Do check these out and leave a comment.  Also, write a wrap-up post in the next week.  It will probably help you get your thoughts together for the final next Saturday.

Final Review Sheet for Dramatic Lit

You final will take place on Saturday, May 9^th at 8:00 AM in our usual classroom (B206).  I will choose 6 of the essays from below.  You will then choose three.   Each essay will be worth 33 points and should have a clear argument and be supported with specific examples from the plays.  It should be a thoroughly developed piece that demonstrates to me that you have:

1) Used your preparation time wisely

2)  Understand the plays we have read in class in and of themselves

3)  Understand the major concepts of theatre that we have discussed

4) Are able to bring these things together for the essay

***You will be allowed to bring the scripts to the exam, but not separate notes.*****

Essay Questions

1. A popular plot in American playwriting is dismantling the American Dream.  Comparing All My Sons and Buried Child, explore what is said about the American dream and how it is attacked in both plays.  How are the techniques similar?  Different?  Which is more effective and why?
2. “Art,” Amadeus, and M. Butterfly all use soliloquy extensively.  Using examples from all three plays, explain the benefits and drawbacks of having a character leave the action of the play and address the audience.   Each playwright used the device for very different reasons.  Then, focus in on one play and explain how soliloquy was used and to what effect.
3. While many contemporary plays do not follow Brecht’s methods to the letter, they do contain Brechtian elements.   Discuss how you think Brecht’s theories influenced M. Butterfly, Doubt or Joe Turner’s Come and Gone.  Be sure to give an overview of Brecht’s theories in the essay.
4. Spinning into Butter, Doubt, Joe Turner’s Come and Gone and M. Butterfly all deal with race—some overtly, some less so.  Choose two of the plays and compare how the playwrights work race into the play, how it is dealt with and what you think the play ultimately says about race.
5. You are part of a producing team that is choosing from the list of plays that we have read for this class.  Make the case for one of the plays to the rest of the team.  Be sure to think in terms of casting, set, style, and themes.  Also, be sure to mention who your ideal audience is for the show and acknowledge the drawbacks to mounting the production.
6. Choose one of the plays that we have read and do an Aristotelian analysis.  Begin with inciting incident, establishing action, climax and denouement, and then lay out the major plot points of the rising action.
7. Aristotle wrote: “There remains , then, the intermediate kind of personage, a man not preeminently virtuous and just, whose misfortune is brought upon him not by vice and depravity, but by some error of judgment.”  Choose a character that you feel fits this description and defend your choice.
8. Both Buried Child and Joe Turner’s Come and Gone have highly realistic elements and highly fantastical elements.  What is the effect of having this mix of the real and the unreal?  How does it work in each play?
9. Aristotle believed that a tragedy should generate both pity and awe in the audience.   What do you think that means in contemporary theatre?  Use examples from the plays we have read to make your case.
10. Choose one of the following playwrights –Wilson, Brecht, Shepard or Miller—and write an essay comparing what you know of his life, interests and influences to the play of his that we read and discussed for class.

The selection of Mr. Sher by the producer, Lincoln Center Theater, has prompted concern and even outrage among some black directors, who say this production represents a lost opportunity for a black director, for whom few opportunities exist on Broadway or at major regional theaters. Wilson himself felt that black directors best understood his characters, and he saw his plays as chances to give them high-profile work. Wilson’s widow, Constanza Romero, however, approved Mr. Sher as director.

It is an interesting conversation to have as we discuss M. Butterfly.  Part of the controversy here is that there are few opportunities for African American directors at that level and that part of writing a play focused on a particular culture is opening up the door to let more actors and directors into the Great White Way (As Broadway is sometimes called).

Hwang is a big crusader for Asian actors in Asian parts, and he became famous when he protested a white man being cast in an Asian part for Miss Saigon in the 1990′s.  In fact, he’s even written a play about the expeirence called Yellow Face.  He is insistent in his author’s notes that Song be played by an Asian. It’s an amazing part, and he wants to be sure the opportunity is giving to the community he intended it to be given to.

So it seems that conversations of race continue ti permeate discussions of modern theatre.  Keep thinking about this as we discuss Song tomorrow in class.

Something that comes up in the play, and that came up in class today, was the association of “the East” with “feminine.”  It is an old, and quite frankly, racist association that doesn’t seem to fade, though it has changed considerably since the days of Madame Butterfly.

Hwang has chosen two characters that, though they ostensibly occupy each of the gender and philosophical comcepts, actually muddle the definitions, as most human beings do.

First therte is Song Liling who is a “Dan”  actor (the female role in a Peking/Bejing Opera is the Dan role).  The men who plays these parts must dedicate a lot of their lives to it.  Someone of Song’s generation probably would have devoted his entire life to his craft.

Here is a quote from a male Dan actor from the Chinese International Radio.

“In daily life, I always observe women beside me, including their actions and facial expressions. I also watched videos of the old male Dan masters to see how they played female roles. Then I think about their moves and practice in front of a mirror. It is not simply imitation. All the gestures have to be coordinated and be my own.”

Of course, even though Song Liling may have, like the character in Farewell My Concubine, occupied a place between genders in his own society, the accusation that he makes at the trial draws into even shaprer focus the binary systems explored in the play:

Being an Oriental, I could never be completely a man. (Act3, scene 1)

So what do you think?  Do we still see the East as feminine?  What does that even mean?

Having characters that are unapologetically who they are (Mozart, Sister Aloysius, Serge) and characters that want to present themselves in a certain way more than be themselves (Salieri, the entire cast of Spinning into Butter, Mark ) is a great way to create drama.    Keep that in mind as you read M. Butterfly.

Sam Shepard is part of this tradition, but instead of relying on realism to blow the cover off the idea of an All-American family, he’s using images and extreme examples.  In all appearences, the family is “All American”–strapping, football playing boys, a successful farm, etc… but underneath it is festering, it is barren (the ground has not produced anything in years), and it is incestuous.  There is no fresh blood here, no new ideas, no light.    Instead of an affair in a hotel room as the big secret, we have a murdered baby.

Think of this play as a nightmare.  Though it starts off realistically (with Doge and Halley fighting), it quickly goes somewhere else.  It’s a dream you’ve had before, only much, much worse than usual.

‘All My Sons’

Innocence dies a hard death

By Jeffrey Borak, Berkshire Eagle Staff

Posted: 04/04/2009 02:59:00 AM EDT

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Saturday, April 04

NORTH ADAMS — At first glance, Joe Keller, the pivotal figure in Arthur Miller’s “All My Sons,” would seem to be the embodiment of the American dream. He has a home, a family, the seeming respect of the community and has survived a terrible scandal created by his company’s sale of defective airplane engines to the United States government in the closing days of World War II, which resulted in the deaths of 21 American pilots.While his former business partner is doing time for the crime, Joe, whose decision it was, has been exonerated. He has rebuilt his business into a success and plans, one day, to turn it over to his son, Chris. And so, as “All My Sons” begins on a bright sunlit Sunday morning in August, all seems to be right with the world according to Keller.

There are signs, however, that for a man for whom appearance is the only thing that matters, all is not quite what it seems.

A fierce storm the previous night has brought down a tree that’s been planted in the Kellers’ backyard as a memorial to their other son, Larry, who’s been reported missing in action in the war and is believed by everyone — everyone, that is, except his mother, Kate — to be dead. That’s only the beginning. By the time “All My Sons” ends in moonlight-tinged shadows a few hours after midnight, Keller’s sturdy house is revealed to have been made of cards.

Miller’s first Broadway success, “All My Sons” — which is being given a fitful production at Main Street Stage that swings between moments of unrelenting power, force and conviction on the one hand, and, on the other, moments of restraint pushed to excess — is an uneven play that introduces themes that run like leitmotifs through Miller’s plays — fathers and sons, guilt and responsibility, truth and denial, appearance and reality, success and morality, the value of one’s name.

In this production, “All My Sons” is an exploration of the death of innocence; the delusions we construct as a means of our own survival, often at great sacrifice and harm.

Edward Cating, who co-directed this production with Alexia Trainor, offers a Joe Keller who has bought into the American dream big-time; who genuinely believes that what he has done has been for the good of his family; who sees nothing wrong with shortcuts. What this master of denial refuses to accept is the fact that private acts have public consequences.

At home, Joe is an amiable get-along guy. He may be the provider but it is clear (especially given a commanding, wrenching performance by Linda White that anchors this production) that Kate is in charge. Kate is driven by a fierce insistence that Larry is still out there, somewhere, alive and that he will return, if only in response to her sheer force of will, which she wears as armor against the truth.

Baby-faced Conor Moroney is a quiet, low-key Chris, excessively so, especially in his opening scenes. There is a too-boyish innocence about him. Moroney is far more persuasive, stunningly so, late in the play as Chris is forced to deal with a truth that has been too terrible for him to ever imagine.

As Ann, the daughter of Joe’s former partner, Larry’s girlfriend and now Chris’ soon-to-be fiancee, Samantha Cullen bursts upon the scene like 16-going-on-17 virginal heroine of a Rodgers and Hammerstein musical. There is little, if any, hint of the maturity Ann is said to have gained after having spent 31/2 years living and working in New York.

Frank LaFrazia is effective as Ann’s gloom-and-doom brother, George, whose newfound belief in their father’s innocence sets in motion the chain of events leading to Joe’s ultimate reckoning, and Jeanne Matthew makes the most of her scenes as a woman who, for reasons of her own, wants her physician husband, Jim (Mitch Bucciarelli in a vaguely defined performance), to be less a man than he wants to be. The American dream, it seems, isn’t for everyone.

The honest truth is that it’s corn.  As you can imagine from the little bit you’ve seen of Shepard, he isn’t the type to assign specific meanings to things that look like obvious symbols.  You can read this play over and over and still not know what something “means.”  And you have to be okay with that.

There are plenty of internet sources that will tell you the corn means this or that or that the buried child is this or that, but they’re going to lead you astray.  In modern plays (and here is where Shepard is influenced by Becket), sometimes the meaning is the experience of the play.

So to all of you out there, stop worrying about what the corn means.  Just read it.  We’ll talk.