Values Dissonance/Theater

---

• The ending of Annie Get Your Gun, in which the female main character throws a target shooting competition and gives up a successful show-business career in order to win the heart of the man who was jealous of her success, is a classic example of something that seems outrageous today that would have seemed completely reasonable when it was written. In Real Life, the opposite happened: Annie Oakley's husband gave up his sharpshooting career for hers.
  • On the other hand, however, Annie wasn't always the loud and brash sharpshooter as she was portrayed in the musical. If anything, she was actually a very quiet girl who frequently did needlepoint in her spare time.
  • Annie Get Your Gun was written deliberately to be post-war propaganda, to lure women out of the factories and back into the kitchen.
  • Revivals have Annie throw the contest, but Frank finds out. He's touched that she would give up her career for him, apologizes for the way he was treating her, and they live "scappily ever after."
• Put simply, in the ancient Greek play Antigone, the title character wants to bury her brother, against the wishes of her uncle the king. In ancient Greece, they would see Antigone as caught between two horrible options; not honoring the dead, or defying her rightful ruler. Thanks to liberalism, individualism, feminism and the separation of church and state, a modern reader would see Antigone as rebelling against a corrupt and authoritarian state, with the only problem being the possibility of getting caught doing it.
  • However, because Antigone seems to be unquestionably doing the right thing to modern eyes, modern performances of the play usually shift the focus to her uncle, and instead emphasize his two horrible options; condemning his niece and nephew to dishonorable deaths as is required by the laws of the city, or placing his family above those laws by burying his nephew and sparing his niece.
  • Most scholars will tell you that this is how the play is meant to be interpreted. Remember, it is the Chorus that is supposed to embody the focus of the piece, and both the Chorus and the play itself spend a great deal of time explaining Creaon's predicament and the possibility of an impending invasion, the implication being that if he appears weak and emotional, he believes the state will be weakened and fall.
    • The Nazis themselves sympathized with the plight of the uncle more than they did with Antigone, in fact, renaming the play after said uncle, Creon. Presumably it was for opposite reasons.
• Most modern productions of Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing leave out one of Claudio's lines near the end of the play. To make amends for his part in Hero's supposed death, he agrees to marry her cousin, but is told that he can't see her face until he swears it before the friar. He replies that he would take her in marriage even if she were "an Ethiope" (that is, an African).
  • "Ethiop" seems to have been a favourite insult of Elizabethans — Lysander calls the dark skinned Hermia this in A Midsummer Night's Dream.
  • This could likely be a Values Dissonance in regard to food culture as well, as Europeans almost never ate raw meat when they could avoid it, save for a few backwoods hermit-y types. Therefore being compared with someone who ate raw meat (look up Ethiopian dishes sometime), which is something not even the lowest commoner would sink to, would be seen as equally vulgar an insult.
• Everyone remembers Othello for the (then) controversial interracial marriage of its hero and Desdemona. Nowadays people are far more likely to take issue at the fact Desdemona can only be sixteen at the very most... and Othello's roughly the same age as her father (who was once his friend). It's disturbing that so many characters speak so lustfully about her, considering how young she is.
  • Another case of Values Dissonance. At the time, a 16 year old would have been considered fully adult and capable of raising a family. Indeed, in much of the world, that's still the case today.
    • How about Juliet? She's thirteen. Even in the sixteenth century, that was so young that a lampshade is hung on it in the play: her father originally thinks she's too young to marry and her suitor Paris will just have to wait... for three years.
      • However, in some adaptations (most notably the 1968 movie), the reason her father was hesitant was because it was implied that he married Juliet's mother too young and had grown to regret it.
      • Isaac Asimov suggested that Juliet's extreme youth was a plot point: that she's hardly more than a child, and is at least as much in love with the idea of an intrigue — "My only love, sprung from my only hate" — as with Romeo himself.
• Something which always provokes a gasp whenever people who have only seen the Baz Luhrman film read Romeo and Juliet: Romeo kills Paris, for absolutely no reason. While his murder of Tybalt can be (very shakily) justified, poor Paris is simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. It would seem Shakespeare's contemporaries would have no trouble whatsoever with this; modern adaptations always omit it as it makes Romeo seem far less sympathetic (ironically, the line by the Prince at the end about losing "a brace of kinsman" is usually kept, even though Paris' death is excluded, thus making Mercutio the only kinsman he lost.)
• The Merchant of Venice has a happy ending, as the villain has been forgiven for his attempted judicial murder and has even become a Christian, thus giving him the chance to go to Heaven. At least, that is what the original audiences would have thought. Modern productions are more likely to sympathize with Shylock: the Royal Shakespeare Company once put on a production where most of the cast were dressed as Nazi stormtroopers. (One critical essay pointed out that for a woman who speaks so movingly about "mercy," Portia is a vindictive bitch: she forces Shylock to renounce his religion and give his property away to the daughter who betrayed and stole from him.)
  • She also tricks her boyfriend into making it look like he had betrayed her (by making him give her a ring she made him promise to never give to anyone else while in disguise), then pretends to act like he had cheated on her. This is played for comedy, rather than as an indication that she is psychopathic.
    • On that note, it's telling that the Values Dissonance is such that the play was written a comedy, but now is almost always portrayed as a tragedy.
  • It's worth noting, however, that Shylock is one of the earliest examples of a sympathetic antagonist, and notably is the only major character in the play who does not indulge in deceit, and whose famous monologue is clearly written to humanize Shylock's and provide justification for his motives, in a time when many still believed Jews had horns. The play makes it clear that, even beyond the anti-Semitism he faces in society, Shylock's got perfectly good reason to hold a grudge against Antonio.
• The Duchess of Malfi revolves around a forbidden marriage and what we would nowadays consider to be an honour killing. While her behavior in disobeying her family, marrying her steward, and actually proposing to him rather than vice versa, would have met with strong disapproval from most audiences, Webster is clearly depicting her as the most noble character in the play, the only one who didn't do anything seriously wrong; the rest of the court is populated by scheming tyrants, incestuous brothers, hypocrites, and murderers — the anti-hero protagonist is a killer-for-hire. This was a very radical play when it premiered. Nowadays sympathies are entirely with the lovers.
• In a couple of his plays, French playwright Georges Feydeau has English-speaking characters in Funny Foreigner roles often speaking a not very accurate gibberish which while hilarious to the contemporary audience doesn't hold up well in translation. Translation Convention is to either to have those characters speak the same English as the French characters but to be not understood by them or else, to adapt them into Funny Foreigners from other countries.
• Inverted by the Henrik Ibsen play A Dolls House. Audiences at the time were shocked by the end, in which Nora leaves her marriage, and Ibsen was forced to rewrite it. (The alternate ending is something of a Writer Cop Out, and Ibsen himself called the change a "barbaric atrocity.") Modern audiences generally find the original ending perfectly acceptable.
  • Ibsen was way ahead of his time in his other writings, too — think of Hedda Gabler and Ghosts, to name but two. The first shows an angry upper class woman who is miserable and depressed, desperate to seek an outlet in any way possible, inciting a man to kill himself, and committing suicide when her role in his death is discovered. At the time critics considered Hedda to be monstrous and the entire play squalid; while Hedda still isn't very sympathetic, modern audiences can appreciate why she behaves the way she does. Even a seemingly secondary character is allowed to ditch her husband to be with the man she loves. Ghosts deals with VD and has a character suffer a syphillitic breakdown on stage; this would have been outrageous when it was first shown. The heroine Mrs. Alving was lambasted, not least for encouraging Brother-Sister Incest. Contemporary audiences view her in a much softer light, though adaptations still insinuate she's too close to her son.
    • Another interpretation is that the son got syphilis from his father - his only memory of him is getting terribly traumatized by his father taking him to his room and "giving him a cigar to smoke". Just after this, his mother takes him, and tries to flee. This explanation of how the son got syphilis is also made more likely by that fact that he describes himself as pretty morally sound, while his father was a notorious drunkard and womaniser. Ibsen might have omitted ever telling anyone about this part of the play, since the rest of it got slaughtered by critics for being monstrous and evil and immoral.
    • A Doll's House also has a straighter example of this trope — when Nora leaves her husband, she leaves her children behind as well. At the time, the concept that men had automatic custody rights to any children from a marriage was completely natural and that particular decision wouldn't raise an eyebrow. To modern audiences, this is much less natural and has levelled charges of irresponsibility on the guilty party. The only ease to that is that an earlier scene indicates that Nora deeply trusts her children's governess (who was also her governess too) to become the maternal figure should anything happen to Nora.
• The musical Carousel features a defense of domestic violence. Julie, thinking longingly of her abusive dead husband, remarks wistfully that "it's possible for someone to hit you ... hit you very hard ... and not hurt at all." The audience isn't supposed to cringe at how cowed she is, but to sigh over this romantic moment.
  • Later she and her daughter share a moment where they discuss how "sometimes when someone hits you, it feels like a kiss."
    • That sounds like... something else entirely.
• Similar to the above, Nancy's staying by Bill Sikes even in the face of his abuse in Oliver! comes across as overly submissive and lacking regard for her own well-being to modern audiences, but there were no abuse hotlines in Dickensian London.
• The lighthearted treatment of rape in Ancient Greek and Roman comedies can make it impossible to enjoy them. Terence is probably the most jarring, in that he makes it clear that his heroes are violently and traumatically assaulting his heroines, yet they still end up together at the end, with the man excusing himself by revealing that he was drunk, or that he thought she was a slave.
• The Magic Flute: To the extent that the opera has An Aesop, it's about how you shouldn't trust or even listen to women, and how women need a man to guide them lest they become too uppity. (On the other hand, it doesn't hurt that all the parts about the brave and noble men overcoming every challenge are complete snooze fests, while the villainous Queen of the Night gets the two best arias in the whole opera, including one of the most famous in the entire genre.) With a side of "black men are too ugly to get any, so they'll resort to raping white women, to whom they are irresistibly attracted."
  • On the other hand, Pamina is initiated with Tamino. Considering that both Mozart and Emanuel Schikaneder (who wrote the libretto) were both Freemasons and that the opera is full of Masonic themes, and that to this day most Masonic loges do not initiate women...
• In The Laramie Project, one of the interviewees is a straight stage actor discussing how he once played the lead role in Angels in America, but his parents refused to attend the play because they didn't want to see him play a gay man. However, he also played the title character in Macbeth back in high school, and they were right there in the front row as he portrayed a mass murderer.
  • That's not so much Values Dissonance as it is a clue that homosexuality is often considered more "relevant" and "topical" than homicide, and thus more controversial. As one actor once put it: "People don't think you're a murderer if you play a murderer, but they do think you're gay if you play a gay."
• In My Fair Lady and its film adaptation, Eliza's romantic prospects were either a mysognistic jerk (Professor Higgins) or a relentless stalker (Freddie). Does either end count as a happy ending?
  • My Fair Lady was based off George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion, and the original ended with Eliza going off to marry Freddie, not returning to Higgins. Subsequent versions changed his play's ending to one similar to My Fair Lady Shaw was so upset with the people who changed the ending that he wrote an essay explaining why Eliza and Higgins would never end up together, and why Eliza would be happy with Freddie.
• Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew contains so much values dissonance that this troper's grade ten class were asked their opinions about whether or not Kate's final monologue (about how a woman should be subservient to her husband and obey his every wish, because he works every day so she can eat) should be included in classroom readings of the play. Not to mention the whole idea of a woman who dared speak up for herself being a "shrew" who needed to be made "proper"...
  • Yet this troper's college-level class discussed the facts that:
    • The play is written as a comedy.
    • The story of Kate/Petruchio is a play within the play - an admitted fantasy and as such is not supposed to resemble reality.
    • Petruchio acts more like a shrew than Kate - and contemporary 'sequels' have it that Kate tames him between the plays.
    • The speech is a public display, which indicates her as just playing - she continually shows that isn't a dumb blonde.
    • The wording can easily be heard as sarcastic, especially given Petruchio's personality and that the beta couple shows kindness is a better way - Bianca is pretty 'shrewish' herself.
  • Those said, there is a values dissonance in the induction sketch of the drunkard being tricked by the baron...But, as stated, it's a comedy. And it could easily be played straight today for comedy.