Out of Gas on Lover's Leap

The play I chose for “Show and Tell” is a two person play I did for my directing class at Southeastern Louisiana University, Out of Gas on Lover’s Leap. Out of Gas was written by Mark St. Germain and was written around 1985. The first production was at the WPA Theatre in New York staring Melissa Leo and Fisher Stevens and directed by Elinor Renfield (St. Germain). To my knowledge, there is no actively running production of this play, but you can purchase the script from Amazon.

Out of Gas is the story of two lost souls in the form of rich, bratty teenagers. Mystery “Myst” Angeleeds is the daughter of a washed up pop singer who follows in the footsteps of her mother’s promiscuous ways and Chauncey “Grouper” Morris is the son of a U.S. senator, slightly geeky and is an outsider at school because of it. The play starts with them on the hood of Grouper’s car after their high school graduation from a rich boarding school for trouble teens. They are drinking and smoking pot as the give details of their plans for the future. But as they plan for the future, the past starts biting them in the butt, such as Grouper’s suicide attempt and both of their parent’s ignore them, thus causing them to act out in hopes to garner their attention. They eventually make love while being stuck up there, but the bliss is short lasting as Myst reveals she’s pregnant with another man’s child and plans to get rid of it. They both try to plan a future for themselves in vain, but they feel their sorrows are too deep and they end up jumping off the cliff holding hands.

One of the choices the playwright makes that I find interesting is the fact that these are two obviously spoiled rich kids; we shouldn’t be feeling sorry for them. They have money, a great education, and a bright future ahead of them, but what the playwright does shows that just because someone’s lives a privileged life, it does not mean everything will work out fine. Both children may have all the money they would want and need, and are provided well when it comes to material needs, they are severely deprived of parental affection. When Grouper tries to commit suicide by hanging himself on a basketball hoop, his father doesn’t come to check on him. Myst acts more like a grown up than her own mother, who when she’s in company of her daughter and others, she just treats her like a sister. Myst is so starved for her mother’s attention (as her mother) that she self-mutilated herself as a child, and despite the surgeries and pain she had, she claims it was the best time of her life. Myst and Grouper both hate their parents and try to emulate them, and it’s so disheartening to see their lives so destroyed by the very people who brought them into the world.

Another choice I found compelling and I predicted it when I first read it, was the motif of Myst’s condition. From the beginning, she complained about not feeling good, and would sometimes refuse alcohol and drugs from Grouper had my alarm bells going “She’s Pregnant!!!” Several times during the play she would start on the topic of kids and would be nervous about Grouper’s response.  When she finally reveals her pregnancy, she says she plans on getting an abortion, and that is the true reason why her mother was coming down and takes her to France, so they could get the pregnancy terminated.

Hornby's Progression

The motif, or progression, in How I Learned to Drive is actually stated in the title: driving. In this play, we see the transition of Li'l Bit learning to drive (though not in chronological order) and how she slowly learns to take control of herself in an atmosphere that is not healthy. Her uncle molests her while the adults in her family look the other way, and her peers see her only as a sexual object as opposed to the intelligent young woman she is.  Through out the play, we see certain points in her life that foreshadow what happens in the second to last scene of the play, such as the first scene when the audience realizes that the man Li'l Bit is with in the car is actually her uncle, and we realize this can't be the first time this has happened. Progressively, more and more details emerge about the incestuous relationship until we get to the final foreshadow of Li'l Bit's mother verbally warning her daughter away from Uncle Peck but does nothing physically to stop what is about to happen, which is Peck molesting Li'l Bit for the first time when she was eleven during their first driving lesson.

In the TV crime drama, NCIS, at the very end of the first season showed a very particular motif that ended up foreshadowing the season finale of their second season. In the last episode of season one, the main character, Special Agent Leroy Jethro Gibbs, in a dream, walks into the Navy Yard's morgue and opens a body bag with one of his agents, Special Agent Kate Todd, dead with a bullet hole in the middle of her forehead. At the end of that episode, it's a different person, an enemy woman, who is discovered with the same bullet whole. But the premonition of death continues on subtly through out the second season until the last two episodes. In the second to last episode, one of the agents, Tony DiNozzo, comes in contact with the plague (via postal biological warfare) and nearly dies. In the last episode shows the still ill but recovering Agent DiNozzo, Agent Todd, and Agent Tim McGee almost get blown up by an Hamas agent the team has been trying to track since season one. Abby Sciuto, their forensic specialist, worries about the safety of her friends and tells Agent Todd to watch out for Tony because she had had a dream about his face covered in blood. Finally, at the conclusion of the episode, after stopping a missile hitting a dock filled with families awaiting their soldier's return, Agent Todd is hit by a sniper in the middle of her forehead and is killed. Agent DiNozzo, who was standing behind her, is then shown with Kate's blood on his face. I do believe the motif in a fully realized production is different than one that is written in a script because there is the factor of did the audience catch that reference? It may be not that different in a short thirty minute or hour long TV show compared to a script because if the motif happens only in that one episode, then it's easier to remember the details of the motif as opposed to having the progression last several episodes or, in NCIS's case, a whole season.

Overtones

Alice Gerstenberg's Overtones is an understandably confusing play if one was just observing it without the script to follow along. Even with it, it's hard to completely understand this play. Who sees who, who hears what, and how they do it can baffle the mind a bit. But hopefully I believe I understand the rules of this world. The rules are that the primitive selves are able to see, hear, and possibly touch their cultured selves, or otherwise their “trained” selves, while the cultured selves can only respond to their primitive selves. In all of the scenes, none of the trained selves ever initiated contact with their other selves.  In the first part of the play, where it’s just Harriet and Hetty, Hetty was able to start the conversation with Harriet while looking at her and even intimidating her, while Harriet is unable to see her primitive self. She is only able to speak to her. Also, the trained selves cannot hear or see another person’s primitive self. Harriet is not able to hear Maggie, nor is Margaret able to hear Hetty. The primitive self hears the other’s cultured self, but does not respond to directly to them, but directs their attention to the other’s primitive self. Primitive selves are able to hear other trained selves, only able to directly respond to other primitive selves and their own trained selves. Primitive selves, like Hetty and Maggie, are able to, according to the play, are able to not only see and hear, but they are actually able to touch each other. They can hold a terse conversation with each other without their trained selves, which is apparent in the text and they get into a physical altercation at the close of the play. I think that hopefully that audience will see this in the way all of the characters interact (or not interact) with each other.  

As for as if there are any rules broken, going by the assumption that what the playwright wrote is law, and was done on purpose, no rules could have been broken. Gerstenberg, whether intentionally or accidentally, allowed the primitive selves to communicate freely among themselves and to physical attack each other, then that is now permanently a part of the play and is a part of the world that play exists in.

Trifles

In regards of producing Trifles as a theatricalized play as opposed to it's original setting in naturalistic, I would like to argue both sides.


For: The idea of a very minimalist design for Trifles is very interesting. Having both read and watched the play, and having read the short story that was based on this play, I feel like I at least a better than average insight to what this play is about. To make this production minimalistic and abstract, would put the play in a different perspective, such as from the men's point of view. I would like to refer this to "gender blindness" where a man can walk into a "woman's domain" (such as a kitchen) and see nothing but "kitchen things." To the men in the play, I wouldn't doubt that they just see the room in shapes as opposed to the detailed objects they are. I think that making the audience see the room from the men's point of view would create a very surreal effect and will probably confuse the audience in a good way. It would probably make them try to envision what the room would look like in natural form (in another words, it would make the audience think.)


Against: There is a reason why this play was titled Trifles. It is almost esential that we see all of Minnie Wright's world, her uncleaned kitchen, her broken jars of fruit, her unfinished quilt, and the pretty little box that held her dearest friend. To see the world through a woman's eye and see that the room is not just a pile of dirty pots and unkept home, but that we find the reason why these things are the way they are by following each and every clue in that kitchen full of "women's trifles."

How I Learned to Drive

With Forne's How I Learned to Drive, I think the choice to use a Greek Chorus was definitely more than just a convenence of low casting. From what I got out of just reading it, I can see why Forne chose to have those three Greek Choruses playing different roles rather than each individual character be casted. One, it helped keep the focus on Lil' Bit and Peck and not on the numerous other characters. Two, to Lil' Bit and Peck, in the situation they were in, it probably felt like all the other characters were just one set of voices anyway. They are hiding this shameful secret and they are fearful that others will find out and it alienates them from others. So all the faces mesh together, an Us vs Them mentality. I personally think Forne did that beautifully by limiting the number of actors on stage.

A dramatical choice that I've never been a fan of is when the actor talks to the audience. Forne has a lot of that happening in this production, and sometimes the actor will stop in the middle of dialogue with another character to address the audience. As a spectator, I don't like being removed from the play by the actor.  But the difference in this production is that it feels like both an instructional video and a home video with commentary added to it. With the subject matter, I can understand why Forne would strive to distance the audience from the happenings in the play.