Wednesday, November 6, 2013
Come See Eurydice! Talking Stones Promised!
When thinking about the quote I would include on my
publicity poster of Sarah Ruhl’s Eurydice,
the first quote that comes to mind is: “What are you thinking about?”. This
phrase is asked of Eurydice to Orpheus more than once in the play and is
referenced another time later. I would go as far as to say that this quote
captures a central theme of the play. Upon finishing the play, the audience
gets a sense that these two lovers who are“a little bit too in love,” are not
as they seem. They appear to be on different pages so to speak and in an
attempt to understand the page Orpheus is on, Eurydice often asks this question.
This quote could go further to describe Eurydice’s final action of going back
to her father at the end, despite Orpheus’ great attempt to get Eurydice back.
This makes the audience wonder what Eurydice was actually thinking during the
“loving” scenes between she and Orpheus at the beginning. This quote could work
on another level in the poster as well. Seeing a direct question would not only
entice the public to think, but would encourage this thought process to
continue during the viewing of the play. With this quote, I can see production
of this play emphasizing the inner thoughts of all the characters, with an
emphasis put on facial expression. I could also picture a few deliberate pauses
during the production in which the audience would have time to think about what
they just saw on stage.
Another quote that would work well on the publicity poster
could be: “How does a person remember to forget.” This is spoken by the Father
towards the end of the play when Eurydice leaves him and he is left with the
pain of losing his daughter. The Father destroys the string room he has made
for Eurydice and sits for a while before saying this. The quote could apply to
several characters in the play and would give the public some general idea of
the melancholic nature of the play. The pain of a loved one surrounds the play
and the desire to forget the pain is central to the plot, with the river acting
as the solution of this play. I could imagine a production of this play
emphasizing on the earnest and eager desire for the characters to forget their past
in an attempt to not experience the pain. I would imagine this production to
emphasize the importance of the river, possibly highlighting its design.
Love! Valour! Compassion! Innovation!
If a future historian were to look at Terrence McNally’s Love! Valour! Compassion!, he might
think that 1994 in America was a very interesting/disheartening/heartening
time. What I mean by that is that the historian might take note of the vast
grey area of the play when it comes to what’s wrong and what’s right. Most of
the characters in this play are constantly judging each other, these judgments usually
seen in monologues to which the characters speak directly to the audience. This
historian may be confused about the way in which the characters of the play
rank “sins.” For instance, a character in the play might put the wrong of
reading someone’s personal diary over the wrong of infidelity. In gist, every
character has such a distinct view of what they consider to be the “wrongest” of
all actions and in the world of this play, these characters are allowed to have
their own views. This is because the play is not based in reality; it is a
somewhat stylized play in which an ultimate, objective capital T-truth does not
exist. The historian would definitely pick up on the dramatic play structure
evolving. McNally decided that Love!
Valour! Compassion! did not have to stick to previously established rules
or norms of other plays. For example, the floor can instantly turn from a lake
to a house, the characters can talk to the audience and to each other, and
multiple scenes can be occurring all at once on the stage. This historian would
see how differently this play’s structure is in comparison to well-made plays,
like The Children’s Hour. The
historian might realize something distinctly different about this play in
regards to how each act ends. Never does the act end in some huge realization
followed by a neat climax. Each act ends quite softly and somewhat open-ended.
The play actually ends with John saying a simple word, but one that serves as a
motif in the play. “Anyway,” he says, while looking at the audience. This makes
it clear that McNally wanted some ambiguity for the audience to bring home with
them and think about.
The Children's Hour (to ruin lives!)
However
beautifully written, for obvious reasons, Lillian Hellman’s The Children’s Hour, I found difficult
to stomach. Seeing such evil nature portrayed in a young child, along with watching
a person mask her own sexual identity, is hard to handle. This is another play
that fits along with the well-made play structure relatively well, minus a few
parts. The place in the play that I found deterred the most from this structure
was in the final act. In a state of complete pessimism, Karen ends things with
Cardin and refuses to go to Vienna with him, saying that these troubles will
continue to follow them. Afterwards, Mrs. Tilford comes to the scene, telling
Karen that she now knows the truth and has already made arrangements to fix the
situation. If the play fit perfectly with the well-made play structure, the
character of Karen would take this news and use it to motivate some sort of
action, like going back to Cardin, and living
“happily ever after.” Instead, when Mrs. Tilford tells Karen to go back
to Cardin, Karen responds, clearly unmotivated, with a simple “Perhaps.” Mrs.
Tilford leaves and asks Karen to write her, to which Karen replies with, “If I
ever have anything to say.” This final act leaves the audience with a high
level of uncertainty, which is not a characteristic of the well-made play
structure. I definitely thing Hellman made this stray from the well-made play
structure deliberate. I think this choice was intended to give the audience an
idea of just a little gossip can ruin an entire person’s life; that sometimes
even when the truth is revealed, the person’s personal state can still not be
fixed. Homosexuality, especially in the time this play was written, was
something people were highly ashamed of, and with good reason, with society’s
prejudice for it being so high. If Lillian Hellman would have ended the play
with Karen going back to Cardin, I think it would have diminished the play’s
disheartening effect on the audience.
One Glass of H2O to Rule Them All
For the most part, Eugene Scribe’s The Glass of Water perfectly embodies the form of the well-made
play structure. There is a long exposition in which a secret that will drive
the plot is revealed, a climax occurring right before the end of each act, and
many obligatory scenes happening where the audience expects and sees certain
things happenings. The many revelations the audience discovers throughout the
play add for a high level of comedic effect. The point in the play, however, where
the play strays from the well-made stricture, is in the final act. This act
does not end with a completely beautifully tied ribbon. This is when the
Duchess and Queen finally find out that the girl Masham loves dearly is
actually Abigail. The Duchess and Bolingbrake have charmingly bitter, yet
friendly banter with each other, and the Queen instructs Abigail to marry
Masham. The Duchess has a husband to go to, Masham and Abigail can live happily
ever after, and Bolingbrake achieved the peaceful state he always wanted, but
the Queen is left, once again, with “…boring days…boring nights….a lifetime of
boredom!” Following this self pity, the Queen notices a new guardsmen she finds
particularly handsome and the audience can see a change in her disposition, due
to the discovery of possibilities within this guardsmen. That is where the play
ends. This leaves the audience with uncertainty of what will happen in the
Queen’s future, thus the story does not wrap up perfectly with the audience’s
awareness of the future of every character. This is where the play drifts from
the well-made play structure.
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