What Is Mask Theatre? What Masks Do on Stage

Put on a mask and your face stops working for you. Everything the audience reads now comes from your head, your spine and your feet. That is the short answer to what is mask theatre, and it explains why the form keeps returning, from ancient Athens to a Sausalito company that gave its masked actors other people’s voices.

What a mask does to an actor and an audience

A mask takes away the actor’s most mobile tool and hands the work to the body. In Noh, the Nohgaku Performers’ Association’s guide to Nō masks explains, “When worn, masks severely restrict the vision of the actors.” So performers “keep a low center of gravity and walk with their feet sliding on the floor.”

The audience changes too. When University of Glasgow researchers had actors perform Greek comedy in rebuilt masks, “Audiences reacted differently to the masks than to a human face, making the costume do part of the work in a large theatre without microphones or close-up screens.”

Full, half, neutral, larval: the main kinds of mask

Masks in theatre come in a few working families. A full mask covers the whole face, and Trestle’s full-mask plays were wordless. A half mask leaves the mouth free, which is why Trestle Theatre Company later made “a new set of half masks, which unite the company’s skills in mask and vocal theatre.”

Training masks are their own family. They exist to train actors, a path the school describes as “discovering the art of acting with masks.” The Jacques Lecoq school lists “The neutral mask (calm, silence, balance )” in its first year, followed by “Expressive, larval, utilitarian masks.” Character masks, from Noh to commedia, fix a type the audience recognises at once.

A short history of mask theatre in six traditions

The history of mask theatre is really several histories that rarely met. This table sets six of them side by side.

Tradition	Where and when	Mask	What it does
Greek drama	Athens and Greek Italy	Full masks, known now from terracottas	Helps the costume carry a large theatre
Noh	Japan, from the Muromachi period	Carved wooden omote, over 200 types	Joy or sorrow by tilting
Commedia dell’arte	Italy; revived at the Piccolo from 1951	Leather character masks	Fixes a stock type
Lecoq training	Padua 1947-48, then Lecoq’s school	Neutral, larval, expressive masks	Trains the body
Bread and Puppet	New York 1963; Vermont from 1970	Huge, stark generic masks	Pageant, ritual, protest
Trestle	Britain, from 1981	Full masks, later half masks	Wordless shows for any language

Greek masks, rebuilt from terracotta

No Greek theatre mask worn on stage survives, so modern makers start from clay. Glasgow’s project “has recreated Greek theatre masks directly from ancient objects,” turning terracottas into moulds. Actors then “used the masks to perform plays by the ancient Greek playwright Menander,” which Professor Elizabeth Moignard called “an eye opener about how that kind of theatre might work.”

Noh: a face that brightens and clouds

Nō masks “are carved from a single block of wood” and “generally represent a character type”. Their trick is light: “The actors can produce expressions of joy or sorrow by slightly tilting the mask up or down, effects known as teru (to brighten) or kumoru (to cloud).”

They are called omote, meaning face, a name suggesting “an object of revelation rather than concealment.” The guide at the-noh.com counts “well over 200 different kinds in use” today, up from about 60 basic types.

Commedia, Sartori and Lecoq

Commedia’s masks returned to the stage through one meeting. The Museo Correr describes “the meeting between the French mime artist, Jacques Lecoq, and sculptor Amleto Sartori at the Teatro dell’Università di Padova (1947-48),” from which “sprang the neutral mask, the ‘mother of all masks’.” Sartori’s leather masks then went into Giorgio Strehler’s commedia at the Piccolo Teatro di Milano from 1951.

Bread and Puppet and Trestle

Peter and Elka Schumann named Bread and Puppet Theater in New York in 1963, moving to Vermont in 1970 and to an old dairy farm in Glover in 1975. A 1985 profile of Chris Hardman singled out Peter Schumann’s “huge, stark generic masks.” Its giant figures belong to the history of giant puppets.

The Trestle Theatre Company archive tells how a group of students leaving Middlesex University founded the company in 1981, dreaming “of travelling around the country with a box of masks and trestle stages.” It went on to tour “mainly with full mask performances, which cross language barriers and entertain all ages.”

An American case: masks that listen

The silent mask leaves a problem: who speaks? Hardman, who met Bread and Puppet in Vermont, answered with tape. Reviewing Vacuum and Russia in 1985, the San Francisco Chronicle described actors in “huge, Cubist-nightmare masks” while “taped voices, from real-life interviews, move the story along.”

Masked bodies, recorded voices

For Vacuum (1981), the interviewees’ “faces became the models for the masks worn by the actors.” For Amnesia’s futurist masks, Artweek praised work “carrying on the Italian futurism of Marinetti with inspiration.” In Caveat Emptor, Antenna’s masked stage play, actors “mostly lip-sync to pre-record-ed tapes.”

Year	Production	The mask, in critics’ words	The voice
1981	Vacuum	“latex masks”	Original taped interviews
1984	Amnesia	Futurist sculptural masks	A tape for each audience member
1985	Russia	“Cubist-nightmare masks”	Taped real-life interviews
1991	Caveat Emptor!	“toothy mask design”	Actors lip-syncing to tape
1995	Skin & Bones	“Picasso-meets-Easter Island masks”	A “tape-recorded text” from interviews

Antenna’s 2004 “Masks and Manikins” page also listed Etiquette of the Undercaste, staged from 1988 to 1995 and The Appearance of Civilization, the 1992 beach procession. Masks were even political: in Hardman’s early-1980s run for the Sausalito city council, volunteers campaigned in masks of his face. More of the work survives in Antenna’s photo galleries, including Masks by Antenna.

Why actors still resist the mask

Not everyone loved it. Hardman found that in Los Angeles, “Masks don’t go over too well, because they all wanted photographs for their portfolios.” One Artweek critic said the masked actors of Amnesia had “the eye contact of a toaster oven.”

The defence came from Trestle, Noh and the new theater forms Antenna built around the audience: a mask that crosses “language barriers” asks the audience to do more of the work.

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