Eurydice

Reading Eurydice (and the interview afterwards) was a revelatory experience. The first revelation I had came when the interview did not contain a question about the character of the Mom of the lord of the underworld, yet it did contain questions about other symbols such as the raining elevator. Clearly there's some sort of symbolic transformation when Orpheus fulfills the Old Woman's needs and the lord of the underworld is reborn tall; however I'm really at a loss for what this symbol could mean exactly. However the play was still powerful to me, despite my lack of understanding. This for me as a writer, was a revelation. Unfortunately, my tendencies as an English Lit major do not transfer well to my creative writing. Too often I imbue my short stories with too much symbolic meaning; instead of portraying character change the trajectory of the story is marked by symbol change. Which, if you're not you know living in my head, can be a hard thing to catch onto, and you're left with nothing to enjoy about the story. However the symbolic change here is both visceral and intellectual––on stage the transformation of the Lord of the Underworld contains its own menace, he literally gets taller, more threatening, just as Orpheus's seduction has visceral impact. The effect is hightened on stage, but the symbols were powerful reading too, due to what they also represent (rape/seduction etc). I would like to learn to write a symbol that is also viscerally impactful the way these are.

Also of note is the use of the Greek chorus. Naturally, as this play is based on other Greek plays, it seems only normal that it has a chorus. However, it's clear that the author is playing with the idea of Greek chorus. This play seems required to make a good play with a Greek chorus in it, in order to make the play interesting, as the form is so borrowed and so old. Notice that seemingly it's hard to identify these as just "choruses" almost everywhere, including the interview, these choruses are identified "greek," inseparable from their source and clearly borrowed. On some level I think that anytime a modern play includes a chorus the play becomes on some level about how it uses the idea of a Greek chorus (Depending on the audience sure). Which is fine if you're trying to make a statement about Greek Choruses, or you don't mind your audience thinking about them and their historical use even if that's extraneous to your point. What I think would be more interesting is ways to subvert this form that might still serve the same theatrical purpose. Characters who begin speaking different voices on stage? Stiffly and frozen to indicate they are speaking from a different source? Documentaries of the action on stage to give that greek chorus like back story? Documentarians on stage? Furthermore, Ruhl discusses how playwrites tend to borrow forms. Which seems to be true given the prevalence of choruses in modern theater, but this seems unnecessary given Ruhl's creativity.

Dialogues

It's interesting that all the excerpts picked by the class for this week's reading have involved just two characters interacting. Where the has been more than the two characters on stage at once (Henry IV, Closer, Angels in America), they have been paired off into couples, and we can compare the couplings to each other. It is by no means impossible to have more than two characters interacting at once, though after seeing these excerpts I wonder if you were to do some sort of mathematical analysis of all plays you would find that the majority of the time only two characters are interacting in this way (Leaving the monologue plays out of course. And the Greek ones, because strophing is an irrational number and would mess everything up). Or perhaps our generation just prefers scenes with only two people. Or perhaps the bias was generated because everyone was looking for exemplars of dialogue, and having only two characters on stage is almost closer to monologue than more action heavy scenes––the characters are allowed to ruminate and express themselves, and the lines stretch out.

Given the stories the class said go over well in plays, it makes sense that these intimate interactions were picked. We listed relationship stories, reflection, and the everyday amongst others. Truly, long scenes of just two people can tend to drag in film, but work incredibly well on stage (Or the page even, I was hanging off every word of the Closer excerpt). In film the camera trickery often involved in dialogue heavy two character scenes seems like it can prove ultra-unrealistic; the camera will switch back and forth from close up of face to face, often leaving the actors glued to the same position as to not cause disorientation. In contrast moment I found that worked incredibly well in Closer was a moment that would work best in the play medium; When Alice tells Dan to "At least have the guts to look at [her]" and he does. I believe strong outbursts like that line are best in live theater because we the audience get some of the same impact as if someone had actually said those things to us. The strength of the actor is almost irrelevant by virtue of those things actually being vocalized, live in person, whereas in film a more fine line must be tread between drama and melodrama––we the audience are more prone to judge the piece from more emotional remove. Also something that seems to work incredibly well in plays is the split scene as seen in Angels in America and Closer. Splitting the scene and putting two couples on stage at once allows them to be foils to each other and speeds up the pacing. While this is technique is totally achievable in film, the shortness of the scenes almost tends to make it irrelevent, the action moves to a new place before it would have a chance to return from the split scene.

One excerpt I found difficult was from Arcadia. I would very much like to see the play, because the excerpt was impenetrable in a way that suprisingly, none of the other plays removed from context were. This makes me wonder if the other plays aren't too emotionally simple in that I could pick up on everything I needed to given no back story and no context. In the Arcadia excerpt, the emotions seem to be far more reserved than in the other dialogues, though in many ways the dialogue was easier to believe, in that it sounded like a conversation that people have, when not at the climax of some particular plot arc. I would love to write a play that had this kind of reserve throughout yet somehow had emotional impact.