Casina Play Review Essay

Casina: A Review When we came together with ideas for what text we wanted to use to inspire our performance, we ended up with about 10 ideas. Fairy tales, Edgar Allen Poe, Dr. Seuss, and urban legends had all been thrown out as ideas, but the play we chose was is a much lesser known greek play named, Casina. Casina, looking through one lens, is a comedy about two men fighting over a woman. Through a different lens, Casina is a power struggle between husband and wife and seeing which of the two will win over the other. One of the big objectives for the play was establishing the story and what was happening within it. Casina is sizeable play with a lot of characters, working on multiple levels to get what they want. Which meant that our group had to condense the whole story into a 7-8 minute performance. To do this, we had to choose a central character for our version of the story and try to shape our performance around just their view. We chose the wife, Cleostrata, because our group liked the level of agency that she was able to have within the story.

Once we chose her as the focal point, we had to

I was not the director of the play, so I had to negotiate a lot with the people around me and find the most effective way to present my ideas to the group without overstepping my boundaries. Also, when I was giving notes, I was continually pushing and pulling away from being a bossy backseat driver. I had a lot of note but did not want to micro-manage everyone. I tended to pose my notes as questions but sometimes the lack of authoritativeness meant no one actually listened to my notes. For instance, before we even started rehearsing I hinted that the “puppets controlling puppets” part of the middle scene might be clunky but no one listened until you gave us that note on run-through day. My directness is something i need to work