The Sound of a Voice by David Henry Hwang is a play that tells the story of two people embroiled in a love affair that is marked by secrets, emotional distance, dishonesty, and ultimately, tragedy. The two characters, a Japanese man and woman who are probably both in their fifties, fall in love but do not even reveal their names to each other. The nine acts of The Sound of a Voice are set entirely in the woman's home.
The man character is a visitor in the woman character's home. The woman serves the man tea and a meal and invites him to stay "as long as [he'd] like." (Hwang 2000) The man decides to stay, at the very least for another day, in spite of the rumors he has heard that other visitors to the woman's home have never left. These two very lonely middle-aged characters, alone in an isolated setting, interact as they simultaneously long for and fight against their mutual attraction and love. They are both desperately lonely but terrified of emotional intimacy, and this keeps them from acknowledging their intense feelings for one another.
The conclusion of the play ends in Scene Nine, when the woman discovers the man attempting to steal away in the dark. She confronts him with their obvious desire for and need of each other, but the man persists in leaving. The woman hangs herself as soon as he is gone. Her death thwarts the man's love for her forever, ensuring that she herself will never have to surrender to a man only to be deserted by him. She is dead and does not see that the man does return to her, his love for her stronger than his fear of love.
The play is filled with symbolism that points to the dramatic and haunting conclusion. The flowers and the shakuhatchi are symbols of beauty, lost love, intima...
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...o make his multiple affairs sound plausible to his girlfriends so that he can continue to see them. At the end of the play, he is given the choice to have his exploits revealed in his professional life or to have them tattooed on his buttocks. His concern remains with himself and he stubbornly refuses to see the ways that he has hurt these three women to the very end.
Works Cited
Hwang, David H. "The Sound of a Voice." Trying to Find Chinatown: The Selected Plays of David Henry Hwang. Writers and Artists Agency. 1st Edition. New York: Theatre Communications Group, Inc., 2000. 151-175.
Ives, David."Soap Opera." Time Flies and Other Short Plays. 1st Edition. New York: Grove Press, 2001. 115-131.
Martin, Jane. "Tattoo." Collected Works Volume 2: Collected Plays 1996-2001. Michael Bigelow Dixon. 1st Edition. Portland, ME: Smith & Kraus: 2001. 221-240.
Good morning/ Afternoon Teacher I am Rachel Perkins And I was asked by The Australian Film Institute to be here to today to talk about my musical. My musical One Night The Moon which was the winner of the Australian Film Institute Award for Best Cinematography in a Non-Feature Film in 2001. I am also here to talk about how distinctive voices are used to show the experiences of others. The voices of Albert and Jim are two characters that give us two different perspectives this is due to their views. Albert one of the characters in my film is an Aboriginal character played by Kenton Pell who is hired by the police as a tracker. Albert is a very deeply spiritual person this gave him a spiritual voice throughout the play but when he get 's kick off the land and banned from the search the gets frustrated which gave him this really emotional voice. This event has a greater meaning which I will elaborate on later and now Onto Jim. Jim is your 1930s white Australian that owns a farm and is going through tough times because of the Great depression. Jim does not allow Albert to find his daughter, This is due to his racist and prejudiced views of black Australians. Jim has an authorial voice because he see’s himself as inferior. Near to the end of
Character voice is used in Craig Silvey’s novel Jasper Jones and James Roy’s series of short stories Town as a way of engaging the audience and making it an inclusive text for the reader. In both texts the author’s use of character voice paints a picture of the nature and feelings of the characters, such as; Lee’s infatuation with Briony in Town, Eliza’s ambitiousness and constant need for freedom in Jasper Jones. The character voice used for all the characters represents the personality, behaviors and traits of the individuals. It also allows the audience to see themselves as a member of the community that Town focuses on and a citizen of Corrigan, becauses of the author’s usage of specific, inclusive and descriptive language.
In the Western world, Butterfly represents a stereotype of the Oriental woman. The stereotype of an obedient, submissive, and domestic Asian woman appeals to Westerners through other media beside the opera; for example, the “mail-order bride trade” catalogues and TV spots. The story of the white devil Pinkerton and a sub-missive Asian girl Cio-Cio-San has become a cultural myth in Western world. In M. Butterfly, David Henry Hwang parodies and deconstructs this myth. In his play, a French diplomat Rene Gallimard fantasizes that he is Pinkerton and his Chinese lover Song is his Butterfly. However, as Hwang says in the “Afterword” of the play, Gallimard “realizes that it is he who has been But...
Wardle, Irving. "American Theater Since 1945." American Literature Since 1900: Penguin History of Literature, Vol 9. Ed. Marcus Cunliff. USA: Penguin, 1994. 205-236
The overarching the play demonstrates the men’s perception of women is entirely not treated as humans. The dialogue between
1, scene 5 is an essential scene in the play. The main two themes are
Kennedy, X J., and Dana Gioia. Literature: An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, and Drama. Sixth ed. New York: Harper Collins College Publishers, 1995. Print.
Francis Lawrence’s I Am Legend is a drama about the sole survivor of a plague who lives in New York City. The sole survivor, Robert Neville, spends his days searching for a cure with his dog, Samantha. The key elements of sound that will be analyzed in this paper on I Am Legend are diegetic sound and non-diegetic sound.
Mishima, Yukio. The Sound of Waves. Trans. Meredith Weatherby and Yoshinori Kinoshita. New York: Vintage, 1994. Print.
When you read this play, take special care to remember the difference between the work of a playwright and that of a novelist. Novelists may imagine their audience as an individual with book in band, but a playwright writes with a theater full of people in mind. Playwrights know that the script is just the blueprint from which actors, producers, stagehands, musicians, scenic designers, make-up artists, and costumers begin. You will need to use an extra measure of imagination to evaluate this play before you see the Goodman production.
Gainor, J. Ellen., Stanton B. Garner, and Martin Puchner. The Norton Anthology of Drama, Shorter Edition. New York: W. W. Norton &, 2010. Print.
...the betrayal and dishonesty that is omnipresent in the play. Not only do they simply embody this concept, but they also serve to conclude the events of the play, by being the ending to what started the beginning.
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.
In this play, the men and women characters are separated even from their first entrance onto the stage. To the intuitive reader (or playgoer), the gender differences are immediately apparent when the men walk confidently into the room and over to the heater while the women timidly creep only through the door and stand huddled together. This separation between genders becomes more apparent when the characters proceed in investigating the murder. The men focus on means while the women focus on motive: action vs. emotion. While the men...
The major climax of the play comes when the friar gives Juliet a potion that will make it seem as though she has died, when in fact she is alive the whole time. While in Mantua, Romeo mistakenly hears that Juliet has actually died and he goes to lay by her side. Just as he takes a vile of poison and dies Juliet awakens to find her love lying dead at her side. She cannot fathom living in a world without Romeo so she takes his sword and ends her own life.