I've gotten into this really weird habit recently where I serially join book clubs and then read the books but don't actively participate in any of the online or in person discussions. As someone who once got in trouble in elementary school because I would speak without raising my hand and than in high school became that student whose participation teachers had to limit to give other students opportunities, this is pretty out of character for me. I was hooked by Our Shared Shelf, Emma Watson's feminist book club. I also will do pretty much anything Emma Watson suggests, so this was bound to happen eventually. Somewhere along the line I got on the Girl's Night In mailing list and they have a feminist book club as well, albeit their picks are usually lighter than Emma's. For example, last month for Our Shared Shelf we read Sister Outsider by Audre Lorde and for Girl's Night In we read Everything's Trash But It's Okay by Phoebe Robinson. Both awesome books by incredibly intelligent women, but tonally, pretty different! I also joined Banging Book Club which is also a feminist book club but with somewhat more sex-ed oriented choices and Life's Library, which as far as I can tell so far is just books that John Green likes, and I'm okay with this. So I've been reading (and not discussing) lots of books because of these amazing book clubs (that I don't participate in), so it seemed like a good idea to also join the Early Career Dramaturgs play reading club (because in reading so many books, I've really been shirking on the play reading). So far, we've read The Danube by María Irene Fornés and God of Carnage by Yasmina Reza, and I have not participated in either online discussion. SO I'm writing about it here! Lucky you! I would like to take a moment to quickly point out the irony that I'm using one post to discuss two plays by women after I just went on this whole tangent about all the capital-F Feminist Literature I've been reading. I know. Women do twice the work for half the recognition and I'm currently being #partoftheproblem but also both of those plays were really short. I first encountered María Irene Fornés' work my freshman year of college when we read Fefu and Her Friends, arguably her most famous play. From what I can remember, the play is about a woman named STEPHANIE (I know) who goes by FEFU (weird) hosting a party for all her lady friends and it's very progressive and feminist but the cool part is in the second act when it becomes very immersive and site specific and there are like six scenes all happening at the same time and the audience rotates through the scenes and it's all timed perfectly. I would take the time to confirm this information but sophomore year I lent my copy to an individual who shall remain nameless and this person lent my copy to somebody else and I haven't seen it since. You know who you are. Author's Note: I started writing this blog post about two weeks ago and at some point in that process I accidentally closed the window I was working in without saving my draft, so I lost all my fresh insights about these two plays and I got very frustrated and haven't attempted to continue writing since. And then María Irene Fornés spoke to me from beyond the grave. First of all, look at that picture! What a star!
Second of all, ugh, fine, I'll make myself write. SO I ate some mac'n'cheese, took a walk around the block, smelled some books at the bookstore, left before I could make any impulse purchases, and now I'm gonna talk to you about The Danube. The Danube tells the story of Paul, an American ex-pat living in Budapest, as he falls in love with a young Hungarian woman named Eve. The plot isn't crazy complex, although there is some weird mysterious illness thing going on, but I really loved this play for two reasons. 1. Language: The play exists in the framework of a language learning tape, which I have a vague idea of because of the scenes in Love, Actually where Colin Firth uses them to learn Portugese and woo the love of his life. Just kidding, I totally know about language learning tapes, I'm not THAT young. Anyway, each scene is labeled as a unit in a course, for example, Unit One: Basic Sentences, and many of the scenes briefly include a Hungarian tape played along with the actors speaking English. Even though the actors are speaking English through out the play, Fornés, who herself was not a native English speaker, nails the essence of what it is like to speak in a foreign tongue, or when two people who know bits of each other's languages interact. More on this later! 2. Puppets: There are puppets in this play. I repeat: THERE ARE PUPPETS IN THIS PLAY. After scenes 12 and 14 it is indicated in the stage directions for the cast to set-up a puppet theatre and then repeat the scenes they just did entirely with puppets. I don't fully get it, but I love it. It's very meta-theatrical, which is always a good time, and in a way lets the audience know that the performers are in on the joke. We all know it's just a play.
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Stephanie KaneI like reading plays, drinking lots of coffee, and holding other people's Tony Awards. Archives
August 2018
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