Reading of Catastrophe

When first introduced to the script of Catastrophe, I was very excited because it was so short. My first thoughts were is this it, is there another piece missing? I quickly skimmed the play and realized that it didn’t make any since to me at all. Then Dr. Everist announced that we would be divided into groups and we would perform a stage reading of the script for the other members of the class. I soon became worried. The next class period we came back and evaluated the play. Just like every other script we had read, it began to come clear. All of the stage directions in the play made it hard to read but they provide excessive detail to the mood and actions of the characters. They didn’t make since at all until we did our first read through as a group. After we read through it twice, we began to make decisions on who would play who and how we were going to do it. We decided to do more research. I found out that the play was just one of a series of short plays written by the author. This was written for an acquaintance of his who was imprisoned for writing plays deifying the government. It was written before the fall of the Soviet Union and was written to describe “the perfect citizen.” Words that we added in to the script for our stage reading, to add that element of the time period to the performance.