-theatre attacks and
rejects all kinds of previous formalism. From the beginning of the century and
on, this formalism consisted of adaptations of famous fairy tales and other
well-known stories read by children in the form of musical plays. L. Frank
Baum's The Wizard of Oz and Barrie's Peter Pan are such typical
instances of this style in the history of children's theatre.
Second,
this anti-theatre also rebels on “representational” or realistic style of
acting in children's theatre that consisted in producing well-made plays for a
family audience. Instead absurdist plays like Harris's Punch and Judy
adopt an all presentational or non realistic mode of performance geared towards
one type of audience: Children. Directors Helane S. Rosenberg and Christine
Prendergast provide a quite succint definition of presentational plays. They
claim that
No attempt is made to fool the audience into thinking that this
place does exist; the idea is only that it could exist in the realm of the
imagination. A presentational play invites the audience to enter another world
(adaptations of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland), which may be a
suggestion or a symbol of life. The audience is often drawn in, even in actual
physical participation... The presentational style helps young people focus
because it often factors out complex motivation and transforms time and space.
Realism gives too much too soon.[5]
Martin Esslin applauds the presentational style and
admits that theatre for young people "must be able to confront its
audiences with the full range and vocabulary of styles, from commedia
dell'arte to classical verse drama, burlesque comedy, Brechtian alienation,
or grotesque expressionistic acting" so that "the young people's
theatre may lay the foundation for a more comprehensive and artistically more varied
adult theatre in this country.” The presentational style Harris adopts in his
use of puppets seems to parallel the innovations both Rosenberg and Prendergast
point in their study.
Finally, this anti-theatre, which abandons all naturalistic techniques, is intimately related to the emergence of the child as a new type of audience and to the increasing growth of entertainments for children during the first half of the twentieth century. This anti-theatre claims its legitimization over other existing media that have exploited and somewhat 'usurped' the same audience. Finally, the innovation in this anti theatre lies in the unorthodoxy of the representation of childhood and adulthood by these avant-garde playwrights like Aurand Harris and the impact new visual mass media addressing the child had on them.
Yet
more questions arise. Is this anti-theatre that presents a so-called
"absurd (ist)" style in children's theatre and which uses techniques
relegated to various children's forms of entertainment, similar to its
homologue in the theatre for adults? Or does it present techniques that have
evolved from its own historical context and independently from that movement?
And finally what does this anti-theatre in children's drama react against?
The
concept
of audience as a changing sociological entity needs to be addressed when
discussing the development of such innovation in the history of American
children's theatre. To achieve their socio critical roles, post World War
children's playwrights competed with two new visual mass media: The growing
children's film industry since the 1920s, and children's television programs
which had captured that popular audience since the 1940s. These two types of
media 'capitalized' on the child as a new audience and courted her as part of
their larger popular audience. Their courting has seriously challenged
children's theatre to the point of influencing its historical development: The
popularization of an avant-garde trend in children's theatre in the 1960s
closely parallels the changing status of the child audience within a European
and American society, the imagery which that society endorses, and the need by
some playwrights to present a new type of theatre.
According to social commentator Neil Postman,
television viewing and its socio critical role are intimately related to the
needs of the audience and its status. Postman argues those successful
children’s programs "display what people understand and want or they are
canceled."[6]
According to him, the success of the object represented depends on the child’s
need to see herself reflected in her social reality. In a chapter entitled
"The Disappearing Child," Postman criticizes the socio critical role
of these visual media and notices that the shift in child imagery in films has
affected the status of the child itself and society's perspectives on
childhood. Postman's portrait rests on his argument that since the 1950s,
television drama and children's films have presented images of children as what
he labels "adultified" and precocious, while the adult characters
have sometimes become "childified" and immature, images that have
blurred the distinctions between the child and the adult as two distinct social
entities (Postman 120-142). This blurring has affected the postwar children's
theatre and the subject matter of plays.
The
blurring in adult and juvenile perspectives correlated with the spread of the
television and the film industries are crucial to understanding the ideology
presented in postwar American children's avant-garde theatre. Unlike the early
twentieth-century children's theatre that presented the child's perspectives
through images of "little adults" behaving like children (such as in
Barrie's Peter Pan), postwar children's avant-garde theatre presents an
altogether different image of both the child and the adult. These shifts in
conventional imagery of childhood and adulthood are reflected in American
children's playwright Aurand Harris' Punch and Judy (1970) who fuses
both the child's and the adult's perspectives through the revival of the stock
puppet Punch.[7]
Harris’s use of a live Punch as the effigy of
a rebelling "childified" adult figure matches the abandonment of the
prewar idealized child model that consisted of miniature adults behaving like
children. Instead Harris's Punch, a live actor acting like the puppet, is a
symbol of a clever trickster, a "childified" adult figure whose
artistic talents are ultimately praised though condemned to be antisocial by
all the other adult-like stock characters of the play like Judy his wife, the
Doctor or the Policeman. Throughout the play's two acts, Punch repetitively
beats the other adult figures with his slapstick, particularly his wife Judy; a
source of comedy for children.
It
is true that Judy is introduced to children with a nagging attitude and an
overall domineering posture. She is wearing an apron and plays other roles than
that of housewife. Holding her broom as a tool ready to inflict physical
punishment, she exercises her power over Punch by hitting him without remorse
in a rather mechanical mode that reminds us of pantomimes (1.1). Her
conflicting relationship with her husband Punch challenges traditional views on
women’s roles and is presented to children as a figure of motherhood that is
certainly problematic. Her constant struggle with Punch is a caricature of
gender relations and a challenge to the more traditional values that were
usually present in children’s plays – mothers are not always right. Judy’s
typical representation as a nurturing mother has been transformed in this play
into an effigy of female authority. Thus Judy’s role is not being just a
housewife but rather one kind of authority to Harris’s childified Punch. Thus
despite his wrongdoings and multiple rebellions against his domineering
housewife Judy, Punch nevertheless remains an attractive figure to the child
audience.
Harris’s adaptation of Punch into a "childified" adult character is epitomized in Punch's method to dispose of the adult characters he confronts. Whereas beating and sometimes murdering his antagonists have been Punch's well-known method in traditional Punch and Judy shows of the late eighteenth century, Harris reduces Punch's violence to mischievous pranks that do no lasting harm and are aimed at those who unquestionably deserve the blows. Harris has intentionally adapted the traditional English Punch and Judy puppet show for the needs of the young audience. For instance, to stimulate interest in the characters, Harris transforms the puppets into human actors in the prologue and converts them into their original form at the conclusion of the play. Unlike the traditional Punch and Judy show, Harris’s plot is simplified and emphasizes a succession of short confrontations that involve Punch. The scenes have only two characters, whose movements are limited to those of a puppet, beating one another with a slapstick. The violence traditionally granted to Punch has been tempered by Harris through a careful treatment of Punch's "childified" behavior such as when he tosses little Punch out of the window. Toby is coincidentally nearby to catch him as stage directions indicate and Judy holds the baby in a subsequent scene to underscore the fact that the baby has not been harmed by Punch's actions. Harris makes sure that children understand that adult behavior is not always correct and ironically has Punch's "childified" persona transformed into that of an adult when he tells his audience PUNCH. Every father wants to throw a crying baby out the window. I did it! (1.4.183)
The
theme of Punch and Judy unites the unrelated episodes in the absence of a
strong story with overlapping events. The theme, symbolized by the actions and
character of the stock puppet Punch and explicitly stated in dialogue and song,
is that although one may have a desire to defy the traditional restraints
society imposes one is nonetheless punished. This is why although Punch is aged
appropriately for his audience; Harris transforms his traditional roles as
father and husband into that of a trickster child. Punch's
"childified" behavior is overstated through his refusal to accept
institutions pertaining to adult society and his desire to be only in the
company of children. Whereas some songs stress Punch's effigy of an antisocial
being, others present him as a childlike, innocent character such as when he
sings nursery rhymes like "Humpty Dumpty." Along the two acts of the
play, Punch always shows his pleasure with the children's presence and
occasionally takes them into his confidence, as when he tells them in an aside
how he plans to repay the doctor for his "cures": "I'll pay him
back every whack he gave me! Are you ready? Shut your eyes” (1.3.177-178). With
the creation of a live "childified" adult puppet, Harris engages his
child audience with moral issues, and as director Coleman A. Jennings
emphasizes with the realization "that as one attains such freedom one
becomes less that human.” Through the live "childified" Punch,
children learn that rebellion past a certain point is inadequate to enter the
adult world.
As
challenging as Punch may be for the field of children's theatre, Harris's
adaptation of the Punch puppet into a "childified" adult nonetheless
fulfills the changing status of the young audience in the early 1970s and
matches some children's playwrights' desire to abandon the prewar idealized
child model presented in children's theatre. Hence his use of such an effigy of
adulthood coincides with the merging perspectives Postman locates in television
shows. Punch's "childified" persona runs parallel to one of the many
images of children's television programs and films after 1950. Harris's
adaptation of the Punch character into a live adult figure may be juxtaposed
with similar "childified" adult characters Postman points out.8
This concept of fused adult and juvenile
perspectives, rather than of literally merged audiences, is presented for the
first time in postwar children's theatre. These parallel developments also
argue that children's theatre needs to be studied in conjecture with other
children's visual media in each era. Finally they also point to new directions:
the first and most important one being not only the popularization of the
entire field of children's theatre itself but mainly its appropriation of
techniques and types by the children's film industry in the early 1990s.
Harris's Punch and Judy as one kind
of antiplay may be a convenient way for playwrights like Harris to bridge
children's viewing habits, to lead them to an understanding of a live theatre
that they had not yet seen as well as to be introduced to a new type of
character: One that is not familiar yet not totally removed from their world.
Works Cited
Esslin,
Martin. Reflections: Essays on Modern Theatre. 7th ed. Garden City, New
York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1969.
---------.
The Theatre of the Absurd. 1961; Woodstock, NY: The Overlook Press,
1973
Harris,
Aurand . Preface to Punch and Judy. Contemporary Children's Theater.
Ed. Betty Jean Lifton. New York: Avon Books, 1974.
Harris,
Aurand. Punch and Judy. Six Plays for Children by Aurand Harris.
Ed. Coleman A. Jennings. Austin: TX: University of Texas Press, 1986.
Lifton,
Betty Jean. Contemporary Children's Theater. New York: Avan Books, 1974.
Mcpharlin, Paul. The
Puppet Theatre in America: A History with a List of Puppeteers 1524-1948. New
York: Harpers & Brothers Publishers, 1949.
Postman,
Neil. The Disappearance of Childhood. New York: Delacorte press, 1982.
Pronko,
Léonard. Avant-Garde: The Experimental Theatre in France. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1963.
Segel,
Harold. Pinocchio's Progeny. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1995.
Signorelli,
Nancy. A Sourcebook on Children and Television. New York: Westport, CT,
London: Greenwood Press, 1991.
Speaight,
George. Punch and Judy: A History. Boston: Plays Inc., 1970.
Swortzell,
Lowell. The Theatre of Aurand Harris: America's Most Produced Playwright for
Young Audiences: His Career, His Theories, His Plays. New Orleans:
Anchorage Press, 1996.
[1] See Martin Esslin, “Preface,” The
Theatre of the Absurd (1961; Woodstock, NY: The Overlook Press, 1973) xiv.
[2] In Chapter IX “Punch and Judy,” in Paul
McPharlin, The Puppet Theatre in America: A History with a List of
Puppeteers 1524-1948 (New York: Harpers & Brothers Publishers,
1949):116-155.
[3] See Betty Jean Lifton,
ed., Contemporary Children's Theater. New York: Avan Books, 1974:
190-191.
[4] In Lowell Swortzell,
ed., The Theatre of Aurand Harris: America's Most Produced Playwright for
Young Audiences: His Career, His Theories, His Plays. New Orleans:
Anchorage Press, 1996: 98.
[5] Both authors provide
an excellent chart that opposes representational (realistic) plays to
presentational (non-realistic) plays with specific examples and the differences
both styles incur on plot, characters, time and space, setting and costumes,
dialogue, acting and audience's response in Rosenberg, Helane S., and Christine
Prendergast. Theatre for Young People: A Sense of Occasion. New York:
Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1983: 22-24.
[6].Neil Postman, The
Disappearance of Childhood New York: Delacorte Press, 1982: 126.
[7] In Coleman A.
Jennings, Six Plays for Children by Aurand Harris .Austin, TX: The
University of Texas Press, 1986 :157-202.
8 Characters such as Laverne, Shirley, the
crew of the Love Boat, the company of Three, Fonzie, Barney Miller's
detectives, Rockford, Kojak and the entire population of Fantasy Island in
Postman, 126. Also for a history of children's television shows, see Nancy
Signorelli, A Sourcebook on Children and Television (New York, Wesport,
CT, London: Greenwood Press, 1991) particularly Chapter One "The History
of Children's Television" for an extensive compilation of children's
popular programs of the 1960s through the 1980s.