Sideshow of the Damned: A kind of anthology schlock horror play, Sideshow of the Damned brings together four ghoulish tales presided over by a dementeSideshow of the Damned: A kind of anthology schlock horror play, Sideshow of the Damned brings together four ghoulish tales presided over by a demented carnival barker who serves as narrator. The individual episodes themselves vary in tone and style, but they're all gruesome. Ranging from a mad scientist who impregnates a woman with roach-human hybrid babies, through a vampire-werewolf couple who turn the tables on a murderous fortune-teller and her henchman, through zombies and lesbian nuns, these stories draw on a set of conventional and unconventional horror tropes, combined with a healthy dash of gallows humor and ironic referentiality to other works of horror, either famous or schlocky in their own right.
For some reason I never really wanted to read Terrence McNally, even though I didn't know anything about him or his work. Just something about the namFor some reason I never really wanted to read Terrence McNally, even though I didn't know anything about him or his work. Just something about the name put me off. But I'm glad I did read this play. It's a very interesting take on the old Corpus Christi plays going back to the medieval period, but with the twist that Jesus (or Joshua, as he's called here) is a modern (1990s, I guess) gay/bi man from Corpus Christi, TX. He still preaches a message of universal love, brotherhood, and acceptance, but now much of the opposition to Joshua is rooted in homophobia more than in critiques of his theological threat to the Jewish priests and Romans. https://youtu.be/5zvR7SYTSkg...more
I read because I'm taking part in a performance of the radio play with Sock & Buskin--my community theatre company. I'm reading the part of Professor I read because I'm taking part in a performance of the radio play with Sock & Buskin--my community theatre company. I'm reading the part of Professor Richard Pierson.
Having just read H.G. Wells' novel shortly before this, I was slightly surprised how different this radio play is from the novel, despite this being billed as a radio version of Wells' work. I mean, for one thing, in the novel the Martians land in Woking, outside London, and here they land in New Jersey. I suppose the difference makes sense for a US listening audience rather than a UK one, but it's still a major change. There are also a lot of characters that don't exist in the original, and some characters who are dramatically changed. For instance, in the original, Wells' narrator survives with the help of an artilleryman who lives through a battle with the Martians, then they get separated, and towards the end of the novel they meet up again. But when they are reunited, it's clear that the artilleryman's mind has deteriorated, since he dreams up these grandiose schemes of surviving underground and rising up against the Martians--all tinged with a eugenics-style assessment of who should live and who shouldn't. But in the radio play, the character is listed as "stranger" and gives Pierson the unhinged rant from the artilleryman's last section; what we lose is the contrast between the rational, reliable, and trustworthy fellow of the earlier chapters and the demented eugenicist ambitions of the survivor.
That being said, there is much overlap between the text of the novel and the radio play--despite some sections being created out of whole cloth. For instance, the stranger's dialogue is largely taken straight from the artilleryman. And much of Pierson's memoirs draw directly from the language of Wells' narrator, even though Pierson is an astronomer and Wells' narrator was a philosophical writer....more
Lodewijk de Boer's The Buddha of Ceylon: This is a confusing play, as portions of it seem relatively followable, but then there are odd moments that ILodewijk de Boer's The Buddha of Ceylon: This is a confusing play, as portions of it seem relatively followable, but then there are odd moments that I don't understand--and I'm not sure whether that's because this is in translation, because I'm not seeing the show performed, or because De Boer is a somewhat experimental dramatist. The basic story revolves around a tenuous situation in a Dutch colony in South America in 1943. Dutch authority has been shaken by the Nazi conquest of the home country, and the colonized subjects are restless under colonial rule. In this sense--and especially with Theodor, the colonial governor, being a white supremacist--the play draws clear links between the violence of Nazi occupation and the violence of Dutch colonial occupation. However, the play is also vague at times, and seems maybe even self-contradictory. For instance, at one point Alban (a Jewish refugee from the Netherlands seeking safety in the Americas) introduces his half-Chinese wife as his half-sister, then introduces her as his wife to the same people, and no one seems concerned about that situation. Again, I'm not sure if it's a translation issue or if I missed something on some level. But there are odd bits like that. https://youtu.be/rbxIn77-xe4
Judith Herzberg's The Wedding Party: A formally experimental play, The Wedding Party consists of a ton of very short scenes--around eighty, I believe. Vignettes really, rather than scenes as such. Set at a wedding reception, the play explores the interpersonal relationships between the guests, families, and ex-husband and ex-wife of the newly married couple. These relationships are generally strained by various interpersonal issues, but there is also a larger concern because almost everyone at the reception has had their life shaped by the Holocaust. Some people are survivors. Some people took in Jewish children and hid them as gentiles. Some people were the children taken in and hidden. But the anxieties about Jewish identity, about the history of the Holocaust, about life and death, etc. deeply mark these short fragmentary scenes, developing the relationships and the individuals in an almost pointillist fashion, with individual dots of scenes coming together to form a picture only comprehensible when viewed as a whole. https://youtu.be/m_MFmEQ9MVQ
Arne Sierens's Drummers: This play utilizes a kind of kitchen sink realist approach to addressing questions of poverty, precarity, and the lives of the poor--but Sierens definitely uses some non-realist elements to keep the style unique and interesting. Perhaps the most prominent one is repeated use of stream-of-consciousness monologues, in which characters pull together thoughts that don't necessarily always follow logically and speak them as a continual speech. https://youtu.be/D44x_gFMAJQ
Karst Woudstra's Burying the Dog: This is a good play, with some slightly odd detours--again, I'm not sure if it's the translation or if the Dutch just kind of are into weird theatre, or whether it's just a product of so many of the plays being from the 80s, with the theatre culture of that era. Like many of the other plays in this collection, this has significant themes focused on the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands (see, also, Buddha of Ceylon and Wedding Party) and on the Dutch tendency to be fairly restrained and repressed (that's a historically protestant culture for ya). https://youtu.be/wWpXbL_-J5Y
Frans Strijards's The Stendhal Symdrome: I tried reading this one and couldn't really get into it. Sorry....more
I really like the medieval English morality play Everyman, and I really like the work of Carol Ann Duffy, so this is an exciting version for me. It's I really like the medieval English morality play Everyman, and I really like the work of Carol Ann Duffy, so this is an exciting version for me. It's a particularly interesting adaptation, because it's not easy to modernize an allegory. People today simply don't do allegory. It's not a genre that modern authors write or that many modern people read, unless we're specifically seeking out something like medieval literature. So, that makes it challenging to adapt a play that's straight-up allegory and make it meaningful for modern theatre audiences. One strategy Duffy uses for this is by making most of the allegorical work something that happens in Everyman's head as he's plummeting off a balcony to his death. So, rather than seeing Everyman literally going around and asking for the help of Fellowship, Kindred, Worldly Good, etc., we see a kind of life-flashing-before-his-eyes scenario, but in which his brain imagines the events of the original play.
Another thing Duffy does is tones down the Catholic elements of the original play. Originally, Knowledge took Everyman to confession and penance/self-flagellation in order to repent his sins and show contrition before God, but here that is completely cut out. Instead of basically coming back to the teachings of the Church, Everyone instead comes to a kind of philosophical acceptance of his morality and the transitory nature of life. It's not deeply theological, more like "spiritual." But likely more effective for contemporary theatre audiences, who are less likely to be medieval Catholics than audiences for the original Everyman were. https://youtu.be/W7hLhHqznnc...more
I'm going to be in a production of this play coming up in Sept., playing Ernie (a relatively small role).
I have mixed feelings about this play, with tI'm going to be in a production of this play coming up in Sept., playing Ernie (a relatively small role).
I have mixed feelings about this play, with three major misgivings. Basically, the play is relatively fun. It's a murder mystery in which Alex, the fiance of dead leading lady Monica, uses his skills as a playwright to create scenarios ascribing motives to everyone in the production that had just semi-flopped the night Monica supposedly killed herself. The play is a Mousetrap type affair--and Hamlet is directly referenced in the show--meant to draw out the killer and expose that this was murder, rather than suicide. Everyone in the production, which occurs one year later, is apparently resistant to actually participating, but are convinced to continue through a series of persuasive techniques on Alex's part. Overall, it's relatively enjoyable.
I said I have three major misgivings...well, two major and one minor misgiving might be more accurate. The minor issue is that this is a play all about the theatre. Yes, I know playwrights do this all the time. We love writing about the theatre and seeing actors act about acting. And while I appreciate metatheatre as much as the next person, it can also feel a bit thin when a playwright is so overt about just setting a play in a theatre.
The more major issues are both structural. The first is a general structural issue in terms of storytelling broadly. Much of the first quarter of this play just involves Alex recounting the events of the original production leading up to Monica's death. While some of the action is actually performed, it's really retrospective. And it definitely has elements that are overtly expository, rather than letting us follow the events in real time. This is also a concern because we know that Alex is a playwright--he is a creator of fictions, and so there's an open question about how reliable his story is, whether we can trust his word. For a while, I actually figured he might be the murderer and this whole thing was an elaborate confession. But it turns out we can trust Alex's version of events from that night--at least until the other members of the production arrive.
The second structural problem I have with this play is specific to the structure of murder-mysteries. *Fair warning, this is going to give pretty clear hints about the murderer* Throughout the overwhelming majority of the play it is literally impossible to work out who the murderer is. The only time that we as an audience/readers even learn that this person knew Monica and had a motive to kill her is in the confession, which takes place in the last roughly five pages of the play. Before that, this character was--to the best of our knowledge--completely unfamiliar with Monica, apart from hearing about her widely reported death in the papers. The only hint, as far as I can tell, of who might be the killer is that when this person arrives Alex tells them to remain out of sight in the back of the theatre until they're needed. But even this comes with a perfectly logical explanation. And while Alex does say that in a murder-mystery, "You take the audience by the hand and lead them in the wrong direction. They trust you and you betray them," it's incredibly unsatisfying to have a murder-mystery in which you're so betrayed that working out the answer is virtually impossible. Audiences/readers should at least be able to plausibly guess correctly, rather than just giving us an entire explanation--complete with relationship to the victim, motive, and opportunity--basically in exposition right at the end of the play. Structurally, it's a piss off. https://youtu.be/DWW4Iub4Nt0...more
Although this isn't as well known as the Second Shepherd's Play (which is, admittedly, more bizarre), this is an interesting play in its own right. OnAlthough this isn't as well known as the Second Shepherd's Play (which is, admittedly, more bizarre), this is an interesting play in its own right. One thing that makes it interesting is that it does a lot of the same things that the Second Shepherd's does in order to get an audience of medieval northern English shepherds and farmers to identify with the shepherd characters--bemoans how much rural people suffer, for instance. And there's a comparable element of the carnivalesque in this play--though in the Second Shepherd's it's much less directly carnivalesque, with Mak's sheep stealing incident. But here, there's pretty overtly carnival/festival references, with the shepherds playing a kind of make believe in which the Gil (the first shepherd) pretends to lead a flock of sheep to market, even though he's going to the market to buy replacements because all his sheep died; John (the second shepherd) pretends to stop him, and in something that could come directly out of Punch and Judy, Gil threatens to beat him about the head. Then when Slowpace (the third shepherd) arrives, the three sit down to a pretend feast with a ton of fancy dishes, sauces, condiments, wines, and ales. None of it's real, but they have a jolly good time pretending.
At the same time, there's one major thing that this play does that departs from the Second Shepherd's. This play engages in a kind of Biblical exegesis, which was very popular in the medieval period among scholars and theologians, but probably wouldn't have been part of the everyday theology of common people--and certainly wouldn't be how first century BCE shepherds in Palestine were thinking. Basically, the idea was that everything in Jewish scriptures and as much as possible of Greco-Roman material (though more Roman than Greek when this play was written in the 1400s, I believe) needed to be brought into a consistently line with Christian doctrine, and so Jewish scriptures were re-interpreted so that Jewish patriarchs because types of Christ--that is, they represented elements of Jesus' story, and therefore hinted at the coming of Jesus. Along with this, both Jewish and Greco-Roman prophecy was re-interpreted as referring to Jesus whenever it could be read so, even at a stretch and pretty much always by ignoring the original context from which these sources come. The reason this is relevant is because there's a lengthy section in the First Shepherd's Play, immediately after an angel announces Jesus' birth, that the shepherds talk through all these Jewish and Greco-Roman prophecies that supposedly foretold the coming of Jesus. It's likely quite boring dramaturgically, but because the goal of these plays was to inform a public that could not read the Bible about theological matters, this serves a clear pedagogical function, which isn't as strong in the Second Shepherd's Play. https://youtu.be/EGmGaQWrWhY...more
This play is inspired by the kind of comedies written by Terrence, but it's definitely not as well developed--probably because the 12th century didn'tThis play is inspired by the kind of comedies written by Terrence, but it's definitely not as well developed--probably because the 12th century didn't have a strongly established theatrical/dramaturgical tradition rooted in actual performance, whereas Terrence did. That being said, this does utilize several of the tropes that were common in Roman comedy and Greek New Comedy, as well as being carried forward into the comedia dell'arte. Figures like the greedy miser, the lustful old man, the sneaky servant who wants the pleasures of the flesh, the ingenue, the braggart soldier, etc. There's also a lot of word play and classical allusions, which reflect the likely role of this document as a teaching text--something to help schoolboys learn Latin....more
There are portions of this play I really like, especially the transtemporal elements where Sara Baartman appears to Denise as a kind of spirit guide hThere are portions of this play I really like, especially the transtemporal elements where Sara Baartman appears to Denise as a kind of spirit guide helping her explore the challenges of having a Black woman's body in a western society that objectifies and fetishizes Black women's bodies. Baartman--better known as the Hottentot Venus--is a major example of this. She was taken from her home in South African and "displayed" in England because of how large her butt and thighs were. She was a perfectly normal person, who was shown as a colonial/racist "curiosity." This process helped fuel a bunch of scientific racism, wherein white male scientists postulated a bunch of racist bullshit about Black people (and Black women in particular) being subhuman, a different species from white people, etc. And those attitudes continue to influence social perspectives today, even though they have been scientifically debunked. Black women's bodies continue to be objects of extra scrutiny and attention, which produces all kinds of self-esteem and body image issues. And in this play Denise seems to have a kind of alienated and yet fascinated relationship with her own body. It seems like she's built a kind of distanced relationship to it, and yet in her job at a clothing store she constantly observes and works with female bodies.
I like this thematic element. But this play is what I would call impressionistic: it brings together a lot of different strands, some more realistic and some more dream-sequence style. This is a very popular contemporary playwrighting technique, but I'm just not a big fan. It probably works better on stage than it does on the page, but since I'm reading this play, that's what I'm going from. https://youtu.be/BbsITj9mj74...more
York Corpus Christi Plays The Ordo Paginarum: The Creation: The Nativity: The Shepherds: The Slaughter of the Innocents: The Crucifixion: The Harrowing of Hell: The Resurrection: The Last Judgement: The York Mercer's Indenture:
The Chester Plays Play of Adam and Eve: Play of Noah's Flood: Play of the Shepherds:
The N-Town Plays Mary Play: The Nativity:
The Cornish Ordinalia Noah and the Ark: The Crucifixion: The Death of Pilate:
The Welsh Biblical Plays, The Three Kings of Cologne:
John Lydgate A Disguising at Hertford Castle: A Disguising at London: Mumming at Eltham: Mumming at Windsor: Mumming for the Mercers of London: Mumming for the Goldsmiths of London: Mumming at Bishopswood:
Hrothsvita is a super interesting playwright, in part because there's no agreement on whether or not her plays were (or were meant to be) performed duHrothsvita is a super interesting playwright, in part because there's no agreement on whether or not her plays were (or were meant to be) performed during her lifetime. There are some indications that they could have been, but given the medieval Church's opposition to theatre, it's also entirely possible that these were just written to be read/studied as a guide for learning Latin. Personally, I think they probably were performed, though likely just by students or nuns at the convent where Hrothsvita lived. And the ending of Abraham contributes to my belief that they were likely performed.
The play is about a hermit named Abraham, who decides to raise his young ward Mary in the ascetic lifestyle, but when she is seduced by a false monk, she despairs and runs away, becoming a prostitute to support herself. Abraham sends his friend to go find her, and when the friend tells him what's become of Mary, Abraham disguises himself as a client and goes to the brothel, eats a feast, and then takes Mary to a bedroom where he reveals his true identity and convinces her to abandon her life of sin and trust that through repentance God will forgive her. Mary agrees, though initially she despaired of earning God's forgiveness. Abraham takes her back to the caves, and she does penance, to the approval of Abraham and his friend Ephrem.
The thing in this play that makes me think this was meant for performance is the ending, where Abraham and Ephrem are talking about how good a model Mary's penance is for others who would see her suffering or hear her cries. Mary isn't actually in the scene, on paper anyway. She has no lines in the scene, which allows her to be absent. But, Abraham and Ephrem talk about SEEing her wearing a hair shirt and fasting, about HEARing her prayers for forgiveness, and about how seeing and hearing these things would be a great lesson for anyone about the glory of God. If we consider that this is a pedagogical play--it was a teaching tool--then it's very odd to have people in the play saying how effective a model Mary's behavior is if we're not seeing Mary's behavior on the stage. This becomes much more effective if behind Abraham and Ephrem we see the performer playing Mary doing the things the hermits are describing, so that the dialogue tells the audience how we should be reacting to this penitence. And personally, I think Hrothsvita was clever enough that she would recognize that....more
This is a strange, but really interesting play. Apparently Fletcher was super into virginity, because in this pastoral play virginity and chaste thougThis is a strange, but really interesting play. Apparently Fletcher was super into virginity, because in this pastoral play virginity and chaste thoughts basically have magical properties, like protecting virgins from wild animals and determining whether someone physically heals from a wound. I'm not one hundred percent sure whether I think this is a genuine devotion to virginity, or a satire of attitudes among certain segments of the population at the time. In particular, the fact that this is a pastoral play makes it somewhat suspect because the pastoral is a genre notoriously contested between idealization of the rural on the one hand and critiques of that idealization on the other....more
This is a fun, weird play, which kind of reflects the medieval approach to theological entertainment. This was part of the Wakefield cycle of Corpus CThis is a fun, weird play, which kind of reflects the medieval approach to theological entertainment. This was part of the Wakefield cycle of Corpus Christi plays, a series of plays that told Biblical history so that a largely illiterate audience would have more access to Biblical info.
And yet, this is totally unlike what one would generally expect a church to put on today if a modern church were creating a Biblical history play. First, it's a structurally odd play because the bulk of it takes a detour when Mak steals a sheep from the three shepherd (Coll, Gib, and Daw), and the Mak and his wife Gill try to hide the stolen sheep by pretending it's their new baby. This makes up the majority of the lines in the play, so it really isn't primarily focused on the story of Jesus' nativity or the shepherds' role as witnesses. And yet, this makes perfect sense for a medieval play because it combines the lived experience of Northern English rural people (i.e., the audience), carnivalesque humor, and theology. And it's really that blending of carnivalesque humor with theology that was common in the medieval period, but would generally be considered sacrilegious or anti-religious today. But it's worth remembering that these plays were performed for an audience primarily of peasants and townsfolk (though also likely of clergy and some nobility). And part of the role of entertainments of any kind was to be light, fun, and enjoyable for an audience who lived generally hard, routine lives--and certainly some Corpus Christi plays were more heavy and theological, but there needed to be a balance to keep viewers engaged. https://youtu.be/cOr3cY16rOw...more
This is a late medieval morality play, so it is allegorical and gives instruction for living a good life and being saved under Catholic doctrine. The This is a late medieval morality play, so it is allegorical and gives instruction for living a good life and being saved under Catholic doctrine. The basic plot is that Everyman is called by God to give an accounting of his life, and show whether he's deserving of getting into heaven. There's a danse macabre type element to this, as Death is God's messenger, and Everyman tries unsuccessfully to buy Death off. Death reveals that he/she/it/they come for every person, including kings and princes, and there's nothing that can be done to stop Death. Then Everyman turns to his worldly companions--Good Fellowship, Kindred and Cousin, and Goods--each of whom refuses to go on the journey into death with Everyman. Goods even says he/she/it/they play a part in condemning humans to hell. next, Everyman turns to his Good Deeds, but Good Deeds is so weak from the weight of Everyman's sin that he/she/it/they cannot get up to go with him. She Good Deeds brings forth Knowledge, who instructs Everyman in going to Confession and penance, then hooks him up with Strength, Discretion, Beauty, and the Five Wits. While Everyman goes to get the Eucharist and last rites, there's a discussion about how awesome priests are because they help people get into heaven; but there's also a critique of the kinds of practices that were launching the Protestant Reformation, like the selling of indulgences, priests having illegitimate children, and the Church's hoarding of wealth. The A-Team now assembled, Everyman begins heading off towards death. However, to his surprise, when he arrives at the grave, Beauty, Strength, Discretion, and the Five Wits abandon him as well--a commentary on old age. Everyman despairs, until Good Deeds announces that he/she/it/they will remain with Everyman into the afterlife, and Knowledge says that he/she/it/they will stand by his side until death. Thus comforted, Everyman goes into the grave with the help of Good Deeds, and his soul is accepted by an Angel before a Doctor of theology sums up the moral lesson. https://youtu.be/x6puf7oKAP0...more
I was going back and forth between a three and four star rating for this, and ultimately erred on the side of generosity. I like the focus of this plaI was going back and forth between a three and four star rating for this, and ultimately erred on the side of generosity. I like the focus of this play, which is about the conflicts created within Tunisian society by the Nazi occupation. The play largely centers on two couples--one Jewish and one Arab Muslims. The Nazi occupation puts the Arab citizens of Tunisia in an awkward position. On the one hand, they are freed from French colonial rule and promised (by the Nazis) that they will be given control of their own country. On the other hand, many Tunisians (including Youssef, the male Arab in this play) were drawn into the Nazi occupation machinery--either because they needed to survive an occupation or because of genuine simmering antisemitism. For Youssef, he isn't an antisemite, he is just poor and finds a job cooking for the Nazis at the detention camp, a job which also seems to include some moderate humiliation/torture of prisoners. One of those prisoners is his friend Victor, a Jewish man married to Loys. At some point, it becomes unclear whether Youssef's humiliation of Victor had been purely about survival, because toward the end of the play it is revealed that Youssef and Loys have had an affair while Victor was detained. This throws a whole new light onto Youssef's treatment of his "friend." It also explains tensions between Faiza (Youssef's wife) and Loys, even though they are also supposed to be friends.
Against the backdrop of these relationships are the Nazi occupiers. On the one hand, there are vicious thugs who enjoy torture, violence, etc. and seem to be true believers in the ethnic superiority of the German people. But then there's also Grandma, the head of the camp. Grandma is one of those unique/quirky Nazis you sometimes get in media--he's not a killer as such, though he does kill, and he has a lot of unusual traits, like knitting (which earned him his nickname), philosophy, and aesthetic appreciation. And yet, these things in their own ways make him much more sinister than the more overtly violent Nazis.
The issue I have with this play is that it seems to want to do a lot, and I'm not sure how well it hangs together coherently. There is obviously the political story line here, but at the same time there is the personal story line between the two couples, and there are philosophical debates about what it means to be a Jew (or what "Jews" mean) and zionism, etc. Everything is, in some sense, justified by what's going on in the show, but it is a bit crammed and consequently feels somewhat more scattered than I'd ideally like. https://youtu.be/47icz1E3pNE...more
It's a good play, adapting Apollonius Rhodius' epic poem. Zimmerman often adapts ancient works that do not really lend themselves to theatrical adaptation, and she has a knack for doing it extremely well. Part of the way she manages to make these kinds of works stageable is through a blend of direct performance, narration, and stylized performances in miniature. Obviously there are direct performances in which actors interact with one another through dialogue, blocking, etc. But Zimmerman covers the lengthy gaps between key episodes with narration, often by a divine being--in this case primarily Hera and Athena--which allows large amounts of info from the original document to be compressed into manageable portions. But there's also the issue of scale, since many of the events in epic adventures occur on a huge scale, like battles or combat with mythical beasts. Often, Zimmerman solves this problem by having miniature versions of the characters/settings/ships (in this case) moved onto the stage during narration, so that we get a visual sense of what's happening without fully depending on just the narrator(s). For instance, when the Colchian fleet pursues the Argos after Jason absconds with the fleece and Medea, the actors playing Medea's betrothed and her half-brother bring on a miniature fleet of Colchian ships to represent the pursuit. https://youtu.be/xf5q43Z10II...more
Zimmerman is a really good adapter of texts that are extremely difficult to adapt for the stage, like The Odyssey or Argonautika, and she's done the sZimmerman is a really good adapter of texts that are extremely difficult to adapt for the stage, like The Odyssey or Argonautika, and she's done the same with Wu Cheng'en's Journey to the West. Much of the actual action of Journey is abridged, handled through narration, or cut altogether, but the core elements of the story are there. It is a quest narrative balancing between the comic--especially figures like Monkey and Pig, who have enthusiasms that often lead them astray from virtue. The central objective of the quest is for Tripitaka, a virtuous monk, to journey from the Eastern (Tang) kingdom to the Western Heaven in order to retrieve Buddhist scrolls that will enlighten and redeem the sinful nature of the occupants of the Eastern kingdom. He is joined by the Monkey King (Sun Wukong), Pig/Pigsy (Zhu Bajie), and Sha Monk (Sha Wujing, though often translated as something like Friar Sand). Each has incurred the displeasure of heaven and needs to redeem themself and find merit. Pigsy and Sha Monk were immortals whose bad behavior had them sent down to earth in "monstrous" forms, while Monkey was the ruler of the monkeys on Flower Fruit Mountain, but his desire for immortality lead his to study Daoism, then when heaven punished him for impertinence, he converted to Buddhism and joined Tripitaka on his quest. https://youtu.be/W8K3CLGGKRU...more
This is a gory, grotesque, obscene, and amazing adaptation of Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus. To be fair, most of the violence, sexual violence, dismeThis is a gory, grotesque, obscene, and amazing adaptation of Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus. To be fair, most of the violence, sexual violence, dismemberment, random murders, etc. are already in Shakespeare's play, but Murphy's version presents them through the bouffon style, which is a kind of grotesque performance inspired by medieval carnivalesque festivals (e.g., the feast of fools) in which social order would be inverted and those who were normally cast out from society would be elevated temporarily to positions of prominence and reverence. On the one hand, these festivals served as a socio-cultural release valve, allowing the airing of grievances within highly unequal and hierarchical societies, but on the other hand they served as forms of protest and social critique--and the modern bouffon tradition continues this. By having performers metatheatrically act as the downtrodden, impoverished, and socially outcast, who then put on a version of Titus, Murphy opens spaces for critique of social injustices and violence within contemporary societies. https://youtu.be/Umnf43OzJiM...more
Shields is an amazing playwright who has a marvelous sense of how to adapt literary classics to meet the needs of present moments. Queen Goneril is a Shields is an amazing playwright who has a marvelous sense of how to adapt literary classics to meet the needs of present moments. Queen Goneril is a King Lear adaptation, which imagines life roughly seven years before Shakespeare's play. Goneril is preparing to take over as queen, readying herself for the practical responsibilities of being a monarch. Regan can't find her place in the court and so she pushes the boundaries of propriety in order to test Goneril's patience and their relationship. And Cordelia smiles all the time to relieve the suffering and pain of those around her, while never showing her own suffering. And all three struggle to navigate the vicissitudes of a patriarchal world in which women are forced to conform to the whims or men, to provide unacknowledged emotional labor to those around them, and to surpass the qualities of men just to prove they're worth. https://youtu.be/X1rmxn_Esug...more
Father Returns, by Kikuchi Kan: This play is part of the shingeki (new drama) movement in early 20th century Japan, and it definitely shows the influeFather Returns, by Kikuchi Kan: This play is part of the shingeki (new drama) movement in early 20th century Japan, and it definitely shows the influences of Western Modern drama, especially people like Synge, Lady Gregory, and Yeats. The short, sharp play deals with a conflict between tradition and modernity, rooted in a personal and domestic situation. Kuroda Sotaro had abandoned his family over twenty years ago, leaving his wife to raise their three children by herself in poverty and social isolation. The oldest son, Ken'ichiro (called Ken), had stepped up to try and provide for the family, especially his two younger siblings. Finally, things are beginning to look up for the Kuroda family, when Sotaro returns. He's now elderly and ailing. He thinks, given the Confucian norms that traditionally governed Japanese society, that he will inherently be entitled to the respect due to a father upon his return. However, Ken refuses to recognize him as his father, instead condemning him for the suffering that his abandonment has caused the rest of the family. In this sense, there's a clash between tradition and a more European-inspired Modernity, which Japan embraced in the late 1800s following the Meiji Restoration in order to compete with European powers on the world stage. However, at the end of the play Ken tells his brother Shinjiro to call their father back, and when Shin reports that he doesn't see Sotaro on the street, both brothers leave to look for him. https://youtu.be/bng0rXvsNVY
Hot Pepper, Air Conditioner and the Farewell Speech, by Okada Toshiki: This is a trio of short plays, all interconnected in that they're linked to the conditions/precarity of workers in Japan (and much of the rest of the world, including in my country). In the first (Hot Pepper), three temps are charged with planning a farewell party for Erika, another temp who has been terminated. In the second (Air Conditioner), two full time office workers talk past one another about political talk show rhetoric and how someone keeps turning down the air conditioning so it's too cold. In the third play (The Farewell Speech), Erika makes a speech at her farewell party about how she accidentally stepped on a cicada that morning outside her house. Each of the plays features extensive repetition and circling around the same points over and over again. This is a distinctive feature of the plays, which connects with the larger themes of the difficulty of communicating and of alienation in the workplace. Even in Air Conditioning, which is the closest of these three to a dialogue based play, the two characters are each more absorbed in making their own points than is ever listening to or considering the others' statements. Hot Pepper basically consists of interwoven monologues, and the majority of The Farewell Speech is just Erika's speech. https://youtu.be/LD0HfYlttgE
Sunrise, by Cao Yu: This play is from one of the playwrights who helped popularize huaja (spoken drama) as an alternative to various forms of Chinese opera. The play was written in 1936, and deals with some of the contrasting forces shaping Chinese society at the time--particularly conflicts between traditional values and Modernity, capitalism and finance versus physical work, the changing role of women, the impact of poverty on society, and more. The core figure of the play is Chen Bailu, a young, attractive woman living as a kind of socialite courtesan in a suave hotel. Around her, a group of wealthy but often repulsive figures gather, drawn in by her parties and the company. Among them are an aging woman in too much makeup who insists she's young and who tries to keep her gigolo interested with her money, a bank manager who has more or less bankrupted the bank and schemes to manipulate the bonds market to get the money back, a "cosmopolitan" doctor who speaks English but consistently gets so drunk he gets sick and passes out, and an obsequious and sleazy hotel porter. Into this world comes Fang Dasheng, a friend from Chen's childhood, who represents the morals of the countryside and Chinese tradition. He tries to get Chen to leave with him, initially to marry him, but by the end of the play just to save her from the degeneracy and corruption around her. Similarly, Chen meets Pipsqueak, a young girl being forced into prostitution by gangsters. Chen tries to save her, but when the gangsters kidnap Pipsqueak and force her into a cheap brothel, Chen and Fang are unable to find her. This failure to protect Pipsqueak seems to have a profound effect on Chen, who turns against her life of partying and socializing. https://youtu.be/aTs3gg-wTnY
I Love XXX, by Meng Jinghui, Huang Jiangang, Wang Xaoli, & Shi Hang: I'm not a bug fan of experimental plays like this one, though I appreciate at least some of what the play is doing. https://youtu.be/voxbh9aVMcM
Bicycle, by O Tae-Sok: This is a play I was really interested in reading because I believe this is the first Korean play I've read, though I am interested in Korea. It's also a ghost story, which I was excited about because I'm into horror. However, I didn't really follow this play well. It relies on a set of historical echoes and repetitions, both in the performance itself and between the events the protagonist is recounting and the burning alive of 127 villagers by retreating North Korean forces thirty years earlier. I feel like I get this play on some level, but I also feel like there are layers upon layers I'm just not appreciating. A town clerk named Yun Chen wants his colleague Ku to help him fill out an absence report because Yun was startled by a ghost and then got sick for forty-two days. In order for Ku to understand what happened, Yun re-enacts the night of the encounter, where he was going home and encountered a man whose youngest daughter had run away, according to the older daughter. However, they weren't actually his daughters, but rather adopted from a couple with leprosy. Somehow it seems that the youngest daughter found out and maybe ran away, but when Yun found her she ran away from him. Then the leper-father came out and Yun told him to burn his house down and leave the town if he wanted the girls to have a normal life. When they suddenly noticed the man's hut burning, the leper went to try and save his wife, while Yun was knocked to the ground by something (a cow?) and passed out. As Yun re-enacts these events for Ku a couple of times, new versions/additional information emerges, namely that Yun may have been visited on the road by the leper's wife after she had died in the fire, or that Yun went to the hut without remembering it and there found the oldest daughter crying after having burned the hut. This blends into the experience of Yun's uncle, Yun Chong-Mok, and a man named So Kwan-Ho, who were the two local men ordered by the North Koreans to set fire to the building with the 127 people trapped inside thirty years earlier. https://youtu.be/OFFOgM3mMpg
The Post Office, by Rabindranath Tagore: One of India's most influential playwrights, Tagore blends the traditions of British-influenced Western naturalism with Indian dramatic and philosophical traditions. The Post Office runs like a realistic--if slightly absurd at times--play, and yet the thematic focus on embracing detachment from the material world and instead finding peace and even joy within one's self is deeply rooted in Indian spiritual traditions. The play follows Amal, a young boy whose adoptive uncle has been told by the kobiraj (Ayuvedic doctor) that he must not be exposed to the outdoor elements or he will become increasingly sick. However, Amal hates being cooped up in the house, and he goes to the window to talk to a wide range of people passing by the house. Much of the play is devoted to Amal speaking with people outside and reflecting on how he wishes more than anything to be able to travel widely, particularly to become one of the king's postal runners and to go about delivering letters to people all over the place. In a rather bizarre moment, the village watchman tells Amal that the king will send him a letter, and so Amal becomes obsessed with waiting for that letter to arrive, even as he becomes progressively sicker. The village headman plays a rather cruel trick by giving the illiterate Amal a blank piece of paper and claiming that it is a letter from the king promising to visit Amal that night. However, this trick is reversed when a royal messenger and then the royal kobiraj arrive bringing word that the king genuinely is coming to see Amal. However, the play ends with Amal falling asleep under the care of the royal kobiraj, with the implication being that he has died peacefully, having embraced the inner peace he finds in waiting for the king's letter, rather than hoping for the external validation of going out. https://youtu.be/TFph4rDk8uk
Hayavadana, by Girish Karnad: This play reminds me of The Two Noble Kinsmen, by Shakespeare, because the central conflict focuses on two young men, closer than brothers, who fall in love with the same woman and pursue her to their own destruction. However, Karnad's play draws heavily on Indian folk performances and mythology, and introduces the major theme of incompleteness as an existential crisis. The play opens with a kind of low plot, featuring Hayavadana, a man with a horse's head who wants nothing more than to become a complete human being. This is our first thematic introduction to the problem of wholeness. Then in the major plot, Devadatta--a brilliant Brahmin, scholar, and poet--and Kapila--a strong and athletic laborer--make up the two halves of the beautiful (though selfish) Padmini's desires: the mind of the scholar-poet and the body of the athlete. Things come to a head (if you'll pardon the pun) when both of the men cut their heads off at the temple of Kali, and Padmini beseeches the goddess to restore them. Kali agrees, and instructs Padmini to put the heads back on the bodies, but in her joyous haste, Padmini puts the wrong heads on each body. It seems that Devadatta and Padmini have won the jackpot here, because they get his head and Kapila's body, while Kapila has his own ugly head and the feeble body of the Brahmin. But, as things turn out, the problem of incompleteness doesn't simply cease to exist because some are happy (while others are miserable)--the problem posed by the incompleteness of each man with the wrong head continues to cast its shadow over the play, right to the very end when Hayavadana returns with his problem solved, but not the way he intended. https://youtu.be/l1dnC0gU-5k
The Struggle of the Naga Tribe, by W.S. Rendra: This is a very much postcolonial play, dealing with neocolonialism and authoritarian government in 1970s Indonesia. The play opens with a Dalang--a puppeteer in traditional Indonesia shadow puppetry, which is a tradition in which the Dalang is an incredibly respected storyteller who controls the action of the entire play. The Dalang lets the audience know that this story definitely isn't set in Indonesia, and definitely isn't satire (even though satire is good for society, actually). This opening is clearly undercutting potential charges of critiquing the government. Then he introduces some of the plays themes, particularly revolving around modernization--"progress" in the parlance of the characters. This is done by bringing in a chorus of machines who produce excess value and need to continually sell it, and a chorus of ambassadors whose function is to secure natural resources and markets for goods. After this, the play itself begins. The Naga tribe live their traditional, communally oriented way, but when copper is discovered in the mountains near them, the corrupt government sells mining rights to a foreign corporation that has agreed to give the queen 10% of the earnings. The Naga resist this incursion that would destroy their culture, and they are helped by a foreign journalist who published stories about government corruption and the imminent threat to the Naga, stories which manage to sway public opinion in foreign countries against the corporation. https://youtu.be/NXyfSVZmO28
Troung Ba's Soul in the Butcher's Skin, by Luru Quang Vu: A play based on a Vietnamese folk tale, this explores the contradictions experienced when a mistake in heaven prematurely kills the virtuous farmer Troung Ba, and the deity De Thich (the King of Chess) puts Troung Ba's soul into the body of a butcher who had recently died. At first, Troung Ba is glad to be back alive because he can continue tending his garden, taking care of his family, and trying to get his son to give up mercantile schemes and live a virtuous life. However, things are complicated both by external factors because the butcher's wife claims she can't survive without her husband to do the butchering and run the shop, so Troung Ba begins helping her out. This desire to help is made more official when the leader of the village shows up and proclaims that Troung Ba is the butcher and must live and work as the butcher--though they create an arrangement where Troung Ba will divide his time between his home, wife, and garden on the one hand, and the butcher's shop and wife on the other. Because he's kind to her, in contrast to the abusive butcher, the butcher's wife tries to get Troung Ba to run away with her (or at least have sex with her). But things are also complicated internally, as Troung Ba feels pulled in different directions by his soul and his body. His soul wants to tend his garden, love his family, and live moderately. But his body wants to eat a lot of food (particularly meat), drink alcohol, and use its physical strength. Eventually, Troung Ba determines that he must give up the body, and he asks De Thich to return the butcher's soul to its body, to return the soul of his granddaughter's friend who has just died, and to allow Troung Ba's soul to merge with the universe. De Thich doesn't want to lose his friend, but he is persuaded that it is selfish to force Troung Ba's soul to live in its misery and to hurt everyone around him just so that De Thich can have a chess opponent. Troung Ba's self sacrifice seems to revive his soul, which had been fading under the appetites of the butcher's body. https://youtu.be/rjDGsLeMu6Q...more
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