(man) In class, you were talking about Expressionist Theater back in 1919, 1920.But wasn’t that a time when Realist plays were being performed?(woman) Indeed! Most plays of the early 1900s presented life realistically, like what you might call a slice of life.(man) But then in Expressionist plays there were all these distortions of reality, like, walls at strange angles, characters who start singing even though it’s not a musical, unusual props like tons of papers spewing out of an adding machine.(woman) Yes, distortion was a hallmark of Expressionism.This art movement was based on emotions, on projecting the artist’s inner feelings rather than recreating aspects of real life.(man) But what I wanted to know is how did audiences react to Expressionist Theater?Wouldn’t they found it to be really weird?(woman) They didn’t know how to take it.Just as with expressionists’ paintings, the initial reaction was, “That’s not what a person really looks like.The man’s out of proportion and he’s got two eyes on the right side of his face. What’s going on?” But this was a goal of expressionism: for artists to express their personal vision, their inner realities, so to speak.(man) Were the Expressionist plays popular?(woman) Not really. Although that one play, The Adding Machine, that you were just alluding to with all the paper.(man) Yeah?(woman) That one did attract a large audience when it first came out, perhaps because it was more accessible than your typical expressionist play, which might have seemed even stranger.(man) Did expressionism last long?(woman) Expressionism was like many art movements in the early 1900s, which had a tendency to develop, then grow, evolve into something else.So, many expressionist playwrights ended up forming or shifting into surrealism, the next art movement.And as they learned more about emerging theories of psychology, they became interested in the subconscious, those subconscious drives behind emotional states.But the influences of expressionism are still with us.Several years back there was this popular series on television, a dramatic series that used this technique all the time.For example, the main character, if she was happy, then a computer-generated image of a dancing baby might appear.But only she and the viewers, of course, could see the baby.(man) But none of the plays written recently, um, I’m an acting major, so I’ve seen a lot of new plays; acted in some, too.And I wouldn’t describe any of them as purely expressionist.(woman) That’s cause today’s playwrights have a large tool box.They can pull out techniques that are most suitable for their play, or a moment within their play.But in the early 1900s, you were an expressionist and you wrote your expressionist play and maybe you moved on to becoming a surrealist then you wrote a surrealist play.You didn’t really combine features of expressionism with bits of surrealism and bits of realism and other things.