The Skin of Our Teeth by Thornton Wilder illustrates a family dodging one catastrophe after another. By the skin of their teeth, they will defeat ice, flood, and war. The main characters of this play are George and Maggie Antrobus, their two children, Henry and Gladys, and Sabina, who appears as the family's maid in the first and third acts, as well as a beauty queen seductress in the second act. The Skin of Our Teeth takes place at the Antrobus home in Excelsior, New Jersey; and the Atlantic City boardwalk.
I selected this play mainly because I love the way Thornton Wilder chose to break the fourth wall. The fourth wall is the space that separates a performer or performance from an audience. The Skin of Our Teeth doesn’t just break the fourth wall it topples it boldly, with actor’s occasionally breaking character to gripe about the script in a play-within-a-play. Technically The Skin of Our Teeth is a double narrative: the story of the Antrobus family in the play and the story of a theater company putting on the play. I find it fascinating how the actors break the actors' fourth-wall by speaking directly to the audience, as the frustrated stage manager tries to keep the show together. Breaking the fourth wall allows the audiences to feel like they are part of the play and it tunes them more into the show.
I believe Thornton Wilder’s purpose for writing this play is to show in a comical and serious way that mankind has always been on the edge of disaster and will probably always be. When writing this play Wilder wanted to represent the ongoing struggles of the human race. He wanted to focus on the situation of a family under successive devastations while sticking together. In this play the Antrobus family goes through ice, flood, ...
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...saster but the determination that disaster can always be overcome is what I believe the audience should take from this play.
If I was to direct this play each act would adopt a different aesthetic style that reflects relevant themes. The first act, which describes a suburban version of the Ice Age, would look and feel like a ‘50s sitcom. It would be complete with black-and-white lighting, and I picture a laugh track. In the second act the apocalypse has arrived in the disguise of a ‘80s sitcom. However adding a brightly colored Las Vegas style would hide the essential chaos. The third and final act portrays a deserted postwar landscape. Straying from the TV show format entirely, I’d like to strip away the pop culture deception to reveal the family beneath.
The main challenge of putting on this play would be changing the maximum set requirements to a minimum set.
Not all plays are character-driven, in fact a great many are not. So if the characters are not what keep the audience intrigued, well then what does? There are many possible answers to this question. Paper Wheat uses the history of a group of people, a specific message commenting on a time period, spectacle elements such as song and dance, and the genre of comedy to keep its audience both engaged and entertained.
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
Throughout the piece, we see the use of audience as active participants to amplify the didactic message of the play. In the literature we see many instances where the author uses this cognitive distancing as a way to disrupt the stage illusion and make the audience active members of the play. Forcing the audience into an analytical standpoint as opposed to passively accepting whats happening in their conscious minds. This occurs time and time again in the fourth act of the play. The characters repeatedly break down the fourth wall and engage the audience with open participation. We see this in the quotation from the end of the fourth Act of the play:
The play teaches are very important lesson on being too cautious. When faced with a small problem like a power outage, the residents of a small town turn on each other. It shows how vulnerable and paranoid humans can be. At the end of the play, the narrator says that this is something that could happen among humans anywhere, it is not just confined to the ?Twilight Zone?. This is a departure from most other episodes, which end, ?only in the Twilight Zone?. This show, which broadcasted during the Cold War, is meant to demonstrate horrible things that could come from people being too paranoid and distrustful.
Our Town is social satire in that it portrays that a small town like Grover’s Corners is like every other small town. Those families are all the same in small towns; they go to school and when they graduate they get married and have kids. The males get jobs and the women take care of the house and children. Another way of it’s a social satire is through their use of minimal scenery and pantomimed actions; the paperboy throws imaginary newspapers, the children pretend to eat breakfast. This then forces each person in the audience to imagine objects that do not really exist. The imaginary quality of these objects makes the play more universal, and make the members of the audience use their own sense of imagination to envision the props in their own way. It really allows the audience to be involved and feel included in the production. This perhaps could be one of the main reasons this play was such a success with a lot of people in general. By doing some research on the play I found a number of scholars and reviewers that have criticized the homogeneity of Grover’s Corners, a largely white, Protestant town. Our Town has been derided as an escapist fantasy that ignores the realities of the racism, sexism, and economic hardship that defined American life during Wilder’s era and that continue, to some degree, to define American life
...ll and be forced to question their identity. The play shows that no amount of ignorance or arrogance can save a person from that.
...onnects his audience to the characters and although the play is written for the Elizabethan era, it remains pertinent by invoking the notion of human nature. He implements themes of love, anger, and impulsiveness and demonstrates the influence these emotions have on human behavior. It is evident that because human nature is constant, people have and will continue to be affected by these emotions.
The theme of Our Town is that people do not truly appreciate the little things in daily life. This theme is displayed throughout the entire play. It starts in the beginning with everybody just going through their daily life, occasionally just brushing stuff off or entirely not doing or appreciating most things. But as you progress through the story you begin to notice and squander on the thought that the people in the play do not care enough about what is truly important. By the end of this play you realize that almost everybody does not care enough for the little things as they should, instead they only worry about the future, incessantly worrying about things to come.
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.
and preparations for what is to come in the rest of the play. By just
... to those viewing the performance. The audience must focus their attention of the happenings and the words being portrayed on stage or screen or they will easily miss the double meaning Stoppard intended in each scene of the play. The human motivation is inseparably connected with the theme of life and death that runs through the play, for it is as the two are about to die that they observe that maybe they could have made a different decision, one that would let them remain alive and free they only missed their opportunity to make that choice. Stoppard wanted his play to express more meaning and different messages to his audience but he desired for them to search the play and pay close attention to the different meanings present so they could gain the most possible from the play and those who did not understand would walk away not understanding how much they missed.
The article Poor Teeth was written by Sarah Smarsh with the goal in mind being to shed light on the issue between upper and lower class society in a particularly concrete way. Teeth and dental health are an easy thing for people to imagine in their head because everyone has a set whether they’re white and shiny or black and rotted. This makes it easy to draw a comparison between people that care for their teeth and those who don’t. However, access to dental knowledge and services which the lower class often times doesn’t have is very different between the poor and the rich. While the rich stroll through life showing off their perfect glossy white rows of teeth, there are less privileged people out there with barren mouths whose weak pale gums
Living in Grover’s Corner can be an eye opener to wanting to modernize and live in the a world where new things happen to help instead of hinder, or it can be a lesson that teaches you how being close and doing things that your family approve can be a good quality in life. The Play “Our Town” lets you see the play in your own point of view. Either you can see living in a small community and not having much privacy as a good quality or you can think that being so close to your neighbors is a bad thing. Either way the play shows us that caring for each other and helping each other out is something you have to work on and become better. The play lets us know as long as we live our life as we want no one can take that from us.
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.
In White Teeth, Zadie Smith warns against the dangers of purism and letting cultural background completely shape one’s identity while simultaneously paying tribute to the rich heritage and beliefs of her characters. It is a cautionary tale for immigrants but is never dismissive of their past. Smith is merely advising against tunnel vision and stressing the need to adapt to one’s environment. She shows the beauty that can stem from adaptation while warning that an inability to do so will lead to one’s downfall. London plays an especially important role as the battleground where the past and the present clash; a melting pot with a large immigrant population and inevitable moral struggle.