The Good Woman of Setzuan by Bertolt Brecht

This drama reminded me slightly of the story of the wall of Jericho, well, the back story. The story of the prostitute who shelters Joshua from harm and because of her faithfulness, she is spared. I found very little footage or pictures of the actual play being performed, and very little stuck out to me. However, the following few clips/photos struck me as being powerfully beautiful; a great symbol of what the play meant to me.

August Strindberg's A Dream Play

Whoa. After reading this through three times, I have no idea what is going on. The language is beautiful and stark though, so I definitely could walk away with something. I felt like Caryl Churchill did an amazing job updating it. The truths left me very depressed and now I am hesitant about getting married, for sure. The section that is discussing about a life of unhappiness struck me, especially when they said having a baby would be a good solution. The idiocy is striking, but it was like holding up a mirror to today's society. People get married and don't want to work on their relationship, because they are so stuck on being right all the time, so they come up with other solutions that allow them to be correct. Having a baby is one of them. There is nothing worse than a child having to grow up in a family where his/her parents do not have a functioning relationship. I feel like every person should read this play before signing a marriage license for its truths.

The woman's voice in this is hauntingly beautiful.

La Passon de Jeanne d'Arc

http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/08409c.htm

The above link is a write-up by the Catholic church on Joan of Arc. You will find much of her biographical information and it answers any questions you may have regarding her life.

As far as this film goes, I agree Carl Dreyer is a genius. However, I found myself very upset in the fact that Joan was portrayed as a madwoman (in my opinion). The way she looked, her eyes bugged out and vacant, made me feel as if Dreyer himself though Joan was mad. I found it difficult to watch, as her expression rarely changed and that vacant look seemed ever-present. Joan, in my understanding of her, seemed a much stronger character than I felt Dreyer portrayed her. Yet, I think the final scene was brilliant. I could feel the agony Joan was enduring.

I feel that this is also a moving adaptation of the story of Joan of Arc, but cannot be compared to Carl Dreyer's timeless adaptation.

Sarah Kane's 4.48 Psychosis

This disturbed me. Greatly. It was all manageable, though, until Kirsten's recitation. Wow. I was so scared she was actually going to hang herself. What an amazing job she did. After seeing that, I was prompted to look up every bit of information on Sarah Kane that I could. I wanted to know what exactly led her to taking her own life. I wondered if her editors or publishers stopped for a minute after noting her brilliance and said "Hey Sarah, is everything okay?" I guess it would not have mattered either way, but I found the real tragedy here to not be the play itself, but the playwright. Along with that, I realized I would not be so intrigued by her if she had not taken her life, which is a scary epiphany to come to about oneself. To recognize that for yourself, you want happy endings, but for others, it is more interesting to witness a tragic end. Of course, that is approximately what the basis of this class is all about if I'm not mistaken, for all of us heinous tragedy-lovers to sit around and talk about what makes a good tragedy great, that is to say, more tragic.

Hamletmachine

Beautiful and disturbing adaptation of Heiner Muller's Hamletmachine

Hamlet

Can utter sanity come from insanity? Ophelia's insanity seems to grant her some sort of wisdom, according to her brother:


OPHELIA
140
(sings)

They bore him barefaced on the bier,

Hey, non nonny, nonny, hey, nonny,

And in his grave rained many a tear.

Fare you well, my dove.


LAERTES

Hadst thou thy wits, and didst persuade revenge,

It could not move thus.

And later on in the text, she starts discussing flowers and "giving" them to King Claudius and Gertrude. The irony is that the flowers she gives are symbols of infidelity, adultery, and repentance. She later says she would have given violets- they symbolize faithfulness- but they dried up when her father died, a foreshadowing of sorts. I found this passage to be enchanting, and of course, a type of beauty that only Shakespeare could accomplish.

I found this video to be a good summary of what Ophelia is going through in her insanity.

Sarah Kane: Phaedra's Love

To avoid the risk of any awkward citation, I'm going to stray from quoting this story in my workbook solely because this is out for the whole world to see, I will work on quotes in my final paper. I found this version to be very stark, miserable, and depressing. But it felt real to me. This Hippolytus was certainly different from the other two in the sense that he was despicable and impure in any sexual sense. In my opinion, though, he was still strikingly similar to both Seneca and Racine's Phaedra. They all were trying to abstain from love in some form and although Kane's Hippolytus had seemingly everyone in the kingdom in his pants, he did not show a flicker of love except for two specific places. One would be where Phaedra mentions Lena and he immediately shuts her down, thus shutting off those emotions. The second is the brief embrace he shares with Strophe. It is a small stage direction that really stood out to me.

I think it is certainly legitimate to say that Hippolytus abstained from love and it is certainly not a good argument to say he was intimate with others. Prostitutes likewise give and receive sex on a large scale and you cannot tell me that they love every person they give favors to. The same is in Hippolytus' case. I think Sarah Kane made him more realistic by making him sexual. He is creepy and so unfeeling, almost like Kane herself put many of her depressive qualities in him.