It was incredible. The main theme of this play is the realization a character goes through when she is on her deathbed. It communicates about death, personality of a person and relationships with other people, and the thought process of being in a job. I especially liked how they portrayed Vivian, the main character of the play.
I watched Spinning Into Butter at Nerinx Hall’s Heagney Theatre. There are only seven characters who actually appear on stage, and they are Sarah Daniel, Ross Collins, Dean Catherine Kenny, Dean Burton Strauss, Mr. Meyers, Patrick Chibas, and Greg Sullivan. Simon is also a major character in this play, but he never actually comes out on stage. Lastly, the setting of this play is in Belmont, Vermont at a liberal arts college. Spinning Into Butter is not just about the many issues a college campus has to deal with, but it is about racism.
The adults in Salem, Oregon in Stephen Karam’s Speech & Debate had good reason to treat the teens as if they were children. If Diwata, Solomon, and Howie were an accurate representation of the other students at the school, it is no wonder that the parents, teachers, and school board sought to exercise an abundance of control and provide too much guidance in their lives. The three teens dealt with “grown-up” issues throughout the play, but they tried to tackle them in characteristically childish ways. In the opening scene of the play, viewers are introduced to Howie, an openly gay 18-year-old.
In the play along with the movie The Crucible, John Proctor and Abigail Williams have interesting relationship bound by adultery and lies. Abigail becomes obsessed with John and will do anything to be with him. John quickly shuts down her fantasy ideas and tells her that what happened between them was a one-time thing that will never take place again and a mistake on his part. With this knowledge, she soon spends all her time plotting to get John all to herself and to make him fall in love with her, even if that means taking out John’s wife, Elizabeth. We see many examples of this forbidden relationship through their secret encounters and arguments in both examples of the story, still, there were more scenes of John and Abby alone in the movie than in the play.
Fly In Fly Out directed by Howard Cassidy and performed by Tammy Weller, Peter Cossar, Stephanie Tandy, Toby Martin and Timothy Potter is a play about the lives of people living in Fly In Fly Out communities across Australia. The story follows the character of Jenny and how the ‘Fly in Fly out’ workers are affecting her life as well as the town. Jenny’s life suffers from a work/home life imbalance and Tammy Weller who performed the role used the dramatic languages to convey the central theme of work/home life imbalance. Through the elements of situation, relationship, voice, movement and tension, the dramatic meaning was successfully communicated to the audience.
Plautus was a play writer and an actor born in Italy in 254 BCE and died 184 BCE, he was a great Roman comic dramatist whose work was sparsely adapted from Greek plays; he began his carrier as an actor. Pseudolus is one of the works of Plautus which was first shown in 191 BCE at the megalesian festival. Pseudolus is play about a soldier who put down 60 pounds of token to come back later to pay the balance of 20 pounds for a girl whose pimp wanted 80pounds for her to be sold. She sends a letter to her lover (Calidorus) who is heartbroken and confused because he can’t afford to watch her leave and also couldn’t afford to buy her from the pimp.
The scenic designer, Terry Martin, truly captured the elements of this production. The way E. Turner Stump Theatre was set up made you feel like you were in the side show yourself. There were lights hanging from the ceiling, and cages set up for the “freaks” on the stage. It was creepy, uncomfortable, and mesmerizing. Examples where the set design was most adequate was during the love tunnel scene, during the beginning of the production, and at the ending of the production.
The stage design gives the impression of the characters being in two separate rooms, the positioning of blocks and pillars helps again to demonstrate this. This intricate attention to detail enables the performance to be compared so similarly to the movie adaptation of Shakespeare’s classic, although the ‘big screen’ enables more room for a fast change in setting and shots, Rourke does a phenomenal job trying to create this illusion which works so brilliantly. The night before the wedding or you could refer to it as the ‘stag and hen do’ was an unexpected twist that the audience definitely did not see coming. Again, the revolving stage was used to represent the divide between the women and the men and to compensate for the lack of space that the stage could carry.
1. Mr. Burns presents a unique take on the field of acting. During the first act, there was a closed off and often quiet tone to the play. The characters are all spaced out and separated even as their common conversation is being given. The only time they come closer together figuratively and literally is when they’re feeling threatened.
Shelby wanted a child even after the doctors told her it would not be a good idea to have a child because of her health. The she got pregnant and she did not have a care in the world and just wanted to have the baby even when she was warned not to by multiple people. Her mom was the most worried about her because she knew that there would be a consequence on Shelby’s health if she did have the child. I see this play’s set on stage as a hairs salon just because while I was reading the play, I pictured a lot of the scenes in the hair salon. The effects would work because that’s exactly how the play started off and that is where a lot of scenes take
I liked that Paula Vogel did not hold back and let all of the emotions of the play loose. I am anticipating that I will enjoy the play. I personally think I would like it more if the characters were portrayed by only people rather that people holding puppets, but they have too much symbolic meaning to be left out. I think the puppets are meant to resemble the fact that we really have no control over our own lives as children. The release of the real people from the puppets into adults symbolizes the freedom from their
“The Play That Goes Wrong” required a very detailed strategic plan of the arranged props and set design that actors need to follow in their performance. I believe the performers did a marvelous job in following the detailed choreography of the show. One of the most memorable cast members was Nancy Zamit. She played Annie the stage manager, who took the spotlight when she was forced into playing Charles’ fiancée named Sandra because the original female lead got "knocked unconscious” in the middle of the play. As terribly shy as she was, Zamit intensified the enjoyment of the audience as her character was reading off lines from pages of the script very awkwardly and awfully in an unfitted red dress and wig.
The subject of fear has captivated humanity for centuries, as it is an ever-present aspect of our lives, regardless of our location or circumstances. Fear is a powerful motivator, driving the plot, pace, tension, and emotions of stories. In Henry James “The Turn of the Screw”, fear is explored and analyzed through the eyes of the protagonist the Governess as she attempts to take care of her employers, neice and nephew. The question of whether fear is real or simply a product of our own imaginations as shown with the governess as she becomes increasingly convinced of the existence of ghostly figures that others seem to ignore. However, the question of whether fear is real or a product of the governess's imagination remains at the forefront,
Throughout this theater project I have learned very much. My group and I researched all sorts of things in order to get factual information about the time period that the play, Grease, took place in. We all had to research the time period of the late 1950’s to find inspiration for all parts of the play. I, personally, focused more on costumes in this project. I conducted research about what high school students wore in the late 1950’s.
