Let's Play

FINALLY! We're speaking about plays!

Plays are one of my absolute favorite forms of entertainment; I've seen mulitple, I've acted in multiple, and I've even been an assistant director of multiple. I could go on about them for hours (but I won't).

In order to understand how to write about plays, we need to undestand what elements affect them. In chapter 7, Gardner takes us through these elements. We learn about components, such as diction and setting. These things help make up the play. Diction is the way the author has chosen for the characters to speak. What is their knowledge level, their dialect, their speaking patterns? By looking at diction, we have an inside look at the characters. Diction helps us read between the lines. Setting does this as well. When we look at the setting, we are able to distinguish the mood of the play, background stories for the characters, and we can even use setting to help us understand the time period.

Gardner also teaches us how to read a play. When reading a playwright, it is up to us to imagine what the situation would look like on stage. I know, back in high school when we rehearsed for our plays before we started blocking (choreographing the movements during each scene), my drama teacher made us read EVERYTHING on the page. And I mean everything. So, we sat in the front of the class in our chairs and each actor read for their character. In between lines, another person read the stage directions, the facial expressions, anything written in italics. This reader had one of the most important jobs because he let the actors know what tone to have, what facial expression to have, and where to move (or not to move). This goes for reading playwrights at home. Read everything on the page because it is up to you to imagine what the stage would look like. This is how you understand the play better.

As for writing about plays, Gardner gives a list of questions we should ask in order to analyze our play more efficiently. These questions (on page 114) are extremely helpful to the process of writing about plays. She goes on to give us an example play, Trifles, with an example paper, which seems to analyze a hidden theme in the play. This is why it is important to read everything because it helps us come up with more interesting questions than "What is the play about?" and "What is the setting of this play?" Instead, we can come up with less generic topics, like the one on moral ambiguity and character development in the example paper.

Cinderelly, Cinderelly

We've all heard of Cinderella, the girl who went from maid to married. However, we've never herd it the way Anne Sexton tells it in her poem, Cinderella. Her version of the well-known story is one I did not recognize, one with the cutting of limbs and pecking of eyes and a white dove, instead of a fairy godmother. Not suitable for children, obviously.

I like the way she tells the story inside the poem, especially because she uses other scenarios to compare it to, like the woman who marries a wealthy man. I think it's interesting to look at Cinderella next to the stories of everyday people because it makes her less glamourous and definitely less memorable. Her story ends up not even feeling like a fairytale at all. Instead, she just turns into another rags-to-riches story that we hear about often.

Although it was one of those "childhood ruined" moments, I still like the dark and twisted story of her. I think that Sexton's point is that we shouldn't rely on fairytales because, when you examine them closely, they end up being like everyday stories, hiding behind a facade of magic and wonder.