Paranoia Is Real

     For our English Literature class, we are reading the Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood. This book is set in a dystopian society where there are very few fertile women, so the few women who can bear children that are left have to repopulate the Earth. Rich commanders and their wives use these women to make babies, but have religion and rules controlling all of them so no one has the pleasure of sex, because it isn't necessary. In class, we did an experiment with the whole class to demonstrate the every day reality that the handmaid's (the fertile women)  have to deal with.
     The way we did this was by putting up everyone's school ID on the board and there was an indication of your position by your name. You could either be a regular hand maid, a rebel who was trying to get out and rescue the rest of the handmaids, or an eye, who is a spy for the government who are trying to catch the rebels and keep the handmaids down. During the "day" period, everyone is a handmaid and no one knows who is a rebel or an eye because no one knows any one else's school ID. At "night" though, everyone keeps their head down. Rebels can quietly communicate and rescue a handmaid. If they mistake an eye for a handmaid, then they are "killed". Every day, the handmaid's choose someone to kill off, in order to prevent a violent out break. The handmaid's must try to figure out who is an eye so they can kill them and who is a rebel so they can save them.

    By the end of the project, everyone was very paranoid and some people even got very emotional and hurt. It was crazy to see how people acted in a tense situation. Some people stayed quiet. Others tried to lead, and generally that made them look suspicious. I was always thinking about how did I look. There were very obvious sides and groups and if you didn't associate yourself with one group, you became a target. Sometimes the rebels were trying too hard and pushing too hard, which made them look like an eye because their actions were suspicious. In our class, and in mostly every other class, the Eyes won, which is very disconcerting. It definitely gave me perspective about the book. I understood why the made were very careful and paranoid. I saw how someone have that much control over you and knowing so little information about your safety can make you very skittish. I could never let my guard down because my life depended on it. There was no easy way to go about it. Once some one thinks you are suspicious, for any reason, it's very easy for them to substantiate why they should kill you off. Group mentality came out to play during this experiment, too. We often ganged up on the person we were going to kill. We technically didn't have to kill anyone for three days in a row, but almost everyday someone was killed. The craziest experience was when one girl was going to be killed and we all pointed to her and she was so confused, she said, " What? NO! Who?!" And another girl shouted out her name even louder, expecting the group to follow suit, but no one did. She shouted out the other's girl's name alone. The other girl turned the mob around and pointed every one towards killing the girl who shouted out the first girl's name. This happened in a matter of seconds and I still don't quite understand how it happened. After the experiment everything looked sketchy and I was still very paranoid. We were all laughing from the nerves. I felt trapped, even after I left.

Realistic View of How You Are

     In my English class, we did this social experiment  where we decided what we value most and we evaluated what that means and what that says about us. An angel means that you don't lie at all. A serpent means that you lie and it doesn't matter to you if you lie. It's not going to make you have a guilty conscience. A lion means you like violence and lean toward that as a reaction. A lamb doesn't agree with violent actions.
      I categorized my self as a serpent lion. This sounds really horrible, but I have my reasoning. There is an appropriate time for everything, and I think that's what people generally don't understand. In theory, yes, I would like to be an angel lamb, but I don't think that's very realistic. I know that if someone killed my sister, who is my best friend and is the closest person to me, I would have the serious, gutteral, visceral urge to kill that person. Whether I act on it or not depends on my actual limits. I think that I could kill someone in that situation, but I can never (and should never) know if I actually could. I'm just being realistic with myself in that I know that would be an option for me. That also doesn't mean that I would think myself above the law. I should still be punished for it, but I would still kill for my sister. I would like to never lie, but I know that I do, especially white lies. I also think its alright sometimes to lie in order to protect someone. If we didn't lie, we would never have Santa Clause, and what a sad world that would be.
     It was interesting to see who was in my group. I was surrounded by a bunch of boys. Typical violent boys. But then there was also Jackie Saplicki, and to me that made so much sense that both of us would be in that group. We have very similar values, and this situation I think we have very similar thinking. I know that we would both kill for our sisters, even if we felt guilty after words. That's the thing that would trigger both of us. We would have the same reaction to someone hurting our family because we are so close to our families.
       I think some people weren't very truthful with themselves, either. I think some people categorized themselves in a group of what they wanted to be, or what thought they thought that they could potentially be. I chose to look at what I would do in the most extreme situations and what I am capable of. Generally, I don't think I act like a serpent lion. But I don't think in the most extreme situations that anyone would be an angel lamb. Also, part of the experiment was that we place where we were on the graph, the more violent the higher towards serpent, etc.
                                                                      serpent


                                       lion                                                             lamb

                                                                       angel
I am not all the way to each extreme. I'm not entirely a lying serpent and I'm not entirely a violent lion. I'm somewhere off of the middle point where everything intersects. I would like to be in the middle, but no one is perfect, and no one is exactly in the middle.

Review of DTC's King Lear

            I thoroughly enjoyed watching the recent performance of King Lear at DTC. I feel like most people weren’t as crazy about the production, but there is a special place in my heart for Shakespeare and DTC always manages to blow my mind. I understood the levels of the play much more once I saw it on the stage. No play is perfect, though, and many things could have been fixed.

            Let’s start with Lear. He is the title character and I thought he was the weakest of all of the actors. I saw the production twice, once with the school, and once on the last production night with my mom and my point of view totally changed. Lear’s voice bothered me. It was weak the entire time. He never showed that he had power so that the audience could see the obvious loss of power. The second act was good because the voice fit well into Lear’s dissention into Alzheimer’s, but I never saw his journey because he sounded the same the entire play. Then, when I saw the play on the last night with my mom, I realized that he was only 37, much younger than Lear’s actual age. He normally looks like this:

and during the play he looked like this:

Basically, a lot older.

He was wonderful at playing an old man, physically and vocally. His consistency overshadowed his bad character portrayal. But then I had to remember that he still had to be true to the character, so yes he was believable as an old man but I still didn’t agree with his acting choices. His voice sounded like an old man's voice, but what's the point of putting all the work into creating that voice if no one can hear it.

            I understood the journey for the King Lear the most through the set. For both of the productions that I saw, I sat toward the front (first or second row) center section of the theatre. I was lucky to sit there not only because I could see Lear's nuances very clearly because the actor was used to a smaller space but also because I felt like I was part of the show. Right before the beginning of the storm, the tall strong walls of the beautiful palace collapsed in all different directions. The two walls in the back fell forward towards the audience, and once it hit the ground I could feel a big gust of cold wind hit my face, along with sprinkles of water from the "rain" pouring down through the mesh ceiling. I felt as if I was in the storm. This is the turning point in the play when Lear officially transitions into crazy. I literally saw his collapse of power and his downfall in the set. It all correlated. The set looked bare and disheveled, demonstrating his defeat and loneliness.

            In the storm scene, King Lear is so weak, crazy, defeated, vulnerable, and practically naked to the world, that he actually strips completely naked on stage. Some people had an issue with this and it has been a very controversial subject. The younger kids did not see the version with full frontal male nudity, but the seniors and other productions included that. I think that it wasn't so necessary to the plot that the younger kids missed out on anything and it probably wouldn't be appropriate for them. I understand the purpose of the nudity because it explains and demonstrates a lot about Lear and his state of mind. The lead up to the nudity was worse than the actual stripping because it was so built up that we couldn't laugh that it made me anxious.

            All in all, the production made me cry and think, which are my two favorite results of theatre. I believed all the characters and understood their relationships. Most of all, I understood everything that was said, and that's one of the hardest parts of doing Shakespeare productions. Props to the Dallas Theatre Center for proving to me once again why I love acting and Shakespeare.

Sonnet

Entire years have passed without a sound,
Yet, these few minutes seem to linger.
I watch the clock, my body tightly wound,
Anticipation courses through my clenched fingers.
All alone in a world of my own thoughts.
The imminent end is all I can see.
Here I lie where my youthful body rots,
Not another soul here to comfort me.
Not sure how I got here, not sure I'll leave.
The life giving heat leaves my firm body,
Still I wonder if anyone will grieve,
hoping the turnout would not be shoddy,
And yet, somehow, I'm ready for this year.
Somehow I'll make it through with just a tear.

Sandbox vs. The American Dream

Both of the plays by Edward Albee center around the same characters with the same general idea and theme. Mommy, Daddy, Grandma, and a Young Man represent a typical American family, but are placed in absurd situations with outlandish dialogue in order to point out the flaws of our society. Although they both have the same point and same characters, the two related plays have very different, specific aspects that make The American Dream and The Sandbox separate, distinct plays.

All of the characters have the same back ground in each play. Mommy married Daddy for money. Grandma married at seventeen and her husband died when she was thirty, so she had to raise Mommy, her daughter, by herself. In The Sandbox, the exposition of Grandma’s history is a segment in the cycle of her life witnessed on the stage. When she enters, she is “borne” in her daughters hands, like a baby. She doesn’t use her words, only child-like sounds. She moves on to the toddler stage when she throws the sand at Mommy in a temper tantrum. Once she is old enough to speak, she tells the audience about when she was a young girl in love. In both plays, Mommy and Daddy treat Grandma like a child, as if she doesn’t understand what they are saying. When Mommy has to experience the loss of her mother, she has a brief, intense burst of sadness her mom dying which rapidly dissipates after Mommy consoles herself and says she is happy in a sort of way. Both plays include this weird sexual attraction between Grandma and Young Man, who enters towards the last bit of The American Dream, and is on stage during the entirety of The Sandbox. The lines are almost the same when Grandma tells Young Man of her approval of his body. He is well built, young, strong and attractive, but that has different purposes in each play. In the American Dream, Young Man represents exactly what Mommy and Daddy want, the American Dream. He is perfect in all shape and form, even though he can feel nothing, emotionally and physically. In the Sandbox, Young Man is the Angel of Death, and his muscles and perfect body show the strength of death, because, after all, death is so strong it’s unstoppable. Young man is never actually his own character or person, but always a symbol for something to reflect back views of our society.

In theory, The Sandbox could be an ending to The America Dream because the characters are the same. If one put them together they would very fluid, and a good alternate ending to Grandma just disappearing in the end of American dream. The writing is fluid because of the absurdity and constant repetition. The Sandbox almost sounds like an afterthought of The American Dream, but oddly enough, The Sandbox was written first. The similarities and differences are very clear, but all very purposeful.