Susan Sontag on Theater

Image: Susan Sontag 1979 by Lynn Gilbert

written by Katharine Matthias - June 29, 2020

In a “The Tulane Drama Review” article in 1996, scholar Susan Sontag questions the lines between theater and film, a question that remains pertinent to our research for this project and for the broader world. Sontag disagrees with the distinction that “theater employs artifice while cinema is committed to reality” (Sontag 26). I think that Sontag’s questioning of this distinction between theater is helpful because theater is committed to truth-telling, just like film. The art of illusion-making is, perhaps, different in theater and film. 

 In fact, later in her essay, Sontag questions: “Couldn’t theatre dissolve the distinction between the truth of artifice and the truth of life? Isn’t that just what the theatre as ritual seeks to do? Isn’t that what is being sought when theatre is conceived as an exchange with an audience?--something that films can never be” (Sontag 29). Sontag notes that the major distinction between theater and film is an issue of continuity. Please refer to this article from Howlround where these questions about liveness are discussed further.