Throughout Rajiv Joseph’s play, Gruesome Playground Injuries, the two characters, Doug and Kayleen, sporadically meet throughout the course of 30 years due to injuries ranging from getting “beaten up pretty badly” (Joseph 31) to going into a “coma” (Joseph 27). The play starts out with the two characters first meeting in the school nurse’s office with injuries of their own. This is the start of a relationship that is full of pain and healing throughout the years. Told in a very unique structure of five year increments, the play shows how injuries, a reoccurring image that may be self-inflicted or inflicted upon one, bring the pair together when either is in a dire situation.
Gruesome Playground Injuries traces the injuries that two characters face over a three-decade span. Their wounds keep them together as each scene starts with Doug entering the scene with a new injury. As the two first meet up in the nurse’s office in their elementary school Kayleen points out Doug’s “large gauze bandage wrapped and taped across his face” (Joseph 5). Through this action eight year old Kayleen starts a tradition whenever they meet by asking him “What happened to your face?” (Joseph 5). Upon all of Doug’s entries in each scene, Kayleen would notice his injuries and ask Doug “What did you do” (Jospeh 11) or “What happened to you?” (11) Doug constantly hurts himself throughout the scenes through acts of carelessness, riding off rooftops with bikes, blowing out his eye with fireworks, and knocking out his teeth with a hammer. After recklessly injuring himself, Doug turns to Kayleen hoping that she would be “able to mend [his] wounds.” (16) As Kayleen heals him through her “superpowers” (17), Doug continues to be open about how he needs her during...
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...hey share as they are always there for each other.
The scenes, which cover thirty years of the characters’ lives from eight to thirty-eight, each revolve around an injury that Doug has acquired through his accident prone life. The play progresses in five year intervals, jumping backwards and forwards, in a nonlinear progression. As they travel and run into each other’s lives, the two characters face new injuries. As the play progresses every five years, a new injury is added to one or both characters. Their lives intersect through these injuries, leading them to compare their wounds, both physical (Doug) and emotional (Kayleen), and drawing them closer together. With each new scene, old injuries and problems may have gotten better or resolved, but some became permanent. Yet, through these experiences, they are bonded together through bloodstains, cuts, and bandages.
The theme of this play is centered around time; the value of the little time we have been given and how that time should be used to live for what is right and what truly matters.
One of the goals in the play is to raise awareness about domestic violence. This is done effectively through the events that are played out in the
the play. It looks at the person he is and the person he becomes. It
In the short story "A & P" the author, John Updike, uses the motif of play as one of the main means by which he develops the character of Sammy, the nineteen-year-old narrator and protagonist of the story. In his many and varied references to play, Sammy reveals, along with his obvious immaturity, his rich imagination and potential for possible growth.
There are a whole host of defenses that amusement parks and ride manufacturers may raise in a personal injury lawsuit. The defenses discussed below can be defenses involving amusement park rides.
All relationships go through both good and bad times. Some last through the ages, while others quickly fall into nothing. In Terrence McNally’s “Lips Together, Teeth Apart,” the heart of this haunting play is a dramatically incisive portrait of two married couples—the Truman’s and the Haddocks. Uncomfortable with themselves and each other, they are forced to spend a Fourth of July weekend at the Fire Island house that the brother of one of the women left his sister when he died of AIDS. Though the house is beautiful, it is as empty as their lives and marriages have become, a symbol of their failed hopes, their rage, their fears, and of the capricious nature of death. The theme of love and death in relationships is quickly developed, as well as an overwhelming fear of homophobia. The two couples McNally brings to life are both going through rough patches in their marriages. While Chloe and John are fighting through John’s esophagus cancer, Sally and Sam are expecting and fearful that this time it will be another miscarriage. Showing how society has struck fear into the couples about AIDS. While everyone except John is worried about catching “AIDS,” the play begins to unveil troubled marriages as well as superficial values and prejudices.
?If you remain imprisoned in self denial then days, weeks, months, and years, will continue to be wasted.? In the play, 7 stories, Morris Panych exhibits this denial through each character differently. Man, is the only character who understands how meaningless life really is. All of the characters have lives devoid of real meaning or purpose, although they each have developed an absurd point or notion or focus to validate their own existence. In this play, the characters of Charlotte and Rodney, are avoiding the meaninglessness of their lives by having affairs, drinking, and pretending to kill each other to enhance excitement into their life.
Caden Cotard is a theater director who is fresh off his last successful production of Death of a Salesman. He was presented a grant and was determined to create a brutally honest play. He gathers together a cast into a warehouse in Manhattan’s theater. He leads them into a celebration of the ordinary, telling them to live out their lives in a small replica of the city outside. As this city inside the warehouse begins to grow, Caden’s life begins to swerve off the tracks. His wife, Adele, who is a famous painter and the mother of his child Olive, left him years ago and traveled to Germany’s art scene. Caden is driving his current marriage to an actress named Claire directly into the ground. The actor Caden has hired to play himself within the play is a little too perfect for the part is making it harder for Caden to revitalize his relationship with Hazel. Caden’s condition is one by one shutting down all of his autonomic functions. Years go by and Caden is concealing himself deeper into this magnum opus. The line between the world of his play and what is reality soon becomes a little blurry. The rehearsal for the play will go on for decades making it unclear if the production will ever launch.
Every time the family comes to a confrontation someone retreats to the past and reflects on life as it was back then, not dealing with life as it is for them today. Tom, assuming the macho role of the man of the house, babies and shelters Laura from the outside world. His mother reminds him that he is to feel a responsibility for his sister. He carries this burden throughout the play. His mother knows if it were not for his sisters needs he would have been long gone. Laura must pickup on some of this, she is so sensitive she must sense Toms feeling of being trapped. Tom dreams of going away to learn of the world, Laura is aware of this and she is frightened of what may become of them if he were to leave.
Now that the play, “Post-its (Notes on a Marriage),” could make the audience react to feel distanced and questionable of the actions of the characters, how can that relate to everyday life? traits of the play Post-its (Notes on a Marriage) through staging and conversation,
The theme of the play has to do with the way that life is an endless cycle. You're born, you have some happy times, you have some bad times, and then you die. As the years pass by, everything seems to change. But all in all there is little change. The sun always rises in the early morning, and sets in the evening. The seasons always rotate like they always have. The birds are always chirping. And there is always somebody that has life a little bit worse than your own.
Such a series of tragic events has a great toll among the two main characters (Cox ) . For a vicious, careless indivi...
changing attitudes toward life and the other characters in the play, particularly the women; and his reflection on the
The play’s major conflict is the loneliness experienced by the two elderly sisters, after outliving most of their relatives. The minor conflict is the sisters setting up a tea party for the newspaper boy who is supposed to collect his pay, but instead skips over their house. The sisters also have another minor conflict about the name of a ship from their father’s voyage. Because both sisters are elderly, they cannot exactly remember the ships name or exact details, and both sisters believe their version of the story is the right one. Although it is a short drama narration, Betty Keller depicts the two sisters in great detail, introduces a few conflicts, and with the use of dialogue,
to the suicide of a girl called Eva Smith and how everyone in the play