Breaking_Through_the_Fourth_Wall

Breaking Through the Fourth Wall With most Realist and Naturalist plays the audience is “safely” concealed behind the invisible ‘fourth wall’ of the proscenium. A play that utilizes this technique is A Doll’s House written by Ibsen. Yet, many later plays do not provide the spectator this same degree of distance and detachment, as seen in Six Characters in Search of an Author written by Pirandello, which his labeled as Metatheater. As a Realist play, A Doll’s House utilizes the “slice-of-life” take to theatre where the play is to mirror life. Instead of emphasizing the cast or the script itself, Realism tries to emphasize life and its hardships; a universal truth that all humans can agree with. To accomplish this for the audience the play itself must look and act like the life they know. In the case of Ibsen and many other Realist playwrights, he “adopted a critical posture toward the pieties of the middle-class audience whose attitudes were embodied in the ‘realistic’ vision of the world” (W.B Worthen 583), thus the controversial plot line of A Doll’s House was received with much passion and understanding in the 1880’s when it was first published and produced. Yet, unlike audience, play, wall, characters, realist, through, fourth, must, life, yet, worthen, wb, thus, seen, pirandello, itself, actors, within, stage, meaning, ibsen, show, plays, metatheater, masks, lives, distance, character, action, world, utilizes, themselves, theatre, six, much, make, line, invisible, illusion, house, first, final, ending, doll’s, breaking, between, about, 702, written, well-made