Prompt 5: Hornby

Hornby believed that motifs are meant to fortell and support the plot of a story. They are repeated often throughtout the text so that they are hard to miss. If an audience can pick out the motifs that are put into a play, they can gain a better understanding of the story.

1)      A motif from Vogel’s How I Learned to Drive is driving instructions. Driving instructions are repeated all throughout the play, especially between scenes. The driving lessons seem to direct Lil Bit’s memories. “You and the Reverse Gear”, for example, means that we are heading into a flashback. The use of this motif helps the audience understand the sequence of the play.

2)      The other day, I was watching my favorite Disney movie, “Sleeping Beauty” with a few of my friends. I noticed a reoccuring element in the film is dreams. When Aurora is a baby, the fairies bestow gifts upon the princess. They display these gifts with dream like visions. Later, she sings the song, “Once Upon a Dream” as she describes her meeting with Philip. Vision- like dreams are also used when Milificent puts visions of Aurora in Philip’s head. This movie is all about sleep, and when we sleep, dreams come naturally. This movie shows that they go hand in hand

Show and Tell Post.. The Nerd: by Larry Shue

For my show and tell post, I read The Nerd by Larry Shue. If any of you have read his plays before, you could have guessed that THIS WAS THE MOST HILARIOUS PLAY THAT I HAVE EVER READ. There was not one point where I was bored while reading this play, and I don’t think that I have ever laughed as much as I did at Shue’s crazy characters and situations. This play premiered at the Milwaukee Repertory Theater in April 1981, and Shue actually starred in this production. It later ran on Broadway in 1987. It was also produced overseas in 1982 by the Royal Exchange Theatre Company in Manchester, England, and later had a run on West End.  (http://nouveau.home.comcast.net/~nouveau/shue/) You can purchase a copy of the script online. http://www.amazon.com/The-Nerd-Larry-Shue/dp/0822208113

The play opens on the Birthday of Willum Cubbert, an architect living in Terra Haute, Indiana. The first act comprises of William’s birthday dinner, and his guest list makes for an interesting mix of people. First, is Willum’s on and off again girlfriend, Tansy, who tries to make the whole special and fun for him. Then there’s his best friend, Axel, who is an extremely sarcastic play critic who likes to make fun of everyone he meets. The Waldegrave family is also in attendance. Warnock Waldegrave (aka Ticky) is Willum’s meand and easily angered boss. His wife, Clelia, is a sweet, but easily stressed woman who carries dishes with her to break whenever she gets too upset. Their son, Thor is a kid as mean as his father, and spends most of the first act locking himself in either Willum’s room or the hall closet. The party seems to be going well until the arrival of Rick Steadman, the man who saved Willum’s life in Vietnam. Rick continuously ruins the evening whether by saying innapropriate things, unintentionally insulting people, or even causing physical harm. After the party is ruined, he literally moved in with Willum who doesn’t want to say anything because the man saved his life. Finally, however, after Rick causes Willum to lose his job, the architect and his best friends try to coerce Rick into leaving with their crazy, fabricated traditions. This doesn’t work, however, and Willum loses control and kicks Rick out. Willum decides to follow Tansy as she moves to Washington, and we learn that the whole ordeal was a plot set up by axel and his friend (who pretended to be the real Rick S.) to keep Willum and Tansy together.

Shue makes really brilliant Dramaturgical choices in regards to this play. The first is his choice to use crazy characters. Every person that Shue creates for this play is so over-the-top, that it is almost hard for the audience to believe that they are real. They are crazy, but they are so fun and entertaining, that the audience willingly accepts them completely. Shue over-exaggerates the small quirks that everyone has, and everyone can see a bit of themselves in these characters. If the audience did not relate to the characters, then they would not appreciate the situations created in this play as much.
A second dramaturgical choice that Shue makes is his use of slapstick comedy. This show is very physical, and a lot of the actions performed by the characters are detailed in the script. Shue knew exactly how he wanted something to be acted. This show is full of people spinning, bumping into each other, and even poking each other in the eye. Shue was very descriptive about how he wanted his vision portrayed.

Prompt 4: How I Leaned to Drive

Dr. Fletcher was right. I loved this play way more than I liked The Conduct of Life. How I Learned to Drive had a greater effect on me than the other. I could really feel with Vogel’s characters, and that is something that I had trouble doing with the characters created by Fornes. I don’t know what it is about plays like this, but I find them really interesting and thought provoking. For me, a great play will leave my mind reeling.

I actually really loved Vogel’s use of the chorus members. I did a play once that had a very similar character set up: two main characters and a “greek chorus” that take on the various filler characters that are still a part of the story. These characters weren’t important enough to the plot to need their own actor. Having a few people playing the many superfluous characters eliminates the complexity of having too many people on stage. The audience is able to focus on the characters that are really important, while the other characters can fade into the story.

Something else about this play that I found really interesting was Vogel’s use of pantomime. When I first began to read the play and the stage directions described the interaction in the car between Lil Bit and Peck, I considered that Vogel chose to make the action less appalling to general audiences. As I continued reading, however I noticed that I was starting to wonder if peck was so bad after all. I thought that if the audience had seen his pedophilic more directly, it would keep us from having sympathy for him. Vogel does this for a reason. We almost get to see peck through Lil Bit’s eyes. She really does care for him. We can hear it in the words she says, and we can see it in times like the dance where she only has eyes for him. The audience begins to see the man beneath the monster. This compassion that we develop makes our shock even more intense when we see the scene of their first encounter, and the action is no longer pantomime. It is meant to remind us that what Peck did was bad, even though he may not have been a bad person.

Prompt 3: Conduct of Life

It is obvious that Fornes chooses to strip away at his scenes until they are sharp and jarring to the audience. Unlike Trifles and Overtones which are both detailed in their own way, The Conduct of Life purposely lacks the details that create a fulfilled world. Fornes wanted to leave his audience dissatisfied and curious. It’s like people watching in a way. You get a small glimpse of someone’s behavior, but the rest of their existence is left to the imagination.

I found myself almost entranced with these characters. Fornes places a huge emphasis on the social environment of the play, and she makes the Dramaturgical choice to create two opposing psychological levels in each character. First we have Orlando, who speaks often of the problems in his government, yet he never seems to notice his own personal problems. His wife, Letitia has this big speech about how she could never stand to hurt a deer, and when she sees a poor girl who is obviously suffering, she does absolutely nothing to help her and even forces the child to take her blame when she murders her husband. Then we have Nena, herself, who doesn’t speak at all in the play until almost the end, when she voices the most eloquent and beautiful monologue in the script. Finally there is dear Olympia. All throughout the story, it is hinted that she has some sort of mental handicap, yet she turns out to be wiser and more kind-hearted than any of the other characters. These distinct, double personalities were specifically chosen to make the audience reflect upon themselves and how they truly are.

One of the definitions of conduct is the direction or management of something (how it is executed). At first I thought that the play’s title reflected Orlando’s conduct (as in personal behavior), but after closer thought, I concluded that the title reflects the actual conduct of the character’s lives. In this play, we see how these characters choose to manage both themselves and their surroundings. It is not titled after the characters behaviors but more how they choose to live based on the people around them.

Prompt 2: Trifles

I first imagined the possibility of a production of Trifles with an abstract, minimalist design with skepticism. This play has so many details that are all important to the plot. The story is meant to show their significance when most people would miss them in comparison to the big picture. The men overlook so many things that are learned to be critical in determining Mrs. Wright’s motive. I thought of a version of this play without the visual details, and, at first I thought that it would lose this effect. The more details that the production contained would make the women’s discoveries less apparent. I then thought more about the text, itself. In the proposed production, the simple set would put more emphasis on the actual words and the descriptions that they provide. This would leave what is not shown to the imagination. If you read the script, you can see that every important detail is described thorough words. The physical details of the world are merely supplementary to the script and are not necessarily integral to the audience’s experience.

The only reason that I would have trouble with this alternative production is the intention behind it. If the stage was more simplistic in order to add to the audience’s imagination, the austere set would serve its purpose. The director, however, wants his production to, “Focus on the people, not on things," and that goes completely against Glaspell’s intentions. The play is supposed to make the audience concentrate on the details most. I can imagine a production with a stripped-down set, but not or the reason that the director wants. 

Prompt 1: Overtones Response!

By the third time I read Alice Gerstenberg’s play, Overtones, I found that the rules of its artistic world had become somewhat comprehensible. The world was developed so that the psyche of it's characters is split into two, physical beings. Harriet and Margaret, the controlling personalities, are visible to everyone in the world, including their inner desires and the desires of other egos. Each primitive personality, however, are never seen by the civilized personas and can only be heard by their own egos and other inner desires. This rule is described in the stage directions and dialogue of the play and is shown to the audience through the fact that Harriet and Margaret never look at Maggie and Hetty while the later duo speak directly to their egos. The audience can see which inner nature is connected to which ego by the costumes they wear. Each primitive personality wears a darker version of their complement’s attire, but they wear the same color. When the ego is trying to hide their shadowy inner nature, the unsophisticated personalities cover their faces with veils close to the light colored ensemble. The stage directions describe that, “Chiffon is used to give a sheer effect, suggesting a possibility of primitive and cultured selves merging into one woman.” This makes the true intentions of the controlling personality shielded from both parts of the other character’s psyche.

There is a rule to this world that is not directly stated like the others, but it can be inferred though the actions and stage directions of the play. This rule describes how the two unrefined personalities can see and communicate with each other. This phenomenon does not occur all the time, but they reveal themselves under certain circumstances. When Maggie and Margaret are about to arrive, the stage directions state that, “As HETTY moves in the following scene the chiffon falls away revealing now and then the gown of deeper dye underneath.” This made me wonder if Hetty and Maggie could reveal themselves to each other by intentionally or unintentionally disturbing their veils. Of course, Margaret and Harriet could never see them; otherwise Harriet would look at Hetty at the beginning of the play. I then realized that every time Hetty and Maggie communicate, they are either moving or purposely addressing the other directly.