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For my performance piece I chose to see Marrying Terry. It is a new play written by Gregg Opelka. The play was read in a “concert style reading” at the Victory Gardens Theater on Lincoln Ave. By “concert style reading” it meant that there was a actor for every role in the script, accept they didn’t move around the stage like in a normal play; Instead there were chairs lined up and podiums in front of them for the actors to use when it was their turn to act. I thought it was interesting and perfect for this class because instead of focusing on the visuals you focus on the script.
Marrying Terry is a comedy that takes place in Chicago on New Years Eve. To start it off there are two women shopping, Terry and Anne. They are shopping for a robe for Terry’s fiancé, an attorney named Johnathon. As they are shopping you are introduced to three men who have met up at the lounge in the Drake hotel; an older jolly doctor named Peter, his timid right hand-man Terry, and the young and strapping Sam. Now the confusion all starts when Terry unwillingly has a few two many drinks and Sam checks him into his hotel room. The irony is that the male Terry doesn’t really have a hotel room there, it is a room the female Terry rented for her and her fiancé. They both have the exact same name and they are both engaged; so you could see how the two of them being in the same hotel room may cause some problems. After lots and lots of irony and funny scenes you close with Terry and Terry, who originally hated each other, getting married.
This play was well-written and very funny. The comedy probably doesn’t appeal to everyone though. A good key indicator is that I was one of three people who weren’t over fifty in the audience. It was mostly good clean humor, something you would see on a 50’s TV show. The timing was impeccable throughout the script. If any event is taken out of order, the whole thing would fall apart. All and all the reading was interesting and a useful tool to better understand literature.
The DePaul University Theatre School had a free production of “A New Brain” at the Athenaeum Theatre. The musical ran 90 minutes and had live musicians. It is a comedic musical that revolved around the life of a writer, Gordon Schwinn. He is Jewish and a homosexual. The scene opens and he has a hard time to writing lyrics for a children’s program. He is stressing over his deadline because he needs the money while his agent, Rhoda, is pressing for him to finish the song by the end of the month. She plans to take him to lunch and see his finished product. His mother, Mimi, calls and she is planning to visit him. His boyfriend, Richard, is missing from the scene because he is enjoying his sailing trip. Gordon and Rhoda are at a little diner and there’s this sarcastic know-it-all waitress who is giving him a hard time. A figure of Mr. Bungee, the character from children’s program is stressing him out even more because the lyrics to his song are terrible. There is this moment chaos on the stage where Gordon is conflicted with these different voices and his head aches and finally he just collapses. His mother joins him in the hospital and there is a couple of wacky hospital staff making the situation even more awkward. They examined and x-rayed his head. It turns out that Gordon has a “cancerous hemorrhage” and he might need a new brain. Mimi got into contact with Roger and he comes to visit him in the hospital. Of course the mother and the agent leaves so they could have some time alone. The hospital rushes to get the surgery done before it might get too late for Gordon so his family and friends spent more time with him and reassuring Gordon would get through the operation. While he is still in recovery his mother cleaned up his room and threw out all of his books because she felt that they caused him to think too much and have the hemorrhage. The surgery is success and he finishes his song and he gets paid.
The whole mother thinking that the books caused his ‘hemorrhaging’ is almost as parallel to Don Quixote’s insanity. Don Quixote read a lot of literature and became disillusioned with reality and his perception. The mother felt that he had too much knowledge from reading many books and plays caused him to end up in the hospital. I really enjoyed the musical. The actors had really good singing voices. There was a homeless girl that was there to help the story and singers move along. They were some little side stories and musical accompaniment of the other characters that were hilarious. It is a comedic musical and even some serious matters were mocked. There was one about the fat nurse and he only found relief in eating pre-packaged pastry snacks. I found it very light hearted. It was better because the school did the production free to the viewing audience, but they asked for donations at the end.
The piece that I chose to see was a small play by a man named Phillip Dawkins. He is a Chicago playwright that first wrote the play in 2002 under the title “The Day After Yesterday”. He has been working on the play up until this point and after further revision has titled it “Still Life in Color”. The play was shown at a local theater company called TUTA. The play was small concerning the cast with only five total characters. The play is based in a city called Crevacia that is located between a large mountain region and a set of hills in a valley.. The “boy”, who is now king was cursed by the gods as he blamed them for the death of his father. The gods decided to curse the kingdom by producing rain that lasts nine years. This causes the town to flood and the king to never leave his home. His only contact is a woman that is his appointed caretaker who is in love with him. One day a woman climbs into the king’ home that is atop the greatest hill because she has survived the floods by building layers onto her house. They immediately fall in love at first sight. The caretaker is hurt and depressed because she is the one who is madly in love with the king and would do anything to be with him. A sorcerer appears and tells her that he will grant her one miracle but to use it wisely. She realizes that if you chooses only for him to love her that the flood waters will rise and they will both be dead. She then calls on her miracle to make the flood cease hoping that this will cause the king to fall in love with her. She is wrong and hurt so she uses her new powers to separate the lovers. She places them on opposite sides of the kingdom and forces them to do an activity but that if they stop they will cause the other to die. When the two lovers met they asked the gods to never let them change or grow old so that they could stay in love forever. They remain in these positions for years while the angry “other girl” goes on with her life in haste to travel the world and see new things all the while hoping that the “boy will one day stop and go to her. She returns to the town after fifty years and the two will not stop. She releases them and allows them to be together. The only problem is that their aging is catching up with them and they die. The change from colors to blackness and must never know the feelings of pure happiness that they once felt.
Okay so maybe it does sound like the play was dark and depressing and maybe in a way it was but I want to tell you that I got so much out of it. One thing I should mention about the characters is that they are all represented by a different color in the beginning and they explain why they are that color and how they will always be that color. The play takes you through their lives and shows that color fades and changes and life must go on. Although this was not a poetry reading I realized that most of the lines sounded as if they were written in poetry form. This included the rhyming and syllable matching from line to line. The theater was very small and private but I think that it really added to the show. The fact is that if I had read this book perhaps, I would not have seen things in the way that the director did. The neat thing about performance is that the props and the costumes are from the eyes of the producer or director. The play was performed based on what the actors felt and heard when they read their lines. This also can make the show different fro night to night because with performance art each time can be different. The show was great and it made me think about things even after I left the show. To me that makes it worth it, when you can really take something away from it.
As a response to the generally accepted criticism that all men are assholes, Rob Becker’s “Defending the Caveman” makes the claim that not ALL men are assholes, men are simply different than women. This uproariously funny one-man show, starring Chris Sullivan, explains and (as the title implies) defends the negative stereotypes of men, using evolution as its basis for argument. By breaking down the role of man as the hunter, and woman as the gatherer, Becker explains how many of the stereotypical tendencies of both genders came about. For example, woman’s propensity for shopping stems directly from the prehistoric days when their role in the family was to gather fruits and other goods from the surrounding territory. They had to keep a good eye out for detail in color, texture, etc., all the while keeping their attention alive to many possibilities in order to bring back the most quality goods for the family. Thus, the need to choose several good items from among many translates directly to their need to shop. On the other hand, men, with their prehistoric hunter role, had one goal in mind, that being to stalk and kill something--one thing. He had to be able to zone in on one target in order to hunt it down. So, whereas women are essentially gathering while shopping, men are essentially hunting. Men know what they need, and while shopping they are essentially hunting it down, avoiding as much deviation and delay as possible.
This mindset of man’s inherent differences in regards to women is an opinion that Camille Paglia attests to and attempts to prove in “Sex and Violence, or Nature and Art,” An example of this is Becker’s use of logic to explain how evolution was the determining factor in the psychological differences between men and women. Along the way he says that male decision making is purely based on logic, whereas women tend argue with emotional or visceral feelings rather than logic. Paglia states that, “It is usually men rather than women who claim logic’s superiority to emotion.” So, although Becker proves his own point, it is steeped in irony. Of course Becker’s argument would be based in logic, he being male. It makes plenty of sense to me, though. Paglia’s quote, “…there can be no equality… [man] is condemned to a perpetual pattern of linearity, focus, aim, directedness. He must learn to aim,” also ties in greatly with Becker’s overall argument of the hunter persona. There is a target, and man is always aiming for it. For these reasons, “Defending the Caveman” ties in with our course outline very well. While the comedic aspect of the play puts people in the seats, they are not left without real substance in male/female psychology and sociology.