My Comments!

1) Laine Korn--The Drowsy Chaperone
2) Yvette Bourgeois--Three Viewings 
3) Morgan Prestenbach--Fires in the Mirror
4) Sara Stevens--Next to Normal
5) Austin Thompson--On the Verge

It's been a great class, you guys.  Have a nice summer!

With much, much, much, some love,

Jordan Campbell

Show and Tell Post 3--Clybourne Park

Clybourne Park was written by Bruce Norris.  It premiered off-Broadway at Playwrights Horizons on February 21, 2010, where it was directed by Pam MacKinnon.  It premiered on the West End at the Royal Court Theatre in August 2010 (with Martin Freeman as Karl and Steve).  Finally, it premiered on Broadway at the Walter Kerr Theatre on April 19, 2012.  The play won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, the Tony Award for Best Play, the Laurence Olivier Award for Best New Play, and the Theatre World Award, and it was nominated for many others.  You can find the play here, or you can wait until September, when Swine Palace will be staging the play.

Clybourne Park is an unofficial sequel to the 1959 Lorraine Hansberry play A Raisin in the Sun, which was about the black Younger family attempting to move into the all-white neighborhood Clybourne Park.  The first act of Clybourne Park takes place during the events of A Raisin in the Sun, but from the perspective of the white family who is selling their house.  The characters are Russ and Bev, who are attempting to sell their house while grieving over the death of their son, Francine and Albert, Russ and Bev’s black housekeeper and her black husband, Jim, the clergyman, and Karl and Betsy, the neighbor and his deaf wife.   In the second act, all of the actors change characters, as the events of the play take place in the same house in 2009.  Over those fifty years, Clybourne Park has become an all-black neighborhood, the black characters represent a neighborhood organization, and the white couple is seeking to buy the house.  After lengthy discussions of housing codes, the conversation eventually turns to racism, to which both parties respond poorly.  At the very end of the play, a nearby worker finds an old trunk with some of Russ and Bev’s stuff, including their son’s suicide note.  We are transported back to 1959, and Bev catches her son, Kenneth, late at night. One of the very last lines of the play is “I really believe things are about to change for the better. I firmly believe that.”

An interesting dramaturgical choice to me is Bruce Norris’ insistence on staging very irrelevant dialogue.  In the first act, this decision manifests itself as many, many pages of dialogue about the correct and incorrect capitals of various foreign countries.  In the second act, the majority of the early dialogue is about indecipherable housing code regulations.  The version of this play that I read was 210 pages long, so that’s a really, really long time to spend on irrelevant stuff in a supposedly important play.  If I had to guess what precisely it means, I would think that it shows a connection from 1959 to 2009 that is consistent throughout the play, and the connection is ignorance.  In 1959, the owners of the house cannot name the capitals of foreign countries, showing their international ignorance.  In 2009, they don’t know the housing code regulations of their own neighborhood, perhaps showing domestic ignorance.

The structure of this play is one that utterly confounds me.  Since the story is told in 1959 and in 2009, the only consistent character in the entire play is the house.  It’s very hard to find a consistent plotline to follow here—essentially, Clybourne Park is two very, very similar plays that occur fifty years apart.  The choice of structure is probably the most interesting dramaturgical choice to me, as it goes against all history of a dramatic journey.  To set the second scene in 2009 with entirely new characters is a bold choice compared to setting it after the Younger deal went through in 1959; in that case, we would be able to see a really clear story with consistent characters.  However, as the play is, the overarching plot is that of the house and the neighborhood.  This play is more like Three Viewings than anything else.

Prompt 14--The Drowsy Chaperone

I think that the main distinction between the fictional Drowsy Chaperone musical and the frame of the Man around it is largely based in ambiguity.  In the musical-within-the-play, there is not much ambiguity—we know that the good guys are going to get married because the play is a comedy, and, of course, they do get married, along with everyone else.  By the end of the play, there really are not any questions to answer—Robert marries Janet, Tottendale marries the Underling, Aldolpho marries the drowsy chaperone, and Fieldzig marries Kitty.  However, within the frame story, nothing is so clear.  We know the Man’s opinions on theatre, as expressed in the very beginning, and we certainly know his opinions about The Drowsy Chaperone.  We don’t know anything else about him, even at the end of the play.  What does it mean when he is “flown into the flies”?  What does that say about his character?

Duration is also treated much differently between the frame story and the Drowsy Chaperone musical.  In the musical, there is a lot of time spent on some pretty silly stuff—take, for instance, the extended tap breaks in many songs and the sheer length of time spent on the utterly meaningless “Toledo Surprise.”  There’s also the spit-take scene, which, if it weren’t for the Man’s kind insistence that we skip through that scene, we would presumably have to watch it for much longer in the actual Drowsy Chaperone.  In the frame story, the duration is spent almost exclusively on the Man expressing his opinions on musical theatre and The Drowsy Chaperone.  Also, I find it pretty interesting that the song “Message from a Nightingale” only exists within the frame, actually, and does not exist in the fictional Drowsy Chaperone musical, so that would be one example of that frivolous, silly scene actually taking space in the frame, not in the musical itself.

Prompt 13--Three Viewings

My first thought when I read this prompt was Margaret-Mary Walsh, as she showed up to all of the funerals.  While she wasn’t necessarily a detail that anyone else missed, she was certainly the one who stuck out to me.  However, in researching just how she is presented in each scene, I came across another name—Nettie James.  She is spotlighted in Tell-Tale, as Emil notes that “Nettie James died yesterday.  She was 103… Terrible woman.  The Herald Star made up a headline for her obituary that read ‘Nettie James FINALLY dies.’ ”  However, I entirely missed that she was also the grandmother of Mac in The Thief of Tears.  Looking back, I apparently didn’t read that monologue very well at all—thus why I did so poorly on the questions from The Thief of Tears on the test.  Anyway, the realization that everyone thought of her as a terrible, terrible person definitely colors my perception of what I read in the second monologue.  However, as far as I can tell, Nettie James is not in Thirteen Things About Ed Carpolotti, which is rather disappointing.  Thus, this reference essentially only exists to give us a preconceived notion of a woman from Tell-Tale that we will later learn much more about in The Thief of Tears. 

A more abstract motif running through these monologues is the idea of a character not being who they appear to be.  In Tell-Tale, Emil waits until the very end of his monologue to mention that he has a wife after telling a very long story about his creepy crush.  Mac in The Thief of Tears begins her monologue with the line “I’ve been stealing jewelry off corpses for years.  Grandma’ll be a fuckin’ cinch,” which is possibly the most villainous line to ever begin a piece of literature; however, she counteracts this by acting very sentimentally throughout her monologue.  The same thing happens in Ed Carpolloti, but from a different perspective—instead of the narrator appearing to be something different to the audience, we learn that Ed Carpolotti appeared different to the narrator than he really was.

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