Subject:And the Soul Shall Dance
Wakako Yamauchi’s play And the Soul Shall Dance seemed to be heavily influenced by the works of Tennessee Williams. Blanch Dubois and Emiko are almost cross-cultural counterparts. They are both women who have been driven to point of madness by abusive relationships and obsessions with the past.
In And the Soul Shall Dance, Emiko is a beautiful and tragic figure. Her life in Japan was a happy one of song, dance, and love affairs. Forced to marry her sister’s widower, she is dislocated from her family and way of life. Her husband, Oka resents her intensely. Also unhappy, he uses violence and abusive language to lash out at Emiko. Educated to be gentile and sensitive, this harsh relationship is too much for her to bear. She honestly believes that if she can just return to Japan, things will be as they were before. But, her situation is complicated when she is robbed of her only source of hope. The audience sympathizes with her because we are given a glimpse of her past. In the second act, she tries to sell her kimonos to Hana. This reminded me of Blanch Dubois final line in A Streetcar Named Desire, “I’ve always depended on the kindness of strangers.”

Realism - The importance of details

Subject: Realism

In reading chapters eight and nine I began to think about all the performances I have seen and the movies that I continue to enjoy, and I quickly realized that realism plays an important role in my overall enjoyment of the performance.

I really want to focus on chapter nine’s section, Evoking a World Through Detail. I think that small, minuscule details make all the difference in a performance. Most recently, the smaller details in performances tend to ruin things for me. For instance, I despise moments where an actor drinks “unrealistically” in between each line. I don’t find it realistic that a person takes that many drinks. This very tiny, and most likely unnoticed detail, makes a big difference in my eyes. The smaller details of a production tend to stay in my head much longer than the overall production itself. In The Foreigner I remember the constant drinking of Froggy, I remember the way the walls were designed, I remember the facial expressions of Charlie, and those are the things that I will remember once I left the theater. These minor details mean a great deal to me.

Minor details are not just the way the sets are designed, or if an actor is using the correct type of liquor glass, but it is underlined performance the actor is giving. In reading And the Soul Shall Dance it is hard for me to get some of the value that I could get from a live performance. The Foreigner, more specifically, Charlie’s performance really made things real for me. The actor did a wonderful job of using his body, facial expressions and eyes giving a chance for the audience to appreciate the “true” feelings he was trying to express.

Realism comes down to the little things in a performance. When we watch a live play or sit on the couch to watch a rented DVD, we appreciate the realism of the performance. We also quickly notice when things are not presented to us in a way in which we believe it is “real.” Special effects on movies may not be accurate, but they are presented in a way in which we believe them to be how they would be in real life. If there is a mistake in special effects, or if an accent of an actor isn’t just right, we are very quick to point out the flaws.

In American theatre, Realism is possibly the deciding factor to success.

Questions to Consider: And the Soul Shall Dance

Subject: Possible Meditation Subjects

Wondering what to write about on And the Soul Shall Dance?

As always, consider the questions and concepts raised and advanced in the text as starting points for a meditation. You might also write in response to these questions:

How does realism work, exactly? What techniques make "realism" a distinct genre of theatre, and how are these techniques deployed by Wakako Yamauchi? (For example: what is the stage world of the play made of, and how is it used? How do the characters interact? What do they discuss, and how does this dialogue further the plot?)

Consider how this play reveals the past. In realism, the audience learns about past events through personal recollections rather than narrative exposition. How is "the story so far" made clear in this play, as opposed (say) to Into the Woods or Catastrophe or The Shawl?

What importance does the cultural milieu play in And the Soul Shall Dance? How much do you need to know about the historical moment and the culture of the characters to make sense of the play? How does the playwright inform the audience (or fail to inform it) of the background that it might need to know to follow the action?

As always, these are not questions to be answered comprehensively, but merely starting points for potential discussion. Remember to use specific examples from the play (or the text) as demonstrations or illustrations of your point of view.

Chapter 6 and The Foreigner

Subject: The Designers

Since we are writing about the play in our reviews, I would like to focus on the items related to chapter 6 and the designs of The Foreigner. I enjoyed how the stage was set up this time around, compared to Suburbia. I find it interesting that the way the stage is set up can change the whole effect of the performance. The book compares a proscenium theatre and thrust, arena and black box stages. I enjoyed how Suburbia was put into a thrust, but don't think that would've worked for The Foreigner. I think The Foreigner took great advantage of its three dimensional space. I think because of the type of play it was, a farce, it was better to be placed in front of the play, almost as though we were watching a Thursday night sitcom. Surrounding the stage, in a thrust, would not have allowed us to view every part of the production. It was important for us not to be able to see certain angles of the stage, to keep the "realism."

Speaking of the realism of the play, chapter six talks about the stage design realism vs. Abstraction. I believe that The Foreigner's stage design, or chose to go with a realism design was key in the performance. I don't think an abstract design would've given us a since of feeling. I compare the abstract to Chicago where you really have to imagine the setting of the scene. I think in this play, it was better for us to see a fully furnished stage, with a backdrop of a small mountain house. It made things much easier to enjoy. The stage was set up in such a way, that when someone went up the stairs, I could then imagine them going into a room with flowered wall paper, quilted bed spreads, and old fashioned bathrooms with old hardware. My favorite part about the the realism set was the windows. I enjoyed how we could see people walking by before they entered the speaking part of the scene. It made me wonder if it was weird for the actors to get into character before entering the main point of the stage. The actors couldn't just walk by the windows as "themselves," but they had to walk by the windows in character. It added to the whole experience of believing this was a old fashioned house in the woods. The one thing I would've liked to have seen was some form of tree in the background, maybe the reflection of water during the daytime scenes, representing the lake. Even know the stage was set in a realism sort of way, I longed for more.

Another aspect of the design was the lighting. I enjoyed at the very beginning when the lights flickered as the thunder crashed in the background, representing lightening. They kept using lights throughout the play as well. Moments when the electricity went off, moments when the actors used candles to light the stage, and lanterns. I thought it helped to put us in the moment of the play. It brought about a feeling of suspense during a suspensful moment in the play. Like a horror flick, I began to wonder what was coming next. When the KKK came around those windows abruptly, I could picture audience members jumping in their seats. I don't think this would've happened without the mood the lights put us in.

The last thing I want to look at is the costume design. I tend to question this aspect in most college plays, just because I suspect the clothing just comes from one of the actor's closets. I felt that the costume designers/actors in this play did a good job of picking out the correct attire for the setting. Each actor picked clothing that amplified their role. Froggy was continuously in his military uniform, Charlie starts in a buttoned up rain coat and eventually is in more revealing clothing, just as his character grows throughout the play. I think clothing can be an extention of the character's movement or growth throughout a play. This play especially used clothing to depict a certain character's personality.

The Foreigner really did a fantastic job of using all the design factors talked about in chapter 6. Using all of these things helped in my enjoyment and belief in the play.

Tongues and the Reverend

Subject: Language in The Foreigner
The Foreigner was a delight! I enjoyed the colorful use of language and nonsense Larry Shue employed to tell Charlie’s story. The play includes two different British dialects, various forms of Southern accents, Ellard’s slow speech, and Charlie’s fictional language. Coming into this experience I was a bit concerned about the cast pulling off such a wide array of speech patterns. I have seen this play as a one act and worked with it in my high school theatre class and realize the difficulties they may have had. It can be such a chore to sustain an accent especially if there are many different ones floating around. I feared the illusion would be spoiled if the actors began rubbing off on one another verbally. I was pleasantly surprised. However, they could have pushed it a bit more with the Southern characters, namely Reverend David Marshall Lee.
I was discussing David with a fellow audience member and friend. The absence of the character’s Southern draw did not seem to bother him. In his mind, David’s clerical status, which suggests some kind of education, seemed to explain the lack of one. I hold a very different opinion. David was no doubt raised in the backwoods of Georgia and at some point he spoke the vernacular. He loves the Klan, he is engaged to a former debutant and the modern equivalent of a Southern Belle, and he is a descendant of General Robert E. Lee. Forgive my grammar, but it don’t get more Southern than that. I honestly do not see him abandoning his roots and his language. His position as a preacher obviously places him within a community that speaks much like Betty or perhaps even more like Owen Musser. The missing accent would make him a foreigner and he would probably not be well received by both his congregations (church and Klan). He needs to belong linguistically because much like Richard III, words are his weapons. Also, I think a colloquial David would have reinforced the image of sweetness and charm mentioned and praised in the script.

Wiletta: Sock it to me

Subject: Trouble in Mind
As I was reading I could not stop thinking about a statement made by actress Hattie McDaniel. She was receiving a lot of guff from the African American community about her Academy Award winning performance as Mammy in Gone with the Wind and she said, “I’d rather play a maid than be one.” Trouble in Mind addresses the struggle that black actors face in an industry controlled by white males. The character Wiletta is torn between doing what she loves and in a sense being a slave to the man. She advises John that “White folks can’t stand unhappy Negroes…so laugh, laugh when it ain’t funny at all.” He calls her “Uncle Tommish,” which is ironic considering the shift in his character a few scenes later to a puppet on a string. She admits that it is, but makes the point that it has to be that way if you want to keep your job. Given these scenes, I really believed that John (“I couldn’t play anything I didn’t believe in”) was going to be the reformer in this play, but I was dead wrong.
I thoroughly enjoyed witnessing Wiletta’s character shift. However, this shift would not have occurred without the dreadful Manners. It really made me furious when he was pressing her to justify and relate to her character. I thought, These techniques have no place here. This experience is in her blood. She doesn’t need some white dude telling her she is playing it incorrectly. But ultimately, the techniques led to her self-discovery and a greater truth within the play. Wiletta gives Manners a taste of his own medicine by employing his methods to point out the flaws within the script (and society itself). Wiletta takes McDaniel’s famous statement one-step further into action. The trouble in Wiletta’s mind is that it isn’t enough just to recognize that blacks are human beings. Childress is telling the theatre community that they must present African Americans not as “simple, backward people” but as intelligent beings who are driven by their principles and emotions.

Chapter 5 and Trouble in Mind

Subject: Adaptation and the director's role

Adaptation is a word that continues to resurface as we discuss the different roles in the theatre. We have seen it in chapters three, four and now five. It makes you wonder who is control of the adaptation of a play? Do we always look to the source of the play, the playwrite? Could you argue that the playwrite leaves it to the actors to "make the detail," as Declan Donnellan says? Finally, is it the director's role to put the pieces together? The answer, I think, is yes.

The playwrite publishes a play for a reason. He or she picks a subject that may or may not be close to their hearts, but they write the play for a purpose. As chapter 5 states, the director takes great consideration in choosing a play they want to work on, just as an actor does. It becomes a long process to get from the pages of a playwrite to the theatrical production. It is feasible for each person involved in the play may have a different vision, but I believe it is the director's role to put them all "in their place."

Trouble in Mind helped to amplify this point. I like the first look at Mr. Manners and the way he shocks the cast. He initially catches them off guard just to put them back in their place. He uses his knowledge of the actors and the play to gain his control over them. Mr. Manners is a person who has decided what he wants "his" play to look like, and is going to use his tools, the actors, to get the story across.

Directors can have so much control, but everything they do relies on the staff surrounding them. They can have an image of where the play needs to go, but without the right casting, set design, and correct communication among all parties, the director can easily lose everything.

That Scheming Seducer

Subject: Richard III
At times I find it extremely difficult to watch certain film actors with any sort of seriousness simply because of the celebrity that is often attached so strongly to them. It is always a challenge for me separate or simply blend my high-esteem for the arts and my frivolous obsession with pop culture. My comment on Al Pacino being a sexy beast may have come off as a bit shallow. Yet it actually encompasses many other non-physical aspects of the famous actor. I admire the “balls out” technique that he has employed in approaching a vast majority of his work including the documentary “Looking for Richard.”
At the start of the film, Pacino asks, “What’s this thing that gets between us and Shakespeare?” I enjoyed the film because it is so raw in its attempt to answer that very question. From the portion we saw in class I think they were coming up with quite a few good answers and also helping out with the somewhat difficult text of Richard III. My favorite part of the film was probably that crazy yet insightful homeless man they interviewed. He says that Shakespeare teaches us to feel through words. He explains that people now do not know how to properly use words and this abuse of language leads to societal problems. He claims, “If we said less, we’d feel more.” I think his statements about Shakespeare are particularly important in the context of Richard III where words are misused in an attempt to gain power.
Richard’s main tool of manipulation is the spoken word. Nowhere in the play is this more apparent than in the scene between he and Lady Anne, portrayed in the film by Al Pacino and Winona Ryder. He has recently murdered her husband and father-in-law, but still manages to win her. He does this very systematically with statements such as “’Twas thy beauty that provoked me.” I will be the first to admit that I melted a little when Pacino delivered this line and also when he said “This hand, which, for thy love, did kill thy love.” Simply chilling and yet simultaneously seducing. Such flattering language could even win over an audience if it weren’t for his soliloquies that expose his sinister intentions. Thanks to Shakespeare for including those, otherwise I could totally fall for that psycho.

Trouble in Mind

Subject:
This play presented what I believe to be a very interesting social issue. The characters in this play are asked by the director to simply do their job and say their lines as they are written in the script. However, several of the characters are hesitant to use some of the words that are used in the script. Judy in particular seems uncomfortable with the use of racially charged words that have been included in the script. The play asks the question: is it possible for a person to ignore their personal beliefs and convictions and to simply “do the job” as Manners puts it? John illustrates this point well when he tells Willeta that he could not ever act in a play that he did not believe in. I come from this same line of thought. I do not think that I could ever be in a play that went against my personal moral convictions. Another question that the play raises is not quite so obvious. Judy seems uncomfortable with using certain words, but I wonder if she would be uncomfortable using them if she were not in the presence of her African-American cast mates. While I believe that this question is present in the play I think that it is more implied than explicitly put out for the audience to answer.

Richard III

Subject: Richard III, Acting and Looking for Richard

I have always enjoyed watching performances written by Shakespeare, but have a very hard time reading his words and getting my imagination to keep up. Richard III could be more difficult for me than others because of all the characters and twists. In reading the play for the first time, I was immediately confused, which I believe ruined the rest of the reading. I found my self reading scenes and acts over and over again to try to figure out what was going on. I was forced to take detailed notes and analyze each point of the play slowly. It made me feel very dyslexic.

Looking for Richard helped me to enjoy Shakespeare again and to lose the frustration I had from reading Shakespeare's words. Though Shakespeare may be difficult to read, I find myself learning the language as I watch a live performance. It is as though my ears adjust to the verses as the play deepens. An abnormal example to this is a play that I went to see while in Mexico over JanTerm. The play was a comedic play performed in Spanish. I am not bilingual in the least bit and at the beginning of the play I understood very little of the conversation. It was interesting that by the middle of the play, my "spanglish" began to work for me, and my ears had adapted to the language. Obviously Shakespeare is not writing in a different language completely, and likewise I did not learn Spanish from seeing one play, but I was able to adapt in a live performance where I might not have been able to do just reading.

Chapter four gives you good insight into what it takes to be an actor, and truly shows the dedication that goes into being an artists. Looking for Richard helped me to see this point even more so than the chapter. The chapter looks at many different approaches of acting, and Looking for Richard opened my eyes to what actors go through each time they take on a role. Watching the actors rehearse at the tables was very interesting. The actress that was playing the queen in the play really shocked me by her performance at the table. She really put emotion into everything she acted. I enjoy seeing what it takes to make a production come to life, and makes me interested to be a part of some production in the future.