Aaron Posner’s Stupid Fucking Bird, a “sort of” adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull, had its west coast premiere this past weekend at the Experimental Theatre at UC Santa Cruz. Directed by graduate student Katie Burris, Stupid Fucking Bird stars undergraduate students Hugh Coles as Con, Michael Logan as Sorn, Siara Woods-Lindholm as Emma, Lucas Brandt as Dev, Grant Palmer as Trig, Ivy Strohmaier as Mash, and graduate student Dani Zuccolotto as Nina. In this “sort of” adaptation, the play ruminates on many of the same themes as it’s predecessor, and isn’t necessarily a “modernization” of The Seagull, but is more so a new, extended exploration of Chekhov.
In adapting Stupid Fucking Bird from The Seagull, award winning playwright Aaron Posner stages a cheeky, contemporary, and impishly funny timeless battle between young and old, past and present, and an emotionally riveting search for the truth of it all. Posner fully absorbs the dark comedy from its original in which was a famous failure at its premiere at the Alexandrinsky Theatre in Petersburg, but luckily, Stupid Fucking Bird premiered with much higher reviews. His adaptation allows the essence of Chekhov’s original script to shine through, while renovating all the quirks, futility, and circularity of human behavior that Chekhov’s script explores but that often get lost with modern audiences because of the language often thought of as “dated”. Just as Chekhov’s naturalistic play was a new form in the Russian theater scene, and was only a success two years after its premiere at the Moscow Art Theatre, Stupid Fucking Bird allows Posner and Burris to take up Conrad/Konstantin’s challenge to create new forms of theatre and invite the audience to reflect on how art, love, an...
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...d with every actor; the ensemble was strong and complex. The overwhelming amount of character development is apparent—the actors gave an unbelievably honest performance of the deeply complex characters presented in the script. I was riveted, the intricacy of the characters allowed me to ruminate on what it means to be alive, to be young and growing older, simultaneously happy and sad, in love and ultimately, what it means to be an artist—bringing me back to the essence of Chekhov’s original script. Like in the original script, the peculiarities, futility, and extreme complexity of human behavior over traditional playwriting tools of tight plotlines and predictable dramatic conflicts keep this play on its feet. Stupid Fucking Bird is a beautiful and successful attempt to explore the messy and complicated idea of what it is to be human. Now go see the fucking play!
My least favorite aspect of this play was the ending. The ending confused me and was anticlimactic. It was not funny and not entertaining at all.
The play, “Riley Valentine and the Occupation of Fort Svalbard”, by Julia- Rose Lewis is an exploration of the resilience of teenagers. The play is heavily symbolic and supports the dramatic meaning of the show. Throughout the Queensland Theatre Company’s interpretation of this play, the director, Travis Dowley, expresses forms of dramatic elements to articulate three types of manipulations. These manipulations include the manipulation of body and voice, space and the creation and manipulation of dramatic mood. Through these types of manipulations, it portrays the dramatic meaning towards the performance. Although, the use of space throughout Travis’s performance allows the audience to identify this dramatic meaning.
The novel Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott is a book that was written in order to provide “Some instructions on writing and life.” Lamott published the book in 1994 in hopes to share the secrets of what it is truly like to be a writer, as both a warning and as encouragement. Bird by Bird shares with the reader the ironic truth of being a struggling writer through personal experience and humorous stories. Lamott uses memories from her past to help illustrate her points and to help the reader get to know who she is, not only as a writer, but as a person. The author focuses on the true struggles and benefits of being a writer while using metaphors and analogies to express her points, she also wraps her life stories around almost every writing tip.
The play that we read for this unit is Too Much Punch For Judy, by Mark Wheeller. It is a form of Verbatim Theatre, meaning that it is based on the spoken words of real people. This play is about the story of a young woman who kills her sister in an alcohol related accident. When I first read the play I couldn’t empathize with the story as I haven’t experienced such a shocking event before. In this essay I will describe, analyse and evaluate both my work and the work of other actors in my group, focusing on the mediums, elements and explorative strategies of Drama.
This paper is a critique of a production of The Last Night of Ballyhoo, a play written by Alfred Uhry, which was performed and produced by the Ball State University Theatre. Gilbert L. Bloom directed the production and was very successful with producing a truly entertaining, comedic play with an important message about the personal dilemmas that we as individuals with different beliefs and values must encounter in our daily lives.
In Dialogue: Theatre of America, Harold Clurman said, “we make theatre out of life” (27), and it was precisely this view that motivated him to help create a uniquely American theatre. Clurman, considered one of the most influential directors of the modern American theatre, had a unique vision of what the American theatre could become. One of the founders of the quintessentially American troupe, the Group Theatre, Clurman was a contemporary of Elia Kazan and Lee Strasberg, and even married to Stella Adler for twenty years. At a ceremony honoring Clurman, Elia Kazan stated that Clurman’s “greatest achievement [was] himself” (Harold Clurman: A Life of Theatre). An important figure in our theatrical past, Clurman’s theories on theatre and directing require close attention. In this paper, I will first provide a brief biography of Clurman, second, examine his theories of theatre and directing, and lastly, I will explore his criticisms of the then-contemporary theatre, and draw conclusions to the current state of the Broadway theatre.
Conflict with reality and appearance brings to surface the elements of the traditional commedia dell’arte in the form of mistaken identity, which enriches the farcical plot-lines that occur in the play. The very embodiment of mistaken identity establishes that what may be seem real could be quite the opposite, however the characters in the play are unable to distinguish this as their vision becomes distorted by their fall into the deception of appearance. It is this very comedic device that enables the conflict between Roscoe (Rachel) and Alan, or Charlie and Alan’s father to occur which is a significant part of the comedic nature of the play as the unproportional situation is what sparks laughter from the audience, and so it is the presence of mistaken identity alone that conveys the play into a light-hearted comedy. Furthermore, Peter O'Neill quotes that ‘using humour can provide a degree of safety for expressing difficult ideas or opinions which could be particularly effective…’. In the circumstances of the quotation Richard Bean effectively c...
Chekhov is the true precursor of the theater of the absurd. Before the beckettian "waiting" there was the continuous "waiting" of the three sisters who never live for Moscow. Chekhov developed an aesthetic principle, according to which tragic and comic are not separated by an impassable wall but represent two sides of the same phenomenon of life, which can be viewed both in terms of tragedy and in terms of comedy.
Beaumont's failed comedy, 'The Knight of the Burning Pestle', is a unique play that seeks to satirise and burlesque the theatrical and social domain. Crucial to this satire is the collision of two concurrent plots that vie for the audience’s attention. These collisions allow the audience to see opposing ideologies in contrast through the dramatic effect of the breakdown in the boundaries of theatre. It is arguable that this play encourages one to question hierarchy and tradition through exploration of ideology, disputed genres, and Rafe's potential rebellion.
This play shows the importance of the staging, gestures, and props making the atmosphere of a play. Without the development of these things through directions from the author, the whole point of the play will be missed. The dialog in this play only complements the unspoken. Words definitely do not tell the whole story.
At first glance, Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and Tony Kushner’s Angels in America appear to serve as two individual exercises in the absurd. Varying degrees of the fantastical and bizarre drives the respective stories, and their respective conclusions hardly serve as logical resolutions to the questions that both Beckett and Kushner’s characters pose throughout the individual productions. Rather than viewing this abandonment of reality as the destination of either play, it should be seen as a method used by both Beckett and Kushner to force the audience to reconsider their preconceived notions when understanding the deeper emotional subtext of the plays. By presenting common and relatable situations such as love, loss, and the ways in which humans deal with change and growth, in largely unrecognizable packaging, Kushner and Beckett are able to disarm their audience amidst the chaos of the on stage action. Once the viewer’s inclination to make assumptions is stripped by the fantastical elements of either production, both playwrights provide moments of emotional clarity that the audience is forced to distill, analyze, and ultimately, comprehend on an individual level.
Every play written uses dramatic elements. The main dramatic elements are plot, character, theme, and language. Lillian Hellman, who wrote the Little Foxes, incorporates these elements beautifully in her play. The play is set during the spring of 1900 and takes place in the Deep South part of the United States of America. Just as every other play, the Little Foxes has included the dramatic elements in her play, particularly the plot, character, and language that all incorporate an underlying theme of greed.
The humans, along with two younger parrots, also served as Alex’s flock, providing the social input all parrots crave. Like any flock, this one—as small as it was—had its share of drama. Alex dominated his fellow parrots, acted huffy at times around Pepperberg, tolerated the other female humans, and fell to pieces over a male assistant who dropped by for a visit. (“If you were a man,” Pepperberg said, after noting Alex’s aloofness toward me, “he’d be on your shoulder in a second, barfing cashews in your
In a more extreme version of the play, directed by Baz Lurhmann, some of the weapons such as swords were replaced by modern day guns, but despite this he still managed to keep it all in context by cleverly placing words, or using other satire. With this paper I hope to produce my own unique version of the play.
The clown contributes towards the humourous entertainment of this play through his numerous puns and jokes. He is a source of laughter, not because we are humoured by his "foolery"; for he proves to be no fool at all; but rather because he amuses us with his brilliant wit. Having mastered the art of jesting, Feste is sensitive of his profession, always aware of the circumstances he is in and the appropriateness of this folly.