Themes in Sunday in the Park with George
When looking between the four corners of a rectangular frame there is a piece of art. It is often filled with color, light, angles, and shapes. But what is more important than the mechanics of the painting style, or the ideological perspective it is intended to garner, there is a connection between the painting and the viewer. This connection is lasting, and deeply personal. In the concept musical of Sunday in the Park with George, Stephen Sondheim uses this quite literally. He tells a story about a man named George Seurat. George is a nineteenth century painter, obsessed with his work. And in Act II, he is his great-grandson, also named George, and also an artist. However, these similarities are not what necessarily connect the two. Instead, it is their relationship with the same woman, Dot. She is the glue that eventually unites the two Georges through time. It is this connection which brings together the emotions and hope from the man of one generation, to the man of another. Like a spectator laying eyes on a beautiful painting for the first time, Dot holds the connection between the old and the new, the unrealized and the realized, and between the real and the imagined. These interlocking pathways between the characters are expressed best in the two songs “We Do Not Belong Together”, sung in Act I, and “Move On”, sung in Act II. Together, these songs, as well as others, explore Sondheim’s use of connection, which ties the relationship of people to art, but more importantly, to each other.
We are first introduced to George as he is in the middle of painting his masterpiece, a real life work of art entitled, Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte. He immediately begins to exp...
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...have to move on.” They both have to, but it will take one hundred years, and three generations, before they have learned enough to come back together.
However, it is interesting to note that in “We Don’t Belong Together” when George sings, “Pretty is what changes. What the eye arranges is what is beautiful”, his belief, and Sondheim's, that art is making order out of chaos, we hear his humming/painting motif in the orchestra. He is explaining his art, and the music underscores this by musically connecting us back to the scene in which he is actually painting. But again, he can only make order out of chaos on the surface. It seems that he can never make order out of the chaos of his and Dot's emotions. We hear the humming motif again as he finishes the painting in the Act I finale, his final interaction with Dot, though she will later interact with the other George.
These days the money and personnel that go into creating a movie is scandalous. It is almost unbelievable that every time they don’t come out with anything less than a classic. Luckily this is true in the case of "Ferris Buller’s Day Off", which features some of the best casted actors for a long time and costs in the region of $5.8 million. Luckily, it is fantastic - and this is why.
Ferris Bueller is a young, rebellious, high school senior who gets away with just about everything. One day, he decides to play hooky and skip school for the ninth time. He tricks his parents into thinking he is sick with his signature fake stomach cramp and clammy palms. After his parents leave for work, Bueller calls up his rigid, hypochondriac best friend Cameron to join him on his day off. Initially refusing to leave the comfort of his bed, Cameron finally is persuaded to not only join Ferris, but to also bring his Father’s precious Ferrari out on the town. The first stop on their rebellious journey is to bail out Bueller’s girlfriend, Sloane, from school. They do so by calling Ed Rooney,
“It was if there was a social moat that divided these two New Yorks.” This quote from the movie The Central Park Five, explains the divide between the poor part of New York, such as Harlem, and the upper class areas. This divide was caused by an economic crisis that changed the social dynamics of the city. This change allowed for consequences such as the injustice of the Central Park Five and the causes of this injustice can be explained by three different theoretical perspectives: the Structural Functionalist Perspective, the Symbolic Interactionist Perspective, and the Conflict Perspective.
In this essay I will be comparing two playwrights, A Raisin in the Sun and A Doll’s House, to one another. I will also compare the two to modern time and talk about whether or not over time our society has changed any. Each of these plays has a very interesting story line based in two very different time eras. Even though there is an 80 year time gap the two share similar problems and morals, things you could even find now in the year of 2016. In the following paragraphs I will go over the power of time and what we as a society have done to make a change.
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.
First, the size of the painting drew me in before all. It measures at 339.1 by 199.5 cm, surrounded by a large golden frame. The size alone is enough to bring in any person passing by. Once getting close, the really wonder happened. The story told by the painting
Georges Seurat used the pointillism approach and the use of color to make his painting, A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, be as lifelike as possible. Seurat worked two years on this painting, preparing it woth at least twenty drawings and forty color sketched. In these preliminary drawings he analyzed, in detail every color relationship and every aspect of pictorial space. La Grande Jatte was like an experiment that involved perspective depth, the broad landscape planes of color and light, and the way shadows were used. Everything tends to come back to the surface of the picture, to emphasize and reiterate the two dimensional plane of which it was painted on. Also important worth mentioning is the way Seurat used and created the figures in the painting.
Our second to last day in New York started like all the others. Breakfast. Shopping. Sites. Back to the hotel. However, upon returning to our rooms, my stepmother (who was escorting us on this journey) handed me three tickets. Across the top of them, it read: The Nederlander Theatre presents Jonathan Larson’s RENT. I was completely stunned and my ey...
In the park written by Gwen Harwood, was originally written under a male pseudonym. The poem represents the idea of changing identity because of certain circumstances as well as challenging common ideas, paradigms and values & beliefs which is commonly held amongst mothers in today’s society.
Lapine’s off-Broadway experienced definitely helped him create his style of writing, which in turn rubbed off on Sondheim even after their time as collaborators was over. Lapine felt that he championed visual theater with less reliance on text to tell the story (Stempel, ...
Now that the play, “Post-its (Notes on a Marriage),” could make the audience react to feel distanced and questionable of the actions of the characters, how can that relate to everyday life? traits of the play Post-its (Notes on a Marriage) through staging and conversation,
The play “Fences”, written by August Wilson, shows a detailed interpretation about the life of a typical African-American family living in the twentieth century. Troy Maxson, the main character and the man of the house, a strict man with the family, hardworking, and at the same time a pleasure seeker. Jim Bono is Troy’s best friend from thirty odd years, a very friendly fellow who works with Troy and is really close to him. They both enjoy the company of each other every Friday on a bottle of an alcoholic beverage. Both characters are characterized based on being typical African American men living in the twentieth century. Even though Troy and Bono are very close friends, their actions and personalities sometimes conflict each other; this essay will focus on similarities and differences between the two characters to prove that even though they are close friends and acquire similarities, they still have different believes and behaviors.
Theo and the young Narrator similarly discover the revelatory capacity of art through a single pivotal painting and author respectively, both which become significant motifs in either text. Tartt utilizes an existent painting ‘The Goldfinch’ as a fixed point of reference, which, for both Theo and the reader provides a sense of reality and constancy ‘rais[ing him] above the surface’ of an otherwise tumultuous childhood. Whereas Proust uses a fictional author, ‘Bergotte’, to communicate the universality of art, and invite the reader, through the vivid immediacy with which the Narrator’s early reading experiences are described, to participate in his epiphanic discovery that art can translate ‘imperceptible truths which would never have [otherwise] been revealed to us’ (97). Artistic imagery becomes a motif in Proust’s descriptions of scenes of domesticity and nature. In a scene recounting Francoise ‘masterful’ preparation of a family meal the Narrator describes asparagus in the technical language of painting as ‘finely stippled’ provoking an association between his observations of asparagus and the creation of a painting. By forming this improbable link he elevates unremarkable asparagus to the ‘precious’ status of art in the eyes of the reader. Proust’s presentation of his Narrator’s ‘fascination’ and pleasure at their ‘rainbow-loveliness’, forces the reader to consider asparagus with unfamiliar and attentive appreciation, conveying the idea that art can uncover the overlooked beauty of the mundane. Though Theo reveals a far more cynical view of ordinary life as a ‘sinkhole of hospital beds, coffins and broken hearts’ Tartt conveys the similar belief in art’s capacity to create a ‘rainbow-edge’ of beauty between our perceptions and the harshness of reality. In the most
...ch as time, dates, and the exact relationships between the different characters are is not spelled out. This active involvement of the viewer is necessary for the work of art to stand on its own. This takes the challenge thrown out by modernists to reject easy conventions and make new ones, and pushes it further to the point where conventions become a joke. Those who understand the references get the joke, and this creates a new kind of meaning beyond the surface meaning of the narrative.
“The theatre was created to tell people the truth about life and the social situation,” says Stella Adler. Theater is unique and intriguing because it blends literary and visual arts to tell a story. Before Theater 10, I viewed theater on the surface level: cheesy plot lines with dramatic scenarios for entertainment purposes. Throughout the course, I have learned what it means to appreciate theater, such as understanding Brechtian and Chinese theatre; however, I believe understanding theater’s ability to convey crucial historical and social messages, such as in the production of RENT, is more relevant and important for theater appreciation.