Teaching and performing commedia dell’arte in the secondary school presents several challenges, ranging from the art form’s bawdy nature to the use of improvisation. How much improvisation was used, and how can a cast maintain some consistency in quality from one show to the next? Commedia also allows several performance options, but understanding the art form thoroughly may be more important in commedia than in any other genre.
Teaching Commedia’s History and Stock Character
Commedia dell’arte’s spontaneity and immediacy makes some understanding difficult. For the most part, scholars agree that commedia dell’arte was a professional and popular theatre that began in sixteenth-century Italy with entertainment and profit as its chief goal. These goals separated commedia dell’arte from the commedia erudita, the scripted amateur Italian theatres that had more academic and literary ambitions.
Scholars also agree that commedia advanced the art of clowning, invented terms like slapstick and harlequin, and influenced many modern performers, including the Marx Brothers and Cirque du Soleil. Still, the exact degree and method of improvisation used by the original commedia dell’arte necessitates an exact definition of what “improvisation” really means, because this meaning determines how commedia dell’arte should be taught and performed.
The best way to learn commedia is obviously to have a seasoned professional teach the different movements for the stock characters and the ways the lazzi (improvised speech and movement) can be used to entertain audiences. While no book can substitute for such a valuable resource, John Rudlin’s Commedia dell’Arte: An Actor’s Handbook comes closest. This book explains the history of the art form as well as the reasons for the stock characters’ movements. Although YouTube and other such resources exhibit some kind of model for many commedia characters’ actions, actors need a foundation both to understand and to personalize the stock characters.
Commedia Dell’Arte Scripts
One of the most popular commedia performances on the academic stage seems to be Goldoni’s Servant of Two Masters. The subtle irony here is that Goldoni’s career flourished after commedia had started to fall out of favor with many Italian theatre aficionados, including Goldoni himself. Although Goldoni kept many of the stock characters, he did not keep all of them, and he concerned his playwriting more with highlighting plot rather than the zany antics of key players. He also limited the masks’ importance so that each actor’s individual ability and emotional exhibition could gain importance over the craftsmanship that went into making the mask.
Even true commedia fans have to sympathize with Goldoni’s desire to allow and even force the art form to evolve. Anyone who has ever directed or acted in a show where the audience members have lingering expectations understands what commedia seems to have become in its waning stage.
Over time, the commedia style, which theoretically offers limitless possibilities, became a stale re-enactment of prior performances. When Commedia evolved into firmly stylized and repetitive craft, it soon became predictable and stale. Eventually, commedia’s existence would require someone to take ideas the audience could relate to and make everything stale become new again. In other words, as Thespis himself realized, a playwright comes in handy. Basically, that playwright was Goldoni in Italy and Molière in France.
Samuel French, Baker’s Plays, and Dramatists Play Service offer different versions of Goldoni’s Servant of Two Masters and Carlo Gozzi’s The King Stag. Samuel French also publishes The One-Act Comedies of Molière, which has less-known but shorter works from the French playwright.
Improvisation in Commedia dell’arte’
Still, none of this suggests that the true improvisational commedia dell’arte has no purpose or audience in modern society, but directors, actors, and teachers should understand what improvisation means in relation to the commedia. First, the dialogue in the scenes often does not contain limitless possibilities of phrases. The origins of commedia probably allowed actors to say anything and keep scenes going, but the later performances included verbal lazzi (comedic bit) not unlike the physical lazzi that included cirque-type activities. For example, the “hat lazzi” became a stock device that allowed the players to push to plot along. (An example can be found in The Red Hat scenario where the hat lazzi is actually the main focus.)
Although the stock and automated nature of these lazzi helped accelerate commedia’s demise, teaching these devices helps modern students and actors because our audiences are generally unfamiliar with them and, therefore, cannot be tired of them. Furthermore, these plot devices make commedia possible for people with day jobs. Directors and producers would like to know that actors have some sort of cheat sheet to fall back on so that a performance can be funny, comprehensible, and finite.
Jon Blackstock - Blackstock has taught and directed theatre productions for almost twenty years and wishes Suite101 could be typewriter compatible.
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