Comment posts!

http://garrettstheater.blogspot.com/2013/05/3-viewings.html?showComment=1367625791971#c8014824137652318360

http://gracietheatre2130.blogspot.com/2013/04/on-verge.html?showComment=1367626767727#c1433907184602066609

http://ohyeahdramaa.blogspot.com/2013/05/show-and-tell-post-3.html?showComment=1367629170471#c2505450408363922156

http://austinthtr2130.blogspot.com/2013/04/prompt-eleven-fires-in-mirror.html?showComment=1367630534522#c2126511546454036616

http://dorapereli2130.blogspot.com/2013/04/the-drowsy-chaperone-response.html?showComment=1367633500032#c1224165012432919536

Show and Tell 3 Post: Play

My third and final 'Show and Tell' post I chose Samuel Beckett's Play, a one-act play. This play was written around 1963 and was originally written in German. Spiel, as it is called, premiered at the Ulmer Theatre in Ulm-Donau, Germany on June 14^th of that year. Deryk Mendel was the director with Gerhard Winter, Nancy Illig, and Sigfried Pfeiffer playing the only three characters. It was finally produced in London, in English, ten months later at the Old Vic theatre. This play was featured in the Beckett on Film project in 2000 with Kristin Scott Thomas, Juliet Stevenson, and Alan Rickman.

 

Play is about a love triangle told in short spurts, told in the past tense and not in the order it actually transpired. It starts with a man, M, who tires of his wife, W2, takes up a mistress, W2. When W1 finds out about the mistress, she becomes unstable. She hires a private detective, she threatens to kill herself, and she even confronts W2, and continues this until M appears to have left W2. W1 is placated until M starts seeing W2 again, this time leaving with her, abandoning his wife. But soon that relationship turns sour, and the W2 receives the same treatment as W1 when M leaves her for another.

 

Like all of Beckett plays, this is no ordinary straight play, and that the playwright’s notes and how he wants the play presented is as much of the script as the words are. Instead of creating a play with dialogue, and have it performed as it happens, Beckett chose to have the three characters to be shown only by their faces while their bodies are hidden in funeral urns. The three people show no sign of acknowledgement of each other and when one speaks, a spotlight is on them while the other two are silent. Far be it from me to try and read Beckett’s mind, but this gives me an image of dead souls reflecting the same moment of their lives, only from their point of view. Like ghosts who do not pass over because of unfinished business, these souls are locked in these urns as if their anger or guilt keep them there. Something that supports this is how the play is performed. The characters do not tell their story one by one, but garbled together, one saying a few lines before being switched to another character. It is jumbled with no linear line of thought or speech. And the fact that Beckett requests that the play repeat itself makes me think of ghosts haunting the same halls over and over again, reenacting their death or a normal day in the life. It gives the feel that these three characters will tell their story over and over again, not listening to one another, and just spending the rest of eternity in those urns.

 

I also noticed how Beckett leaves how the characters die ambiguous, but gives us clues of their demise. M, throughout the play, would hiccough as would a man who had too much to drink. I see him as dying from either alcohol poisoning or perhaps from liver disease. He could have also possibly died from an accident in which he was drunk at the time. W1 had shown signs of being suicidal throughout the production, so it is not at all difficult to imagine how she died. The only thing the play does not indicate is the manner of which she would have killed herself. Women usually do not shot themselves in the heads for vanity reasons, so if I had to hazard a guess it would be either pills or slit wrists. As for the mistress, as the play worn on, she showed signs of instability, laughing crazed and talking more nonsense than the other two. I would imagine that she could have died in a mental institution, that she went crazy after M left her, like he left his first wife, and died alone.

The Drowsy Chaperone

It took me a while to understand this prompt for this blog post, but I think I got it now so here goes.

The difference between choices for the play-within-the-play Drowsy Chaperone and the real Drowsy Chaperone is that the playwrights chose to add another play in the mix, abet "accidentally". In the musical The Man is listening to, never has a break that includes a very racist song. While that could be considered just a part of the story, but the playwrights chose to include this part and not as a part of the fictional musical. They could have made a number within the fictional show that was made from the same cloth, but it was only added to the meta-show part.

A second element that is different between the two plays is the motif. A motif in the play-within-the-play would obviously be monkey, but it is different in meta-narrative play. While it still has a monkey in it, it is not really shown in the outside world of the fictional play other than the note from The Man about it. A motif that applies to the whole play would be interruptions. There are many interruptions in both the fictional The Drowsy Chaperone and the narrative world of it. A good deal of them are caused by The Man himself, but some are caused by outside sources: the telephone, the scratching of the record player, the maid having put the wrong record in the wrong sleeve. It all leads up to the final interruption of the power going out. Even the final moment of the show, where The Man is ascended into the rafters, he has to pause his assent to grab the record.

On the Verge Glossary

Found this on blogger, a glossary on all of the terms in On the Verge. Hope this helps you out!

On the Verge Glossary

Three Viewings

Okay, I seriously doubt no one else will see this common point, but Margaret-Mary Welsh. Not only is the name fun to say (Margaret-Mary, Margaret-Mary, Margaret-Mary) and the fact that I want to switch it around (Mary-Margaret just makes more sense,) but she seems to be an expression of comfort, however small, to all of the three characters. And while the interaction with her is not major, she is there, in the peripheral of the story, like an angel that is always there and watching.

As far as a motif, I think it is deep, personal loss. Yes, they are all set at a funeral home, and they all go to funerals, but the funerals that are most prominent are not the ones that the three characters felt the most at. Ellis, being a mortician, speaks of many funerals, some in great detail. But the funeral of Tessie is only described briefly. He speaks of his love for her throughout the play, sometimes just standing there and saying "I love you" over and over again. With Mac, she would go to funerals to steal jewelry off of the dead one's body, but she couldn't go to the one funeral that mattered, the loss of her family. And with Virginia, her husband's funeral was perhaps the most detailed of the three when it came to the lost loves, but the events that happened afterwards overshadowed. She not only had to deal with the loss of her husband, she had to deal with the possible loss of who she thought her husband was, and even though it had worked out in the end, it was still painful to see (or read) her go through that.

Another motif I just realized is that they all take away something from this, whether it is physical or metaphorical. Ellis took Tessie's pacemaker, which kept her heart going until the accident. Mac took Nettie's ring, though she throws it in the hole later, and Virginia took on the responsibilities of her husband, but was later given 13 written things of his love.

On the Verge

The image that first popped into my head was three silhouetted women in the classic style of Victorian, but with pith helmets on their heads. The three women would be of three different shades, and one of the women would have another woman climbing down from the pith helmets, much like a mountain climber would descent from Mt. Rushmore, having her scale down the face of one of the women. I chose the tag line, "Where life as we know it is, well, not as we know it." (p. 234) It is the second spoken line in Act Two, and I thought it was a perfect example for this play. That quote reminds me of Star Trek: The Original Series ("It's life, Jim, but not as we know it." Dr. McCoy, "Devil in the Dark"), which is science fiction, much like this play. They are not just exploring a world that no one else has traveled, they are exploring a different time. They are moving both slowly and quickly into the future and everything that they knew in their lifetime, from what are eggbeaters to who the President is, changes so quickly that literally life is not how they knew it. I chose the image because I still wanted the three women, but not holding the umbrellas or eggbeaters. I wanted them faded as to show the distance they have at the end, where Fanny stays with Nicky, Alex goes off with Troll, and Mary, the clearest of the them all, continues on with her journey to the future. The person scaling one of the women's face is not only from actual events in the play but it shows a descent their high intelligent language to their drop down to the rest of humanity. As the play went on, the less times I had to consult a dictionary for terms, and I wanted to reflect that.

I'm a creative person, and I couldn't help myself. Here is an actual image of what I was talking about.

Fires in the Mirror

While I understand the confusion of the beginning parts of Anna Deavere Smith's play Fires in the Mirror, that it is such a long part of the play before the actual topic of the play is performed and it does not appear that there is a credible reason why to perform those parts of the play. But I assure you, those parts are just as important to this play as the last half and should not be removed, nor should the order of the play be changed at all. The first, and quite obvious reason that I will not dwell on it long, is that that was the playwright's choice. I am a firm believer of trying to keep words of the play to the exact way the playwright first presented it. But that is my own personal opinion and should not be the sole basis in which you form your judgment.
But another reason that you should keep the beginning is because while it may not appear on the surface, or at least the first time you read it, that it plays any significance to the later part of the play, but it does. Every story needs some background, novels do it, and we do it in theatre all the time. It is called the exposition, Gustav Freytag uses it in his graph to help introduce important information to the audience. And while stories of how Al Sharpton got his hair style or why the orthodox Jew couldn't turn off a radio might not appear important in the grand schemes of things, for this play it is important for people to understand the two cultures that are at play here. It is essential to the plot of the story that a clear background is given as to understand the different versions of the start of the riots. Otherwise, it would just be a story of "he said, she said," and no one would understand why the events happened like they did. They would get the story, but only part of it. so by Smith giving the background information about these two very distinct groups of people, it allows the true story of what went on that August than by just layout out the supposed facts of the case.