Wiley and the Hairy Man

This past week, I attended a production of the play Wiley and the Hairy Man that was put on by Saginaw Valley State University’s theater department. This play definitely surprised me. I went to the show thinking that I needed to see the performance for class, but that I would not actually enjoy it since it was considered a “children’s” play. I was wrong. I loved every minute of it and found myself wishing that it would keep going even though it was apparent that it was going to end soon. 

The director, Ric Roberts, made some excellent choices while bringing this play to life. Wiley, his Mammy, and the Hairy Man are all conjure people. This means that they are supposed to perform “magic” on stage. Some of these effects were as simple as turning the lights on or off. But how would you make things such as snakes appear? Professor Roberts’ solution to that was to have most of the cast dress in skin-tight black suits with mesh masks over their faces so that they appeared only to be “shadows.” Then he had the suits painted with glow-in-the-dark designs. The result was that snakes “appeared” by turning on a black light and having actors move their arms like snakes. This effect was extremely cool if, like me, you spent a small portion of your time wondering what meaning the drawings had to the show.

The actors also did an excellent job in bringing this performance to life. They had a solid cast in spite of the fact that they used some actors new to the department. The role of Mammy as both a southern conjure woman and a mother was brought to light incredibly well. The Hairy Man was both scary (for children) and funny. Wiley himself was an incredible combination of a boy doing the funny things that children do as well as someone who is learning to face his fears. And, of course, the “magic effects” cast were extremely mysterious and played very well. Overall, this show was a great performance and the result was a production that I would definitely recommend that everyone should see, no matter what your age.

Six Characters in Search of an Author

The play that we had to read for this week’s class session in Modern Drama was Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author. The premise of this show is that six characters out of a play appear before a director and his acting troupe looking for an author to write their story. They are then confronted with the differences between how their story is intended to occur and how the director and actors interpret the story and deliver their versions of it.

I think that by doing this, Pirandello is actually making a profound point. He is pointing out the differences between the story that the author writes and the story that the audience gets. These differences occur due to things that cannot be helped when creating a performance. As shown by the clashes between the characters and the actors, an actor is not the character. They can try to interpret a character and behave how they believe the character should behave, but they never truly become the character. This causes an element of the original story to be lost and results in the audience seeing the performance to miss some of the messages that the author sends them.

A Long Day's Journey Into Night

In O’Neill’s play, Long Day’s Journey Into Night, there was no one particular character that caused more dysfunction in the family than another. They all contributed to the dysfunction in their own way. However, the character that seemed to stand out to me was Mary Tyrone. Mary’s addiction to morphine plays a large role in what causes the men in her family to drink so much. There are certainly other factors, but having a wife and mother with a drug addiction certainly makes the alcohol seem more like an escape from her. She is a source of dysfunction in the family because she lies to them about her drug abuse and refuses to see the truth of a situation.

Mary is also a source of dysfunction because she lives in her own fantasy world. She blames the other characters for not living up to her expectations. She believes that Jamie is a failure of a son who does not work and spends all of his money on alcohol and loose women. She warns Edmund that following his brother will ruin his life as well. However, she expects more from Edmund. She sees that he has more potential and puts all of her hopes on him succeeding. This, along with the fact that he is a replacement baby for his brother that she did not want, puts a serious strain on their relationship. Finally, Mary blames nearly all of the bad things in her life on Tyrone. She is constantly saying that it would have been better if they had never married and she had become a nun or piano player instead. She also blames him for her addiction to morphine because he was too cheap to get a good doctor. Finally, she says that it is Tyrone’s fault that they never had a “real” home like she dreamed of. All of these things that she puts on her husband and sons cause tension between the characters and dysfunction in the family.  

Pygmalion

Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw is a play about a young woman learning to speak proper English to create new openings in her life and the two men who teach her. Eliza Doolittle is a poor flower girl who catches the attention of Professor Henry Higgins and Colonel Pickering. She becomes the source of a bet between the two, and they attempt to educate and refine her to the point that they can pass her off as a duchess.

There are some debates over who is the main character of the play: Eliza or Higgins. I, personally, view Eliza as the main character. She is the person who took began play by coming into Higgins' home and demanding that he make good of his claim to be able to teach her proper English. She is also the person who ended the play by choosing to leave Higgins and once again obtain some form of independence. It seemed to me that she was the main character because so much of the plot revolved her actions. It also followed her story from her humble, yet independent, beginning in the streets, to learning from Higgins and Pickering, to leaving them because they viewed her as a bet, not a person. The focus of the story seemed to revolve much more around her than around Higgins who went through no changes whatsoever.

The social point that Shaw seems to be making with Pygmalion is that people in higher social classes have less freedom. Eliza begins the play by being a totally independent flower girl. By the end of the play, she has been educated to the rank of a noble. This leaves her with no where to go because she has been educated for the higher life and can't go back to the lowly lifestyle that she used to have. Eliza struggles with her lack of options and tries to regain some independence by leaving Higgins and using what he taught her to make a living. This restraining social class is also shown in Eliza's father. Doolittle is happy at the beginning of the play when he only has a little money and can lead a simple life. At the end of the play, he is a member of the middle class and is miserable. Shaw was trying to show how unsatisfying life is in high social classes because of their lack of independence.