Amadeus

When I read the revision notes Amadeus, I was immediately struck by the fact that he worked the climactic sequence so many times. Previously, I had thought that out of any scene in your play, that would be the scene you would want to rework the least--if it's the culmination of your play, you would think it would be wonderful the way it was and not need reworking. However, when thinking it over and considering my own plans for revision as the time for Portfolios draws near, I find it quite makes sense to rework the ending/climactic scene so many times. I completely agree with him that endings are the most important(which is also why it's what i've mostly written in all of my pieces of plays) because I think that a great first step is to know where your going to end up, and then go back and decide how you're going to get there. I think that having the ending perfected allows you to finally establish the point of where you're getting to; and in my opinion there's nothing like endings that either leave you shocked or confused--I hate the cop-out endings that usually end with "And they all live happily ever after. What's most interesting to me about the revisions on Amadeus was how the rewriting of the ending, far from just changing the plot of the play(and often, it didn't change it much), the play actually was revised to allow showing of the villans--Salieri's-- humanity. To revise solely for that purpose, I think, shows wonderfully how you can take a play from just good to really great. I think, in his revisions, he unintentionally brings up a good point: you can't just see evil for evil. If you're going to have a play that connects characters to the audience--and with Amadeus I think this is especially important considering the time in which the play was taking place and the tendency for audiences to disconnect from such a "period piece"-- you can't just have the evil guy be evil, but you have to connect the evil to some fundamental part of humanity that makes the audience almost afraid to see that in themselves. The most bone chilling villans are those that simultaneously inspire sympathy and disgust.
Probably the most important thing I learned from these revisions is to make sure to connect each and every character to the audience--especially if you have a rather philosophical or antiquarian piece. The only way you're going to leave the audiences with that stunning ending is to both shove your point upon them and to not make things so cut and dry as simple good and evil.

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.

Eurydice

It's difficult to express how I feel about a play like Eurydice. On one hand, I've always like the somewhat stylistic form of theatre. I appreciate theatre as an art form, not just as another representation of reality that the audience comes to see. However, I believe it necessary for an audience member(any audience member sitting in the theatre) to have some form of connection with the play. Whether it is identifying with someone's struggles with loss, disease, or isolation, a really good play--which, of course, is all subjective to the audience member-- will be able to nail down all of these points and more, allowing the audience member with AIDS, for instance, to view a character's struggles with the disease with that much more of a connection.
My problem with Eurydice was that there weren't enough points of contact for me as an audience member. I liked the way she adapted the play off of the Greek myth of two lovers, and I think she did it without being cliche and too "Romeo and Juliet-like". However, I think it was written so stylistically that you lost out on some of the possible points of contact for the audience. One example would be the father's death(twice). Now, in her introduction ,she had said that this play was adapted both from the traditional Orpheus myth we get from Ovid and the too soon death of her father. For a Greek scholar, for example, the adaptation from the Orpheus myth would have given them a point of contact. For someone who has just lost their father, there's another. But that seems to all get lost in the excessive stage direction--yes, i also take issue with that, although I appreciate the poetry that the stage directions seem to be sometimes-- and Wonderland-esque world that is the Underworld. Sentences are so disconnected and yet cyclical--the double mentions of the wedding, for instance, which is one thing I think was done well-- that we lost a lot of the fluidity that I think would make the audience be sucked in.
I can also definitely respect that excessive stage direction is an art form. Susan Lori Parks does it, as i'm sure other authors do as well. But I'm not a huge fan. It seems like she's telling us how to direct/act the show, when she really should be stepping back and letting the actors and directors do their work. One of the beauties of theatre, literature, and other things is it's ability to depend on the reader for its interpretation. A director wanting to center the focus on her dead father and nothing else, for instance, should and could be given the chance to tend the show that way, focusing on certain aspects at the expense of others. But Sarah Ruhl seems to try to force us how to costume, how to dress, how to act. It doesn't seem like there's any room for adaptation, and unless the director/ actor/ audience is going to see every moment of the play exactly as she does, I don't think complete success with this plays performance will be possible.

Dialogues Day #1

Over the course of reading dialogues for the first day of class, i've discovered that, for me at least, there's a fine line between what I like and what I don't. It's difficult for me to explain why I like something, especially for this exercise. For one thing, dialogues are much more limited than monologues in my opinion. You can't just say to someone you're talking to(no matter how close you are to them) " I suddenly feel depressed and anxious because of my life" without the person thinking you're crazy and the audience thinking you don't know how to write. What you can say then, depends on what one would be able to say in normal conversation, most of the time not involving heart-wrenching revelations or admittances of your innermost feelings. On one hand, I think that to be difficult. You can't just come out and say something. On the other hand, it seems interesting.Like in so many of the dialogues here, you have to talk around something, using the characters' power of the spoken word to convey your message. Often what the characters are saying has nothing to do with what they're talking about directly(take Orphans, for example, I was quite confused as to what was going on the entire time) but in some way, what is happening to the other story of the other characters relates, or reveals something that you wouldn't have seen otherwise. I wasn't sure at first, but i've decided I like this, simply because of the realness of it. I definitely will try this in my monologues I think.
Another thing that I liked quite a bit while reading the monologues was when one character did essentially all of the talking and the other character just said, " Yes" or "No". I think the ability of those two words to say more than an entire page of monologue ever could is quite interesting(for example, in Closer) and demonstrates how a lot of actual "fights" go(very different from the dramatic yelling and screaming that usually happens in movies). One thing i'm trying desperately to stay away from in this is constantly talking about Shakespeare, because I love him, but could never hope to emulate him and will make myself crazy trying :).

The Laramie Project and the Vagina Monologues

One of my favorite things about the way Moises Kaufmanns’ play The Laramie Project was written was the narrator. On the first page, I was unsure about the narrator explaining to the audience about what the Tectonic Theatre Project was doing. I had felt it seemed unnecessary when throughout the course of the play; we were probably going to figure it out through the plot. However, I think that giving a little bit of explanation at the beginning did a few things. Firstly, it inserted a layer of realism into a theatrical event. What in my mind was unique about this play as a contrast to many others I had seen was that it was an actual historical event. I’ve seen plays that are based on events but take great dramatic license. Other than the narrator and some of the staging, this play didn’t seem to take that sort of license plot wise. In my opinion, the strict, interview style of writing—where one person would talk and then the narrator, and then another person—made the events in the play that much more potent. We know that it actually happened, and so we feel the events even more despite the fact that it never takes place as a part of the plot. The style of writing almost makes it more like a newscast than an actual play.
However, other aspects of the writing which were purely theatrical made for a wonderful reading experience. I loved the fact that there was a narrator throughout the entire thing. It gave the feeling that someone was guiding you through the description of the heroic events. One of the things I also love about theatre, and things that this play uses, was the fact that sometimes the narrator molded into characters. In theatre, different from movies, you have the ability to change characters onstage, providing the audience with a clear representation of who is playing whom. With the narrator changing into other characters, you know that obviously the narrator must be a part of the project, and although he is guiding you through the traumatic events following the Matthew Shepherd murder, he is also just as much a part of the actual action. I also loved the episodic way of writing where characters would change often. It gave it a news quality feel and allowed me to picture how you would stage that. Personally, a cool staging I think would be only four or five actors with all members in black, where lights would go on and off onto who was talking. You could have a tape of all of the court voices in the background at the end. I also loved the way the play got a bit more fluid with longer scenes as we got closer to the end. The way Kaufman wrote the characters, making sure to include the “ums” “uhs” and repetition when discussing the “thing”(aka being gay) made for a realism that I don’t think is often found in theatre. Overall, I think the writing was some of the best I’d ever read, and I would love to see this play performed.
I felt a little bit differently about the vagina monologues, although I don’t know why. It was odd to me that, despite the fact that it was written the same way in that the dialogue was episodic with breaks in between each character, the dialogue felt more contrived. It seemed like they were trying to be controversial, and it felt more theatrical then natural. You didn’t feel like the things they were talking about were things that anyone would actually ever say in real life, so it distanced you from reality to which you could appreciated the message it was trying to make, but didn’t actually think that it was something they would talk about on a news broadcast. I appreciated its political message of being comfortable with who you are, but I don’t know if I necessarily liked it as much as The Laramie Project.