Director’s Notebook Death and the Maiden By Ariel Dorfman Candidate Name: Daniel Hawie Roca School Number: 0448 Content: The Play Text, Its Context, and the Ideas Presented Pages 1 - 5 Artistic Responses and Live Theatre Experiences Pages 6 - 9 The Director’s Vision and Intended Impact Pages 9 - 15 The Staging of Two Moments of the Play Pages - Bibliography Page Key: Quotes from the Play Quotes from External Sources Quotes from Ariel Dorfman Director 's Notebook By: Daniel Hawie Death and the Maiden By Ariel Dorfman The Play Text, Its Context, and the Ideas Presented This notebook is focused on the direction of a personal proposal for the play text of Ariel Dorfman’s “Death and the Maiden”. It will have as a primary objective to illustrate the ideas I get not only for the envisioning of the acting and design of the play, but also to get the reader of this Director’s Notebook to understand clearly every idea of what I envision for my production of this play, regarding both the vision I get for the acting and the design, but also regarding where these ideas came from, whether it was from Dorfman’s context or my own. For my director’s notebook, I decided to create a staging proposal “Death and the Maiden” firstly because the main aspect I wanted for my play text to have had to be an open ending. When proposing the staging for a play, I want to be free to interpret what the playwright wrote freely, so the fact of using a play text which has an open ending
Manipulating the magical realism conventions, symbolism and multiple role-playing, and australian gothic convention intertextuality, Dan presents with dark humour a disturbing yet intriguing remarkable piece of theatre. A very obvious convention that Dan Evans has manipulated into this play is the use of magical realism’s multiple role-playing. With only two actors and eight different characters, we watch Ray and Sylvie progressively lose their mind as they visit each
In this section of Drama and Dramatic Poetry, my English class read “Trifles” and “POOF!”. “Trifles” is a one-act play that is dramatic and serious. In this play, the husband, John Wright, was found strangled with a rope in his bedroom and all of the evidence points to his wife, Minnie Foster. The question explored throughout the play is why she killed him. The story hints that she was a victim of domestic violence, but the audience cannot be absolutely sure because it does not outright say it.
The productions of this play were successful through stage design, lighting crewing, and acting. Those three aspects made the quality of the play stand out to me, as an audience member. The production of the set design of the play was a good effort. The set design for the play staging aims for the sweet spot between feeding adult nostalgia and satisfying a new generation of children.
The theme is this scene is supernatural. This theme is important in the play because without the witches there would be no story. The audiences will be uncomfortable and quite scared of her because witches can kill people. They would be immersed into the play because of the
The play, although only a few pages long, is able to depict how the stages of life, the birth of one’s child, one’s marriage, the
As the curtain closes, the audience is struck with a newfound love, and because of the excellent use of literary devices, Shakespeare’s writings continue to live to this
Readers observe the Stage Manager’s inital definition of “eternal” by noting the events of Act III. Here, popular characters such as Mrs. Gibbs and Simon Stimson exist, though not in the world of the living; rather, they silently observe mortals from beyond the grave. As they exist, time and events eternally unfold around them. The Stage Manager views “eternity” as something abstract, yet he illustrates it in every single human being. He believes eternity serves as a bridge between unappreciative and humility.
Thesis Statement: design elements, actors performances and theatre space, overall approach contributed creating an unsettling overall approach about life and the production.? (P1) The particular acting performances that helped me experience and understand the play more fully were the grieving scenes of Herman and Nara. Both characters go through a series of emotions trying to find new ways learning how to live without their loves ones being physically present. Each character goes through the grieving process differently.
In the infamous tragedy of the play ‘Romeo and Juliet’ by William Shakespeare, the theme and influence of death are poignantly prevalent through the course of the play. The use of death in ‘Romeo and Juliet’ is portrayed through 3 instances of the deaths of 4 major characters, Romeo, Juliet, Mercutio and Tybalt, in which the context of each death, are relative to the cause and development of their demise. Shakespeare capitalizes on the sophistication and complexity of death along with its varying impacts in relation to the context in which guides their tragedies. The death of Romeo is the result of his intense love and passion for Juliet as he refuses to exist in a world without his true love, “ The lean abhorrèd monster keeps thee here in dark to be his paramour? For fear of that, I still will stay with thee, And never from this palace of dim night depart again.”
For Shakespeare’s plays to contain enduring ideas, it must illustrate concepts that still remain relevant today, in modern society. Shakespeare utilises his tragic play Othello, to make an important social commentary on the common gender stereotypes. During early modern England, Shakespeare had to comply to the strict social expectations where women were viewed as tools, platonic and mellow, and where men were displayed as masculine, powerful, tempered, violent and manipulative. As distinct as this context is to the 21st century, the play exposes how women were victimised by the men who hold primary power in the community in which they compelled women to conform to the ideal world of a perfect wife or confront an appalling destiny for challenging the system. Moreover, Shakespeare utilises the main antagonist, Iago, to portray how men are desperate to achieve what they want and to indirectly fulfil the stereotype of masculinity and power through manipulation.
The Feud in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet The aim of this essay is to define the nature of the feud in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet and to discuss its function in the dramatic development of the play. The conflict between the families of Montagues and Capuletes is presented as the outcome of an ultimate expression of patriarchal society in Verona which promotes virility at any cost and obscene sexual innuendo targeting women. However, the love of Romeo and Juliet comes to prove the young people’s indifference towards the feud but at the same time the patriarchy’s tremendous power over them. Finally, the family’s feud combined with the contribution of fate makes the timing of events such, that a tragic resolution cannot be prevented.
The chronological structure also makes the audience aware of Blanche’s spiral into a destruction which is tragic and inevitable. The plot of the play is advanced
This play consists of a lot many themes. To cite a few: Rewriting the tale of Cinderella and Sleeping beauty, Class, language and phonetics and Independence. But in this paper, I would like to work on the feminist aspect of this play for this aspect, is the one which impressed me more. As this paper is based on Gender analysis I am restricting my analysis to the theme of Feminism in this play.
In the twenty-first century, the plays of William Shakespeare may at first appear dated and irrelevant: they use archaic language, are set in the age of Kings and Queens, and the Kingdom of England. However, it would be plainly mistaken to construe that Shakespeare’s works do not still remain integral to a twenty-first century society. Shakespeare’s plays gave the words and expressions one uses every day, revolutionized the art of theater as it was known, and forewarned about issues that would unknowingly still apply centuries later. Therefore, Shakespeare has had a profound effect on our lives by enriching our language and culture, as well as providing ideas that would still apply five centuries later, and it would thus behoove us to learn from his works and life.
“Life is a mixing of all kind of things: comedy and tragedy going together” (Alejandro Jodorowsky). Comedy and tragedy have been two popular forms of entertainment for people throughout the ages. From Greek performances to contemporary plays, the art of theatre is well and thriving. While the styles of playwrights and the way theatre is experienced changes through time, the messages these plays gaves have more or less stayed the same. Drama can, for the most part, be classified as either tragedy or comedy.