Prompt #12--On the Verge

For my series of posters, I would want to emphasize both the time travel aspect and the expansive vocabulary of the main characters.  Essentially, it would be two posters, with the first being a shot of an egg-beater in an upside-down umbrella in the woods and the second poster being a Norman Rockwell-esque painting from the outside of a 50s gas station/diner with Nicky’s Peligrosa Paradise Bar and Grill in neon lights in the background.  However, both of these pictures would be overlaid with various esoteric words that may or may not be in the script, emphasizing the intense vocabulary used by the ladies.  From a far distance, and, to most people, from a short distance, it would look like faded, jumbled, random letters in the background, as the words would be in tiny font, all capital letters, with no spaces, so it would look something like  “ISTHMUSEMBARCADEROPEREGRINATIONSINCONGNITAPROFORMACUPPACLAIRVOYANTTRUCULENTVERTIGINOUSPUNJIORINOCOHABERDASHERYRECALCITRANTSILURIANHIPPOPOTAMIIMUCILAGENOUSPROVENANCECIRCUMGLOBULARLYMILIEUUBIQUITOUSCALLIGRAPHYSERAGLIO.”  The effect I am going for is similar to one of the posters for Darren Aronofsky’s Pi. These words would be more faded in the second poster, and the words themselves would become slightly smaller and more obvious, reflecting the lack of reliance on a large vocabulary in the second act.  The words overlaying the pictures are not meant to draw focus away from the pictures, but to add texture to them.

The pictures themselves on the posters are to emphasize the time travel and intense change of scenery between the two acts.  The juxtaposition of the Victorian-era umbrella and the modern eggbeater hints at this, as well, and the effect of both being dropped in the middle of the woods creates a rather mysterious effect.  The second poster simply reflects the locations of the second act—the gas station/diner (which just happens to be a perfect cultural emblem for the American 1950s) where the ladies meet Gus and Nicky’s bar.

Prompt #11--Fires in the Mirror

Fires in the Mirror must be performed the way that it is written, with all scenes intact, as opposed to cutting out the first half of the play that is not strictly about the Crown Heights riots.  The play is structured so that Crown Heights is not mentioned or belabored for a very long time, and this is intentional, because the play is about identity more than it is the Crown Heights riots.  For one, we can see this in the title—the play is called “Fires in the Mirror: Crown Heights, Brooklyn and Other Identities,” not “The Crown Heights Riots: Themes and Identities.” Anna Deveare Smith contextualizes the Crown Heights riots within the larger scope of identity, and she flavors it with the natural effects that come from her playing every single part.

The very first section of the play, with the Ntozake Shange, Lubavitcher woman, and George C. Wolfe monologues, it titled “Identity.”  Similarly, the next section is titled “Mirrors.”  Of these, only the anonymous Lubavitcher woman’s monologue is even cursorily about the Crown Heights riots.  I’m not saying this to give fodder to the belief that these monologues should be cut; I’m saying that anyone who thinks that way should reconsider the text as a whole, and not just the source material from which Anna Deveare Smith worked.  Essentially, just look at the duration of time that the script spends between the two subjects—about half of the script is explicitly about the Crown Heights riots (which, by that point, are already contextualized in the frame of identity, especially with Anna Deveare Smith’s unique style), and the other half is explicitly about identity.  The two are essentially inextricable, and it would be a loss and an insult to the rest of the script to perform only one half or the other.

Blog Checkpoint #2 Comments

1. Dora Pereli's Detroit

2. Austin Thompson's Buried Child

3. Zac Thriffiley's Buried Child

4. Corey Vincent's Show and Tell

5. Yvette Bourgeois' Detroit

6. Sara Stevens' Detroit

Show and Tell Post #2--The Last Days of Judas Iscariot

Stephen Adly Guirgis’ The Last Days of Judas Iscariot was written in 2005 and first performed off-Broadway at The Public Theatre, where it was directed by Phillip Seymour Hoffman, with a cast that included Eric Bogosian as Satan and Sam Rockwell as Judas Iscariot.  It was also performed at the West End at the Almeida Theatre, and it is a part of Theatre Baton Rouge’s Turner-Fischer City Series in 2013.  You can find the play at http://solomon.nadr.alexanderstreet.com.libezp.lib.lsu.edu/cgi-bin/asp/philo/navigate.pl?nadr.1442.

The Last Days of Judas Iscariot is about a modernized trial to determine whether or not Judas Iscariot was guilty of betraying Jesus Christ and whether or not Judas should be sent to heaven or hell.  The play dramatizes many events of the betrayal in the form of flashbacks and testimonies, but it also includes many tangentially-related historical figures such as Mother Teresa and Sigmund Freud.  The play begins with Judas’ mother stating that if her son goes to hell, then there is no God.  The trial begins, and the prosecution calls Judas’ mother (who defends Judas’ character), Mother Teresa (who said that Judas didn’t listen to God), Satan (who claims not to have coerced Judas), and Caiaphas the Elder (who claims that Judas approached him about betraying Jesus).  The defense calls Simon the Zealot (who says Judas did it for God), Sigmund Freud (who claims Judas was insane), and Pontius Pilate (whom the defense attorney berates for sending Jesus to death).  In the final scenes, Judas complains that Jesus should have made him better, and Jesus responds asking for Judas’ love.  The end of the play is a monologue of a man named Butch Honeywell praying to Judas.

One of the most interesting choices that Guirgis makes in building this play is that he does not include Judas Iscariot in many scenes.  This is not a play that chronologically retells the story of the betrayal of Jesus; the play simply is not about that singular relationship between Jesus and Judas.  It is more about commentary on those events.  The characters who have the most lines are not Jesus, Judas, or Satan—they are the fictional lawyers, Fabiana Aziza Cunningham and Yusef el-Fayoumy.  This helps to distinguish the play as a wacky Stephen Adly Guirgis play that just happens to be about religious themes.  I think the use of many characters onstage talking about one singular character who rarely appears reinforces a theme regarding the judgment and absolution of a guilty person by the community around him.  This play is less about whether or not what Judas was verifiable wrong, but more about what the community around him thinks about the situation.  Anyone with a vague understanding of the Bible would know that Jesus would forgive Judas for anything, so there is not much to say about that story.  This ensemble play is primarily about the community—it could perhaps be titled Some Relevant People’s Thoughts on the Last Days of Judas Iscariot.

On the other hand, the choice that I entirely disagree with was Guirgis’ decision to give some of the angels and religious character stereotypical urban black dialect.  Saint Monica is perhaps the worst offender, with lines like “Saint Augustine—he stopped bangin’ whores and sippin’ on some wine, and he became learn-ed, so fucking learn-ed that he’s known as one of the Fathers of the Church, and you look that shit up!”  Honestly, everyone but Jesus has this modernized dialect to some extent; I feel like Stephen Adly Guirgis doesn’t know how to write outside of the “New York voice.”  Even if I don’t understand why he treats so many religious characters with that modern voice, it does make sense that he separates Jesus from them by leaving Jesus the way that everyone would expect him to be played.   

Prompt #10--Detroit

As Zac Thriffiley pointed out in class (much more eloquently than I would have), the city of Detroit has had a very strong connotation with social and economic collapse in the last few years.  The title certainly would not make any sense to an audience that saw the play before Detroit’s collapse.  Given the modern housing situation in first ring suburbs and the presence of the new neighbors, Sharon and Kenny, I would say that the point of Detroit is somewhere between dashed expectations and unstoppable deterioration. 

Throughout the 20^th century, Detroit has been a highly successful and important city, often noted as the automobile center of the world.   However, Detroit took the economic collapse especially hard, and any hopes of continued financial success were ruined.  In Detroit, Ben and Mary have high hopes for their new neighbors, and when it turns out that they are just drug-addled squatters, the effects are pretty devastating. 

The decline of Detroit was something that most people could not help to fix.  The options for many people would be to get out of town (as the majority did), as the deterioration of the city was inevitable.  Onstage, this is shown by the houses falling apart.  Also, Ben and Mary are helpless to stop the drug-fueled descent of Kenny and Sharon.  Really, the only thing that Ben and Mary did wrong was befriend these drug addicts and stick with them; I would say that this strongly parallels people not wanting to leave Detroit because they think that their fortunes would turn around.  These people were hurt the most.

Also, as I stated in class, it’s actually fairly similar to the title of David Mamet’s Oleanna.   No, the play is not set in New Norway, Pennsylvania, and Detroit is not necessarily set in Detroit.  That’s not the point.

Prompt #9--A Spoonful of Water

The first instance of the storylines merging in this play is when Elliot and Yaz get on the rehab forum and talk to Orangutan because they are trying to sell Odessa’s computer.  Elliot fakes being Haikumom, which Orangutan sees through very quickly.  Then, Orangutan suggests that Elliot become a part of a pain medication addiction forum, which offends Elliot greatly and lets him know that Odessa has been public with Elliot’s addiction.  This scene does a couple of interesting things that are necessary plotwise.  First, it reveals Elliot’s addiction, which had been unmentioned thus far in the play.  Secondly, it aggravates Elliot into hating his mother even more.  The fact that Orangutan almost immediately notices that Elliot is not actually Haikumom seems to fit into the recurring theme of emotional presence over physical presence; that is, the play stages the forum members as speaking to each other directly because they are emotionally available for each other despite the physical distance between them, whereas Elliot and Odessa are rarely onstage conversing with each other because neither of them are emotionally available for the other, despite how physically near each other they are for the majority of the play.  Also, the poor maternal relationship between Elliot and Odessa is pretty similar to Orangutan’s nonexistent relationship with her birth mother.  From the beginning of the play, Orangutan and Elliot have traveled a very far distance to receive some kind of closure from their birth mother; however, by the end of the play, neither of them would succeed.  

Prompt #8--Buried Child

I should start by saying that I generally see Buried Child as a theatrically realistic play—like most everything by Sam Shepard, there are copious details in the stage descriptions regarding little set decorations that help place the scenes in a world that is consistent.  Buried Child is stylistically very similar to Fool for Love, which also lends itself to kitchen-sink realism, but includes the ghostly, fantastical Old Man.  However, the world of Buried Child is NOT logically consistent, even if the set disguises itself as such.  The primary problem I run into when reading the play is the subject of family bloodline.  The play never really resolves the tension between whether or not Vince is actually Tilden’s child, and, if so, what relationship he has to the buried child.  For some reason, no one ever brings up Vince’s birth, and Tilden only acknowledges the birth of his murdered child.  If the play is trying to be remotely true to real life (or even just simple logic!), then something has to give, especially since we actually see the remains of the dead and buried child at the end of the play.  Because of this, I would describe Buried Child as realistic on the surface level, but illogical on a deeper, nonrealistic level.  Similarly, there is the unexplained growth of unplanted crops in the back yard.  While it is not unfeasible for corn to grow very high in the back yard, and it is not entirely impossible for there to be some way that the corn was planted, the occurrence of the excess growth of corn, as it is explained in the play, it utterly illogical and unrealistic. 

Prompt #7--Noises Off

A running motif throughout Noises Off (especially the ends of the acts) would be the curtain lines.  The curtain lines exist on different levels that affect each other throughout the course of the play.  For instance, the curtain line to the first act of the metadramatical farce Nothing On is “When all around is strife and uncertainty, there’s nothing like a good old-fashioned plate of sardines!”  Nothing On is essentially designed as a typical older farce, which would very often have curtain lines to bookend a scene. The Nothing On curtain line seems to underscore the action of Noises Off in every act; after all, every time the players perform Nothing On, there is nothing but strife and uncertainty.  There is also the curtain line of the first two acts of Noises Off, in which the director, Lloyd, says “And curtain!”, which is as metatheatrical of a curtain line as there can be.  The final line of the play, however, is a combination of the curtain line of Nothing On and the curtain line of Nothing Off, as the Burglar Selsdon misspeaks his line to say “When all around is strife and uncertainty, there’s nothing like a good old-fashioned plate of curtain!” 

            I actually think this line is a great start to understanding the play.  Essentially, the plot of each act is that, no matter what craziness befalls the actors onstage or behind the stage, it will all be over if they finish the act.  The curtain is what saves them, especially in act 3.  The rest of all three acts is pure chaos—truly, it is nothing but strife and uncertainty until the final moments of each act when the curtain comes in.  Specifically, I think that the final moment of the play, in which all actors bring down the curtain as an ensemble, shows the unified cast finally achieving a victory.   Even if the production was terrible and hectic, at least it is over as soon as the curtain hits the stage.