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.

Show and Tell Post 2: M. Butterfly

For my second Show and Tell post I chose M. Butterfly, which I read in my theatre history class. M. Butterfly was written by David Henry Hwang. It was first premiered at the Eugene O’Neill Theatre on Broadway on the 20^th of March in 1988. It was directed by John Dexter with John Lithgow and DB Wong playing the two main characters at the start of the seven hundred and seventy-seven performances run.  This play is inspired by both the opera Madame Butterfly by Giacomo Puccini and the loosely based on true story of the French diplomat, Bernard Boursicot, who had a relationship with a Chinese spy, Shi Pei Pu, who masqueraded as a female opera singer.

M. Butterfly starts off with Rene Gallimard, the French Diplomat, in his prison cell, talking about how he was in love with the “Perfect Woman.” He talks about how he is now famous and how boring his life was before we started working at the French embassy in China. That was when he met and fell in love with Song Lilling, an opera singer who was performing a piece from his favorite opera, Madame Butterfly. Song Lilling is able to entrap Gallimard and they start to have an affair with gives Gallimard the adventure and power he craves while Song is able to get information from Gallimard that the Chinese government wants. But after several years, Gallimard is sent back to France, and Song Lilling is forced to follow him because her government will not pay for her to stay. The couple are together for twenty years before it is found out that not only is Song Lilling a Chinese spy, but she was actually a male. Song Lilling is able to completely fool Gallimard all those years that Gallimard is unable to comprehend the truth and decides to keep the fantasy of the perfect woman alive in his head, ending his life in a Japanese suicide ritual.

One of the dramaturgical choices Hwang had made was how closely he tied the plot of this play to Madame Butterfly. The opera is not just a play that the characters in the piece performs or likes, there is both an overt and a subtle connection between the two productions. The more overt one would be that Song Lilling emulated Madame Butterfly to gain the trust and affection of Gallimard to gain the information his government needed. He allowed Gallimard to play the part of Pinkerton and allow him to feel the power that the character in the opera had over his Butterfly. But the subtlety of it is that, in truth, Gallimard is Madame Butterfly, that he allows his love for the ‘Perfect Woman’ to trap him in a lie for all those years. Gallimard is the poor wife stuck while her husband abandons her. It is Gallimard stuck in the prison while Song Lilling goes free. The end proves this by showing Gallimard dying the same way Madame Butterfly did in the opera.

Another choice I found interesting was how Hwang never really spelled it out in the play that Song Lilling was really a man, but had left a lot of clues. The first clue, was of course, was the playwright’s notes, which states that this play was loosely based on the events between the French Diplomat and the male Chinese opera singer/spy. Though, I am unsure if that was just a part of my textbook or if it was shown to the audience via the play program. But other clues are that Song never allowed Gallimard to never see him naked and that Comrade Chin kept on talking about dishonor and lack of understanding for homosexuals and the fact that he only brought the same upon himself. It wasn’t until the end of the second act and the beginning of the third that the audience is told what has been only hinted before, that the woman Gallimard has been in love with has been a man this whole time.

 

Source: www.ibdb.com/production.php?id=4497

Comment Post index

http://2130coryvincent.blogspot.com/2013/04/noise-about-noises-off.html?showComment=1365872824665#c3999352780904772545

http://garrettstheater.blogspot.com/2013/04/detroit.html?showComment=1365873127152#c2174424565998567336

http://emilielegethtr2130blog.blogspot.com/2013/04/buried-child.html?showComment=1365873745126#c3501847290314818474

http://thtr2130sh.blogspot.com/2013/04/glass-of-water.html?showComment=1365873346724#c2145843935191635840

http://garrettstheater.blogspot.com/2013/04/water-by-spoonful.html?showComment=1365874305740#c5640078511550907837

http://emilielegethtr2130blog.blogspot.com/2013/04/water-by-spoonful-hudges.html?showComment=1365874600150#c5530464115214477529

 

Noises Off

I think great motif for Michael Frayn's Noises Off would be the old adage of Murphy's Law, "anything that can go wrong, will go wrong." In this farce, we see what is supposed to be a normal production start spiraling out of control, from something as minor as Brooke losing her contact to the multiple love triangles that end up completely unending a performance. Almost at every turn, something that should just happen naturally and melodically turns into a complete disaster. And while it's a given that all productions would have some sort of mess up or accident (such as I once stepped on a fellow actor's prop glasses after having problems with my own contacts right before the lights went up), this one shows Murphy's Law to the extreme. Frayn has the actors miss lines, skip queues, have wardrobe malfunctions, and completely allow their personal problems to bleed out into the production that ends with them having to drag the curtain down.

I think a great tag line would be the line Lloyd says in the first act. “That’s farce. That’s the theatre. That’s life!” Not only because the play itself is a farce, but it this play shows what can go wrong in a production, and that the key is that this is life, and with life, you just have to go on. That things will go crazy and chaotic, and you just have to accept it and move on. Just because they are putting up a production, doesn’t mean life has stopped. The actors can try to put aside their emotions and their problems, but they are but human, and can only go so far. And though they allowed their personal problems to bleed into their performance, none of them actually stopped trying to put it on. And that what being in theatre involves, to keep on going even though you messed up.

 

Detroit

In this play, I think a great phrase to describe it is "Detroit is not a city, it's a lifestyle". There is a news article I read online that is entitled "Letters: Life in Detroit--distressed but not beyond hope." It talks about how "this once great city" is dying, that it is a "shell" of it's former glory. The neighborhoods are decrepit and broken down, the once sparkly houses turned to seed. And the city will not or cannot help. This mimics not only the neighborhood that the two couples live in, but the couples themselves, or at least each individual character. Frank, at the end of the play, talks about the former glory of the neighborhood, how everyone knew everyone, and how the houses are falling apart. And even with the "fancified" houses, that he could understand why those in the crumbling houses would be wary of asking for help from the richer people. The neighborhood itself is a Detroit neighborhood, even if it wasn't really in Detroit. And as far as the characters are concerned, it is about the human condition, to be downtrodden but still with hope. It is almost like the characters are Detroit, that they were once good and great, but have been neglected by those around them and are falling into decay, especially Kenny/Roger. His mother moved away, not wanting to be apart of the family, and he got into trouble but it seems no one wanted to help him. So he kept on getting into more and more trouble. But it finally appears that he wanted to try to make a new life. Get a new name, a new place to live, and someone who he can share his new life with. And with Mary and Ben, they were lonely and forgotten, in their little house, when Shannon and Kenny came by and opened their world for them. And while that friendship turned disastrous, the ending was not all that bad. They may have lost their house, but it opened doors for the couple that they probably would not have thought of before. They plan to go to England and start their new life. They are distress...but not beyond hope.

http://www.freep.com/article/20120527/OPINION04/205270482/Letters-Life-in-Detroit-distressed-but-not-beyond-hope

Water by the Spoonful

The scene I think is a pivotal moment in the play that has the realities interacting is the scene where Elliot and Yaz find Odessa's computer and starts talking to Orangutan on the computer. Prior to that, the only time the real life is interactive and not just glimpse of the real world and online world is when Odessa makes it. This time it is two worlds interacting without the middle person. When Elliot and Yaz comes into his biological mother's apartment to grab things to pawn off to get her sister some flowers for her funeral, they come across Odessa's website and Elliot, who is pissed off with his mother, tries to start things on her website, but when Orangutan outs his own addiction to pain medication. Obviously upset and angry, Elliot takes his anger out at Orangutan and then unplugs his mother's computer to sell it. When Yaz tries to get answers from him, having not know of his addiction, but Elliot deflects and pleads with her to let it go, which she does.

In this scene and the scene before, we saw the contempt Elliot had with his mother and people who are addicted in general, so to finally have the information out that he himself is an addict is jarring but somehow understandable. Elliot is in clear denial of his own problems and chooses instead to manifest his feelings of his own addiction upon his mother, who had hurt him in the past with her own addiction. He can't face what he has become so he tries to push off his guilt and turns it into anger at his mother. He hates what his mother's addiction did to her and his family, especially his sister. To have Elliot be confronted about his own addiction by another recovering addict while the realities intersect creates a stronger tie between the two worlds.