The script of The Trip to Bountiful, written by playwright Horton Foote, was a story about an elderly woman named Carrie Watts. The short yet sweet story was told of Mrs. Watts, who was homesick and simply wanted to visit her hometown of Bountiful, Texas before she passed on. A unique yet thorough way to evaluate this play, is to break it into sections and analyze each one. Aristotle, a notable Greek philosopher, deconstructed the plays into six segments. These include plot, thought, character, diction, spectacle, and song (Downs, 78). This essay will analyze each element in relation to The Trip to Bountiful. The storyline and plot of The Trip to Bountiful is written in a linear way, meaning that the story’s format is pretty straightforward. …show more content…
Thoughts in a play are the ideas or messages the author is trying to communicate. This play's theme or message stated pretty clearly about Mrs. Watts yearning to get back to the city she was born and raised in, and to escape the box of an apartment in Houston. This thought or message may apply to several peoples’ social and cultural climates in today’s world. Unfortunately, there may be several older people living with their grown children or other family members due to numerous circumstances, yet this may not be their home or location of choice. Mrs. Watts was very motivated to get out of the apartment and head to Bountiful, as she was feeling anxious and felt she just couldn’t live like that in the city in that small apartment any longer. Readers can view her point and empathize with Mrs. Watts and the whole thought of the play to a degree. Though the theme of the play wasn’t really universal, it doesn’t apply to individuals of a certain social class. This is because of a somewhat isolated instance in that period of time. Yet some people may be relying on other family members' paychecks, describing the theme of certain people's human
When Mary Zimmerman adapts a play from an ancient text her directing process and the way she engages with text are woven together, both dependent on the other. She writes these adaptations from nondramatic text, writing each evening while working through the pre-production rehearsals and improvisations during the day with the cast. The rehearsal process influences the text, and the text enriches the rehearsal process, so that one cannot exist without the other. Every rehearsal is structured the same but each production is unique because as Zimmerman states in “The Archaeology of Performance”, she is always “open to the possibilities”. The piece is open to everything happening in the world and to the people involved, so the possibilities are honest and endless.
Set ages apart, Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman and Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex provide different perspectives on the topic of tragedy and what is defined as a tragic hero. Although Oedipus would be thought of as better representing the tragic hero archetype due to tradition and time period, the modern tragic hero of Oedipus Rex is more of a dismal one. Through analysis of their respective hamartias, it is exemplified that the New York businessman with his humble story proves to be more thought provoking than the King of Thebes and his melancholic tale. **By incorporating a more relatable character and plot, Arthur Miller lends help to making Willy Lowman spiral toward his own downfall while building more emotion and response from the audience than with Oedipus. When Oedipus learns of his awful actions, this invokes shock and desperation. With Willy Lowman, the audience goes for a bumpy ride until the eventual, but expected, crash. ** (NEEDS WORK)
American Literature. 6th Edition. Vol. A. Ed. Nina Baym. New York: W.W. Norton & Company. 2003. 783-791
Haley, Darryl. "Certain Moral Values: A Rhetoric of Outcasts in the Plays of Tennessee Wililiams." 1997
The use of offstage action is effective in constructing Medea’s authoritative persona. “Fe-oo! Fee-oo! Weep. Pity me.” These lamentations are passionate and emotional, exactly what many men of Ancient Greek society would expect of a woman. Suspense is built and the audience’s attention captured, focusing it on Medea and the moment of her on-stage arrival. However, when Medea does appear on stage she is calm and composed, dispelling the notion of a “wild woman”. “Ladies, Corinthians, I’m here./ Don’t think ill of me. Call others proud.” The Medea character has the power to command the audience through this presentation of her dual natures; she can be defined within the typical female gender role as emotional and passionate, yet she usurps masculine traits of rationality, resourcefulness and int...
Driver, Tom. The sense of history in Greek and Shakespearean drama.2nd ed. New York: Columbia University Press. 1961.
Medea and Agaue, the tragic heroes of Euripides’ Medea and Bacchae, represent similar ideas. For both plays, the plot focuses on those two characters’ attainment of vengeance, so that their desire for a form of retribution is the primary driving force behind the plays’ conflicts. In each case, the revenges taken by Medea and Agaue are the results of their acting on their most basic, instinctual emotions without the self-control given by a more reasoned nature. Accordingly, the women and their pursuit of revenge become representative of the emotional side of human thinking. The characters that Medea and Agaue eventually destroy, Jason and Pentheus, support and represent reason, civilization, and ambition. As these male characters against which Medea and Agaue take their revenge hold purely civilized and unemotional values, they become the opposite of their play’s women. Thus, the conflict in each play becomes less specific. Instead, both plays seen together become a more generalized reflection on the natural opposition of logic and emotion, and the tragic results of their imbalance.
The Bedford Introduction to Literature. Ed. Michael Meyer. 7th ed. of the book.
The blinding power of aesthetic standards is a defining, if not clearly visible, theme in both the plays of Medea and Hedda Gabler. Both the authors, Euripides and Ibsen, bring the subject to a new light through the characters of Jason and George Tesman. Although the plays were written for people of a certain era, their message is timeless. The act of impulse must be replaced by the thought of careful understanding, a lesson one can take into reality from tales of fiction.
A. "My Papa's Waltz". , Literature: An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry And a lot of drama. Ed. X. J. Kennedy and Dana Gioia. 7th Ed. -.
Print. The. SparkNotes Editor -. “SparkNote on The Oedipus Plays.” SparkNotes.com.
Tennessee Williams’ Suddenly Last Summer is a one-act play with a cast of colourful characters ranging from the eccentric Violet to the troubled Catherine. One individual, George Holly, is more minor than others, and as such might get overlooked. However, the Fictional World method of analysis uncovers new insight into his nature. By analysing George’s character in the Social World of the play specifically, we get a better understanding of how traumatic and powerful the climax really is.
Fergusson, Francis. Oedipus, Myth and Play. Literature and Its Writers: An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, and Drama. 2nd ed. Ed. Ann Charters and Samuel Charters. Boston: Bedford, 2001 1462-1469.
In Euripides’ tragic play, Medea, the playwright creates an undercurrent of chaos in the play upon asserting that, “the world’s great order [is being] reversed.” (Lawall, 651, line 408). The manipulation of the spectators’ emotions, which instills in them a sentiment of drama, is relative to this undertone of disorder, as opposed to being absolute. The central thesis suggests drama in the play as relative to the method of theatrical production. The three concepts of set, costumes, and acting, are tools which accentuate the drama of the play. Respectively, these three notions represent the appearance of drama on political, social, and moral levels. This essay will compare three different productions of Euripides’ melodrama, namely, the play as presented by the Jazzart Dance Theatre¹; the Culver City (California) Public Theatre²; and finally, the original ancient Greek production of the play, as it was scripted by Euripides.
Aristotle is the most influential philosopher in the history of Western thought. A Greek drama by Sophocles, Oedipus Rex, was praised in the Poetics of Aristotle as the model for classical tragedy and is still considered a principal example of the genre. In this essay I will analyze Oedipus Rex using Aristotle's concepts praxis, poiesis, theoria.