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.