Comedies

The most important thing that reading these comedies has taught me is that you can't have a play that is entirely funny. If you write jokes back to back for the entire ten minutes of your ten minute plays, people are going to leave the playhouse wondering what the point was. You have to intersperse a serious(ish) theme into your play to be able to get any sort of point across to your audience. I guess dramas do this too, but I supposed I just didn't notice it as much in the dramas because i'm more used to reading them. In these comedies, the serious parts in the plays and the not-so-serious parts really stood out.
Probably none stood out so much to me as the ending part in "Duet for Bear and Dog" where the author emphasized the bear going out with her young "into the still of the night". Now, maybe having this dramatic moment be so dramatic was the entire point of the play, maybe it was meant to be satirical. Also, I suppose that the theme of getting rid of the bear humanely is a serious-ish theme. However, the serious at the end of this play didn't really work for me. It simply felt like it didn't belong there, and although the words themselves were nice, they seemed to be stuck in as if the author said, "oh no, I have to have a serious part in my play now, and i'm at the end and nothing's been serious!"
"Aimee" worked better for me as a sort of black comedy that interspersed serious themes. In an age of the Patriot Act and unauthorized survelliance, the play carries a strong political message that is easy to find and serious enough. However, this political message is emphasized by Madge revealing how truly ridiculous the political issue is.

Ten Minute Plays

In the past year, I've actually grown to quite like ten minute plays. I appreciate the talent it takes to develop a character in such a short amount of time. In a way, I think that writers have to be better in ten minute plays, because you have such a brief amount of time to capture your audience. You can't spend two acts developing a character, you have to develop him enough--i'm never going to say that the characters are fully developed--to where the audience isn't going to be hopelessly bored and disconnected from the action.
A tendency I have noticed--and whether this is a good or bad tendency I don't think is the point--is that for these plays to get really dramatic really fast. I'm not just making this judgment out of the plays we read, but in some ways I think it's easier to write a drama than it is a comedy. With a comedy, if the audience doesn't get it, all you end up with is a play that kind of lousy. However, with a drama, you get the point even if the writing/directing was lousy. You get that it's dramatic, and whereas you might not want to go see it again, you at least get in the right mood for it.
One of my favorite things about ten minute plays is their tendency to make us think about things in a new way. For example, when Eric in "dance" refers to dancing as "having enough control", that struck me as odd, because everyone has always emphasized dancing as losing control.Also, he refers to himself as not having enough control to dance. It's weird to me because one would think that Eric's concious choice of lifestyle(rebelling against established authority, for instance) is having a lot of control, isn't that the whole point? I think that made for a very interesting play
I also like the idea of creating mini-forwards int en minute plays. In bowl of soup, the idea of memory is turned on its head, because we are waiting the entire time to discover why Rob doesn't speak and what affects him so, until we find out about David. And yet, we still don't know the whole story, and it keeps us wanting to learn more.
All in all, I'm very excited about tackling the big subjects in these plays, because I think that where audience members could think a character or theme is cliche in a longer play, they won't necessarily here. I also think that these are going to be a huge challenge to get them interested right away.

Fences

I've determined August Wilson's writing style is a bit of a weird experience for me. On the one hand, I often find myself unable to put the play(August:Osage County or the Fences that we are reading now) down, but on the other hand, I don't feel like I should connect with it, since many of the experiences that the families in the plays have are very different from any experience i've ever had. Maybe that's the point, however, of his writing. Despite the fact that we are not all suppressed minorities and we don't all have this many problems in our family life(let's hope not, at least) we still enjoy his work.

One of the things I enjoyed most about Wilson's writing was his unique use of exposition. Instead of revealing it all to the audience at once-- Troy bought the house with Gabe's money, he is actually having an affair with Alberta, etc-- Wilson gives you hints before he actually reveals it to you. I like this. I feel like it keeps us reading, and acts as a sort of theatrical "forward" that prompts us to be surprised at the fact that Troy is actually having an affair even though he says he isn't.
But, there's another layer to what Wilson does that I think works well. Are we really surprised by the revelations during the play? If we were to observe closely and follow the mantra of "the author doesn't write even one word for no reason" we could see it coming. There are hints that all of this "hard work" Troy put in in the house never actually gets done, or that it isn't his hard work that got them living in a house. There are hints(given by Bono, mostly) that he is actually having an affair with Alberta. However, we may skip over those as a fact of everyday conversation. Wilson, using the technique of "realness", puts the answers to our questions right in front of our faces. We are just so used to lying in everyday conversation--more or less known as joking around about certain things that obviously aren't true-- that we tend to miss these things and attribute them to men having a good time and joking around.

The way he writes his characters allows for them to be simultaneously loved and hated. We appreciate Troy's Horatio Alger mentality: he works for his money, and gets it. He rose up from nothing to something, however little that something is. Yet, he's unaccountably mean and nasty, too busy complaining about things not getting done when he himself never actually seems to do anything. It's the same with Cory. We appreciate his vigor and wish to grow beyond what his father has, but then we find out he doesn't want to go to his Dad's funeral, and that, in actuality, he's alot like his Dad. I think this shows the true realism of the characters. No one is completely liked or hated, but each express their frustration and anger with their lives in certain, unique ways.