Chapter 2 - The Railroad

Summary

With a helpless victim tied to its tracks, the railroad has figured prominently on the modern stage, serving as an ambiguous image of modernity - at once a force of social disruption and a platform for social mobility. Chapter 2 considers the nineteenth-century vogue for stage naturalism in relation to a deepened sense of space and an accelerated experience of time introduced by railroad travel. As a means by which whole productions - including actors and scenic effects - were transported into the provinces from the city centers where new plays were first mounted, the railroad introduced new productive relations that changed the dynamic of the actor-audience relationship. With new spatio-temporal dimensions represented both on stage and off, audiences began to shift from attending to the iconographic “landscape” of scene-ending tableaux vivants to the “panoramic” perspective that railroad historian Wolfgang Schivelbusch identifies with modernist perception. As plays and productions changed to accommodate this shift, actors did likewise, with Konstantin Stanislavsky urging his actors to redirect the railroad’s propulsive energies inward to explore their characters’ “motivations” along the play’s narrative “throughline.”