Bentley Opens Norton Lecture Series Stressing Drama's Link to Emotions

An 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."

Psychology of Identification

"The 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."

Praises Loeb

Rentley praised the 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'."

"Passion is a vital aim of the theater," he continued, emphasizing the passion of people for each other. Because of the prominent place that love occupies on the stage, the Englishman reiterated, the theater is a natural place for adolescents to express the new depths of their emotions. "In a sense, the theater is an extended puberty rite," he jested.

As 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.

With a discursive but never irrelevant style of delivery, Bentley managed to discuss the comparative futures of art and religion, and to comment on the sense in which theatre is art.