Prompt 5--Hornby

In Maria Irene Fornes’ The Conduct of Life, the progression of the rape scenes is pretty important.  Scenes three, five, and seven are all scenes in the warehouse with Orlando and poor Nena, but rape does not happen in every scene.  First, to start the progression, Orlando brutally rapes Nena in scene three, waking the audience up to that terrible atrocity.  It is terrifying, and many audience members would probably walk out or sit through it in hopes that it would be the last of such scenes.  Then, the tension comes back in scene five, but Orlando does not rape Nena; instead, nothing really happens, and the audience is probably pretty confused.  Many audience members would take it as a sign that Orlando is getting better and just does not want to rape her.  However, in scene seven, Orlando rapes Nena again, and the audience has to sit through another terrible rape scene, just after getting their hopes up that Orlando would stop.  It puts the audience in the mindset of Nena because, though they do not know what will happen any time Orlando enters the warehouse, they should prepare for the absolute worst. 

In the Lab Theatre’s production of Dutchman last semester, Lula’s apple was a recurring motif.  Obviously, the image of a woman eating an apple is a clear biblical allusion by itself in symbolist literature, showing Lula as a trouble-making, seductive creature, but its use in the play added other elements to it, as well.  For instance, in the beginning of the play, Lula is eating an apple and offers it to Clay, which he graciously accepts, foreshadowing his seduction and downfall.  When Clay has eaten the apple, he places the core on his book on the ground, showing that this seduction is hindering his ability to think.  At the beginning of scene two, Lula feeds Clay slices of an apple by cutting them off with her knife, showing Clay’s naïveté and full acceptance of what Lula feeds him, as well as foreshadowing Lula’s future use of the knife—stabbing Clay to his death.  In the script, this was not very specific—Lula enters with the apples, and they eat them together, which is a strong gesture in itself; however, I do not think that reading a motif has the same effect as seeing it produced onstage.  I think the visualization of the motif is substantially more important than seeing a word repeated many times in a paper script.