Sallying Forth...

These are the plays I've read this quarter:
Mouthful of Birds by Caryl Churchiil
Oedipus Rex
Three Days of Rain by Richard Greenberg
Phaedre by Racine
True Love by Charles Mee
King Lear
Lear by Edward Bond
The Revenger's Tragedy by Tournier (actually, probably by Middleton)
The Unnatural and Accidental Women by Marie Clements
Hedda Gabler by Ibsen
After Darwin by Timberlake Wertenbaker

And coming up are Fences by August Wilson, Soyinka's Death and the King's Horsemen, Sara Ruhl's retelling of Eurydice, The Hungry Woman: A Mexican Medea by Cherrie Moraga, and Vogel's How I Learned to Drive. The last three are plays that the grad students in the class are teaching. I chose to use Vogel's play because I know it pretty well and because of all the plays I'm familiar with, it deals most clearly with tragic structure and mechanisms. As the class's focus is contemporary tragedy and whether or not such a form still exists, it seemed a good choice.

That class has been a wonderful journey. I've been pretty quiet during discussions, but I've learned so much about the progression of the structure of tragedy and what it means for a play to be "tragic". The latest question posed by Wertenbaker's play is whether or not tragedy exists in a post-Darwinian world. Does Darwin preclude the concept of tragedy? If there is no faith to be lost - no great binding force in society - and we are all, indeed, individuals striving to be the fittest, soundest organism in order to survive, and we are all doing what we reason to be the best way to survive... I'm not sure even where to take that thought quite yet, but Darwin throws a wrench into the works. Hegel suggests that we are all doing what we reason to be right, and that the closest thing we might come to tragedy is when two lines of reason - two great arguments (faith and evolution, for instance) - collide, one will overtake and subsume the other. This is through no real fault of the subsumed line of reason, other than it lost the battle. Unfortunately, this is all so new in my head that I'm not making any sense of things. Read After Darwin . . . you'll get it.

My other truly challenging class is painting and rendering. I was really frightened of watercolor - talk about irrational fears, right? I've just never had much luck with it. Turns out, I'm not terrible. I need a lot of practice, and the Louvre will not come knocking on my door, but I'm really getting there. I'm comfortable enough to actually think I can do renderings successfully as a designer, which is important - haha. As my advisor says, you need to be able to sketch quickly so that you don't have to say, oh, sure, let me model that up for you - give me a couple days. Anyway, it's going much more smoothly, and, if nothing else, I'm a bit more confident about what I can do.

Although I'm pretty distant from production in general, our next show, As You Like It, goes up in a couple of weeks, and my fellow MFA scene designer is having to put in a lot of extra hours so I've offered to help him in any way I can. Mostly, that means painting and texturing scenery at this point. I think the set will look really nice when we're finished, but there's still a long row to hoe.

And - I almost forgot - I'm designing a show that goes up in April! It's a grad student-directed show based on a Twilight Zone episode called "The Howling Man." (If you can't remember which one that is, someone posted it on YouTube. It's also on another video site with a name that I can't remember right now . . .) Anyway, I'm really excited, and I've already started doing some research. It'll be pretty small, but I think it will be fun too.

I guess that's about it for now. Next quarter is probably going to be a lighting design class, scene painting, and a costume pattern drafting class. I'm also going to audit a theater history class and a Swahili language class. I still need to put up those driving posts . . . someday I guess. Hopefully before I make the trip again!