A and B

Why cannot I not deal with realism and/or naturalism in the theatre?

Realism, especially, demands a structuring of a performance that gives to the audience the appearance of inevitability.

Inevitability -- the inability to evade. Unable to escape. Inevitability finally leads to death.

Realism hinges on "transitions" and psychology to connect every single dot in a mostly linear fashion to give the appearance of inevitability, part of its appearance of being "real." That where you start and where you end in a play, and everything in between, will always essentially be the same, which is to say, will appear the same every night.

This kills the fight. This makes every ministration in the "real life" of a realistic play mean nothing, have no result, other than to connect moment A/the beginning/life to moment B/the ending/death. With little awareness of such, because no one steps out of a realistic play to say:

To-morrow, to-morrow, and to-morrow
creeps in its petty pace from day to day
to the last syllable of recorded time,
and all our yesterdays have lighted fools
the way to dusty death.

At least Beckett was honest about the nothingness in between, so honest to show that that is really all we are truly aware of. We don't know, we can't remember moment A, because no one can remember their own birth; and no one knows when moment B might occur, when one will die. All we have is the time in between.

Realistic theatre cannot portray action or choice because it believes it knows when, where, how, why, etc., about moments A and B. Moment A is irrelevant. Moment B is inevitable. Whatever action and choice connects the two must "make sense."

It must "make sense" to comfort the audience, to assure them that how they live their lives will not lead them ultimately to a place of fear and uncertainty at the last, or in the now, but especially at the very, very last. This is a peculiar and unnoticed effect of our culture's infathomably deeply-ingrained notion of religion, particularly monotheistic religion; without which most people's worlds would make absolutely no sense, and moment B would not be just non-inevitable but downright obvious and terrifyingly immediate.

Non-realistic ("non-traditional") theatre assumes nothing about moment A or moment B. There is the beginning of the performance, and the end of the performance. What happens in between is a container for choice and action which fly in the face of inevitability, which erase linear time to extend beyond the beginning and ending of the performance and even try to pass our ultimate, but unknowable, points A and B of reference.

It is a dream of flight and fear. It tempts death and scorns birth in an attempt to transcend existence in the quet for true life, the very opposite and archenemy of pitiable "real life."