Cheerie Moranga's The Hungry Woman explores a surreal histrionic borderlands between fact and fiction. Playing upon the story of Medea, Cheerie's story utilizes already understood stereotypes to quickly articulate the situation. The stereotypes being the old Meixcan story of "The Weeping Woman" described in Anzaldua. Also the classic Greek story of Medea. In the spirit of Oregon Shakespeare Festival's American Night, old stories and mythos are turned upside down to articulate a purely latino/latina struggle in American society.
The widely known composition depicts the idea of the singer leaving her serenity and going off on her own to start a new life and learn through making mistakes. Though it is hard for her to leave those familiar things behind she knows she needs to grow and get a broader thought of life. The negative outlook of the singer’s life is briefly illustrated at the start of the song. “When the rain would fall down, I'd just stare out my window” With the use of imagery, the audience can picture a forlorn female behind a glass window with rain pouring down. This gives a feeling of how the singer is miserable with her current, old life and the desperate urn for change.
A streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams is unconventional play for that time. Williams uses unconventional techniques and uses truth as a destructive force. Lots of the characters in this play use truth as a way to survive in the world. They use fantasy as way to survive. Blanche, Stanley and Stella all react to truth differently within the play.
The story is all about Irene Ruddock and her experiences through her eyes. Due to the protagonist being the narrator, the audience has a magnified insight into her thoughts and emotions, consequently we know that she is lonely. She references her pen (an inanimate object) as her only friend. She states ‘At least it’s an outing’ so the audience gathers she spends a lot of her time indoors, by herself. The play is set in a simply furnished room, which indicates at her very plain and aimless life.
Edna’s development as an independent woman, her reinvigorated sexual appetite, and her determination to break away from societal norms and be free are all internal events which result in the literal events of the novel; they are the plot. Edna comes to detest the treatment which she is given from her husband, Leonce, and wishes to live on her own and unbound by the “expectations” of womanhood pinned upon her. The primary influence of these internal happenings is Mademoiselle Reisz. When Edna witnesses her piano playing, she is enthralled and moved, and comes to idolize the aged musician. Reisz’s effect on Edna is even more apparent by the reader’s witnessing of how Reisz sees a younger version of herself in Edna.
Judith Butler argues gender roles are arbitrary and artificial concepts. She argues that Feminism brings attention to gender roles. Butlers’ main argument is that “Gender is put on, invariably, under constraint, daily and incessantly, with anxiety and pleasure.” Judith Butler argues her main “concern is that sexual difference not become a reification which unwittingly preserves a binary restriction on gender identity, and sexuality.” Butler asks us to rethink the use of arbitrary gender assignments. Butler argues that words like womanhood and Feminism are words that have some value as a utility, but we need to remember they are arbitrary assignments and there is no absolute feminist. Gender is something that we put on, we are taught gender as we grow up.
Just as the narration is set free and unleashed into a world of fantasy, the reader is held captive in a place that they cannot determine as absolutely real or absolutely fantastical. In The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the reader is held captive by the narrative of a woman with a worsening nervous condition, left with no way out of her increasingly demented view of reality. There are words that the narrator uses to convey to the reader, and really, to herself, that what she is describing and the way the she is describing it is metaphorical and not true in a tangible or logical sense. She states, “John is a physician, and perhaps - (I would not say it to a living soul, of course, but this is dead paper and a great relief to my mind) - perhaps that is one reason I do not get well faster.” The word “perhaps”, along with other words of the like, are used in the beginning of the piece to lend a sense of reality to what the narrator is saying. These words also do the task of presenting the narrator’s nervous condition in its earlier stages, when she is wary of her husband
Cosi Essay How do composers present aspects of human experiences? The play Cosi (1971) by Louis Nowra examines the complexities of love, illusion and reality in order to challenge a contemporary audience’s understanding of madness by sympathetically portraying characters. Written during a period of the Vietnam War when Australians were evaluating their place in the world, through allegiances, beliefs and relationships with a global society, Nowra critiques society’s indifference to those suffering mental illness while emphasizing the importance of human connections when forced with life’s realities. Through effective integration of structure and dramatic devices, we learn that it is possible to take control of your own reality and make life more bearable.
Contemporary Australian Theatre and Drama By Aimee Contemporary Australian theatre and drama refers to Australian produced theatre which challenges the conventions, forms and styles of traditional theatre in order to engage and inform the audience with the social and personal concerns of the characters on stage. Jane Harrison’s Stolen and Matt Cameron’s Ruby Moon are two plays that challenge the conventions and styles of traditional theatre. Both playwrights use the characters social and personal concerns to engage the audience, using unconventional styles of theatre to help them understand. The play Stolen by Jane Harrison tells the stories of five different Aboriginal children forcibly removed from their families and affected by the
Australian theatre practitioners have included symbols to effectively communicate meaning. According to the website, ‘the drama teacher’, “A symbol implies a greater meaning than the literal suggestion and is usually used to represent something other than what it is at face value. Symbolism in the theatre can be achieved through the use of characters, colour, movement, costume and props”. I have experienced this through my experiences of rehearsing scene and reading over the plays, ‘Ruby Moon’ and ‘A Beautiful Life’. I believe the statement “Australian playwrights often include important symbols in their plays” is true as I have experienced and seen the use of symbolism in the plays Ruby Moon and A beautiful life help put the point of the story across as it represents the emotions, mood and meaning of the plays.