Over the course of my academic career, I have grown accustomed to viewing stories that follow a specific plot structure. Gao Xing Jian’s The Other Shore and Toshiki Okada’s The Sonic Life of a Giant Tortoise have shown me that I should look at theatre from different angles, instead of the one I have grown used to. Even though I found these two plays challenging to read, they offered me a unique perspective that I do not usually see in theatre. After reading Marvin Carlson’s article, I have started to look at the relationship between text and performance in different ways. I tried to keep the four different approaches in mind when I read these two texts. One of the things I noticed while reading The Other Shore and The Sonic Life of a Giant …show more content…
Similar to The Other Shore, The Sonic Life of a Giant Tortoise is a piece that is difficult to understand when it is only being read. A performance of Okada’s play would enhance the text and would allow the audience to see what the playwright had in mind when he wrote it. Even though The Sonic Life of a Giant Tortoise would be incomplete without a performance, translation would still be a better approach than fulfillment. The script of The Sonic Life of a Giant Tortoise does not provide many stage directions, but its pictures of Okada’s production depict scenes with very specific imagery. Since Okada seems very particular about how his plays should be performed, it would not be suitable to handle the play with an approach that values the performance over the text. It is best to approach this play as a translation that attempts to replicate the text as accurately as possible. Otherwise the original intention behind the writing could be lost on audience members. The Sonic Life of a Giant Tortoise can be handled multiple ways, but it seems that the original intent was to treat the performance of the play as a …show more content…
In addition to that, the actors would switch parts in the middle of the play. I would struggle whenever the actors switched roles because I had to figure which actor was in the dream and which actor was describing the dream. Since I have grown accustomed to seeing plays that have a specific type of plot structure, I had difficulty understanding this play. I am also used to characters that have descriptive names instead of names like Actor 1 or Actress 2. My difficulty with this play made me realize that I have a tendency to feel a sense of discomfort and confusion when I look at plays that have an unfamiliar format. Despite my initial discomfort with this text, I realized that not every play has to follow a typical western structure in order to be a good play. Reading The Sonic Life of a Giant Tortoise has made me realize that I have a tendency to judge plays a certain way because I expect them to follow a familiar format. This play has challenged me to put my expectations aside and view the text in a way that is different from what I am used to. After reading The Other Shore and The Sonic Life of a Giant Tortoise, I feel like I have stepped outside of my comfort zone and experienced a type of theatre I had yet to be exposed to. These two plays made me realize that my knowledge of theatre is still rather limited
It is imperative to understand the significance of the profound effects these elements have on the audience’s response to the play. Without effective and accurate embodiments of the central themes, seeing a play becomes an aimless experience and the meaning of the message is lost. Forgiveness and redemption stand as the central themes of the message in The Spitfire Grill. Actors communicate character development through both nonverbal and verbal cues; their costumes serve as a visual representation of this development by reflecting the personal transformation of each character. In the case of The Spitfire Grill, set design is cut back to allow for the audience’s primary focus to be on the actors and their story. Different from set design, the use of sound and lights in The Spitfire Grill, establishes the mood for the play. In other words, every theatrical element in a play has a purpose; when befittingly manipulated, these elements become the director’s strongest means of expressing central themes, and therefore a means of achieving set objectives. Here again, The Spitfire Grill is no exception. With the support of these theatrical elements, the play’s themes of forgiveness and redemption shine as bright as the moon on
If there is truly tradition to be found among the great theatres both on and off Broadway, then certainly the Sullivan Street Playhouse and its long running production of The Fantasticks rates as one of the most celebrated of New York theatrical traditions. Maintaining its place as the longest running production Off Broadway, The Fantasticks remains an enchanting and insightful tale of both young love and bitter disillusionment. It also reminds one, in this age of spectacle and the mega-musical, how powerful and truly inspiring theatre itself can be. Clearly, one of the great strengths of this production and a large part of its appeal for audiences over the last four decades lies in the fact that both the story and the style of presentation compliment each other so completely. Here we find the non-essentials are stripped away, and we are left to rely simply on the imagination of both the audience and the performers to create a magical evening.
“A dramatistic explaination appears in terms that performers can comfortably employ in their efforts to stage events” (Pelias and Shaffer 62). This means that the process for understanding text in an aethestic manor needs to be simple and understandable to the performer so it can be clearly related to the audience. So, for the process to be effective it has to be true to reality, otherwise the message of the text will be lost. Pelias and Shaffer describe the questions in Burke’s Pentad as “fundamental of all human action” (62). The simplicity and familiarity of the concepts are comfortable for even the most inexperienced performer.
Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night is a comedy that has been interpreted in different ways, enabling one to receive multiple experiences of the same story. Due to the content and themes of the play, it can be creatively challenging to producers and their casting strategies. Instead of being a hindrance, I find the ability for one to experiment exciting as people try to discover strategies that best represent entertainment for the audience, as well as the best ways to interpret Shakespeare’s work.
Olive, David. "Possibilities of Performance: New Ways of Teaching Dramatic Literature." Links & Letters 2 (1995): 9-17. UAB Digital Repository of Documents. Web. 30 Mar. 2012.
...h reality versus the appearance of reality and various types of madness that occur when the line between the two is crossed. The various adaptations of these plays play on these themes in new and creative ways. The many adaptations show the immortality of these stories. Dreams, reality, and art will never cease to be applicable questions to different societies and different eras. With adaptations, these stories will never cease to be created anew, they will always be fresh, and they will never die.
I believe that universally, theater is the concentration of passing down history, whether factual or mythical, to future generations paired with various degrees of artistic dignity. Like many other staged performances, the root of Noh is based off of a storytelling tradition, enhanced or exaggerated to be viewed by a wider audience. In the end, it was supposed to be somewhat entertaining, the viewer perhaps receiving a more dramatic interpretation of a past tale accompanied by dance, music, and visuals. In general, another characteristic not as significant from the original literatures and stories that seeps its way into Noh are the religious undertones and shrinking the distance between the world of the living and the world of spirits. In Zeami’s Atsumori, the play concerns characters from a scene in a probably already overdramatic depiction in Heike Monogatari, bringing in a single frame from Japanese military history into a different context. Sumidagawa has a slightly different way of coming into existence, since it does not depend so heavily on an exact picture from Ise Monogatari, and is only loosely associated with it. Nevertheless, both Atsumori and Sumidagawa have interesting ties to literature from earlier periods that make each unique in their presentation.
It was very nice to read something that had a lot of drama and suspense. This story has a mix of everything. It has a bit of suspense, drama, and comedy; therefore, it led it to be a very nice play. The people that would most like this play, has to be people who like suspense, drama, and thriller. These people would like it, because this story has a mix of everything, so the people who like to have a mix in their stories, they will love this story. It will suit them, and will give them a pleasure of reading a nice
In The Visit by Friedrich Dürrenmatt you feel unattached and are constantly reminded that you are in fact watching a play, nothing else. Dürrenmatt constructs this play using Bertolt Brecht’s epic theatre, a twentieth-century theatrical movement that was a reaction against popular forms of theatre, Dürrenmatt uses epic theatre in his work, The Visit, because he wants his audience to analysis what is being said and done instead of what they see and hear. An intellectual audience member will make connections when watching an epic play.
Gainor, J. Ellen., Stanton B. Garner, and Martin Puchner. The Norton Anthology of Drama, Shorter Edition. New York: W. W. Norton &, 2010. Print.
This play shows the importance of the staging, gestures, and props making the atmosphere of a play. Without the development of these things through directions from the author, the whole point of the play will be missed. The dialog in this play only complements the unspoken. Words definitely do not tell the whole story.
The difference between appearances and reality is also explored through the play-within-a-play, to particularly comic effect. The "rude mechanicals" completely fail to understand the magic of the theatre,
The play opens on the edge of a cliff; anything can happen. Derek Walcott, a playwright from the Caribbean, lives his own life on the edge of a cliff. Walcott’s family placed strong emphasis on education and ancestry. His inherent duality, European and African, mirrors that of post-colonialism (Gilbert 131). It is this duality that Walcott tries to reconcile in his work, drawing on his experiences in the theatre and in the Caribbean (King 260). In Pantomime, Walcott employs the versatility of language to describe the evolving relationship between main characters Harry Trewe and Jackson Philip paralleling the colonization to post-colonial movement and comes to a tentative reconciliation.
Willett, John, trans. and ed. Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic. New York: Hill and Wang, 1986.
Bruce, Wilshire. Role Playing and Identity: The Limits of Theatre as Metaphor. Indiana: Indiana University, Folklore Institute, 1991.