Summary Of The Play 'DNA' By Dennis Kelly

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‘DNA’ is a play written in 2008 by Dennis Kelly. The play is basically about a group of teenagers do something bad, really bad, then panic and cover the whole thing up. An important character named Phil is presented as a powerful, quiet, confident and intelligent person in the first section of the play. Phil has a friend who is always near him called Leah, but seems to ignore and not answer back to her how much ever she talks. Leah always talks continuously and tries to get Phil’s attention but never succeeds, which shows that Phil doesn’t care a lot about Leah. Phil thinks the choices he makes will make others happy but they clearly did not like them and even Phil himself didn’t like the choices he made. Paragraph 1 In Section 1, Scene 3, Phil has been introduced as the leader of the group over John Tate as well as becomes more bossy over things. He stops eating for a while and starts talking to the other members of the group about the plans, uninterrupted. This suggests the group accepts Phil’s leadership. This is supported when Phil says “Cathy, Danny, Mark, you go to Adam’s house, you wait until his mum’s out, you break in” shows that Kelly uses …show more content…

Through his relationship with Leah we learn that Kelly uses silence as a vital technique to aid in the characterization of Phil. During Section One Scene One Leah continuously attacks Phil with questions, such as “Are you thinking about me?” but the use of stage directions says ’NO ANSWER’ which shows that Phil’s relationship with Leah is very one sided. This tells us that Kelly uses a lot of body language to show how Phil is reacting to Leah’s Quote. Also, in the scenes with Leah, Phil only directly responses to Leah when she has decided to leave him at the end of Section Three Scene Three which shows that Phil feels like he has some company when Leah is around and cares about her, but Kelly doesn’t show this until the end of the