The Play about the Spaceship

Hey everyone!  Posts have been quietly being written this week - but not quite ready yet - for posting next week or so.  In the meantime, I have started writing a play!  How exciting!

More on that later, and also a post about how I watch tv and movies now - dramatically different.

Love,
Ben

It's Gene To His Friends

DISCLAIMER:  WIKIPEDIA RESEARCH AHEAD.  I can't find my goddamned Brockett, it is absolutely nowhere in this house but then where did it go.  [confused ben body language]


So Eugene O'Neill.  An interesting guy.  His most lasting contribution to the American theatre was realism; stark realism, more often than not.  Stark because all but one (1) of his plays is a tragedy, the tragic* comedy Ah, Wilderness!, a piece largely remembered for Mark Chevalier's purple, brown, and skeletal set.  Sigh... so tragic.  His importance as a force of American theatre was reinforced during his lifetime as he won four (4!) Pulitzer Prizes, awarded for:

Problems with the formatting tools

Pardon my tiny script and enormous hard returns - I'm still figuring out these goddamned formatting tools.

update: BLARGARITAS THIS IS FRUSTRATING

Summary v. Synopsis v. Analysis

My idea for this blog was nebulous at best - read play, post about play.  So I eventually got to the point while writing my first play post where I had to ask myself: how much is too much, and what kind of information is more important?  What do I focus on in this blog?

Q: To Agamemnon, or Not to Agamemnon?

A: Not to Agamemnon.

A thought came up the last time I sat down (after several previous failures) to write the Topics post for Agamemnon.  I’d been having problems getting started and it was starting to piss me off.  That thought is this: 

A Quick Note on Homecoming

Homecoming, by Mr. Eugene O'Neill, was finished last night out on the porch.


Previously, this would be cause for excitement, if not a drunken bitch session with other theatre students/normal people who felt like I did after I read The Hairy Ape: glassy-eyed, lethargic, filled with post-modern John Osbourne-levels of rage, and thoroughly bored out of my goddamn skull.

This Joint Needs a New Name

So right now I'm fully aware I'm simply shouting into the void (or sometimes singing, sometimes reciting dry, horrible background) in this space, with these posts.  Pointless?  I don't think it is, yet.  It could become a gray landscape of devestation, Hamm and Clov arguing eternally in a corner and me in a garbage can, wondering how it all went awry, but only if I neglect it.  So, attention must be paid!

Happy Birthday Lex!

Heeeey since no one's reading I can do what I want - for now - and I want to wish my sister Lexi a HAPPY HAPPY BIRTHDAY!

First blog research trip

So I'm headed down to the Harold Washington Public Library here in good ole Chicago, IL, for my first list of topic post research day!  (Also: how to find a grad school.  Go.)

Agamemnon

Agamemnon

by Aeschylus

First Performed: 458 B.C. 

Cast Breakdown: 4M/2W/Chorus/Non-speaking Roles

Previously, on Atreus

Welcome to my first author post!  Very simple - just a set up and background information to prepare for the onslaught of words, words, and bloodshed to come....

By the time of Aeschylus (b. 513 B.C., d. 456 B.C.) Greek tragedy traditions were largely set.  Athenian festivals consisted of three groups, each consisting of three actors and a chorus, acting out sets of four plays. Aeschylus was said to have won first prize in the dramatic contest 13 times while alive, but even in death he kept rakin’ ‘em in against other, more living, playwrights.  Crazy!  Of the 70+ plays he’s credited with, only 7 survive: The Suppliants, The Persians, The Seven Against Thebes, Prometheus Bound, Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers, and The Eumenides.  All of them some of the finest, clearest action taking place in a play yet today.  Pretty good stuff, and undeniably human.  Who hasn’t felt that a certain murder would be justifiable?

A monthly book breakdown: Backwards and Forwards

Twice a month I plan to write longer posts covering whatever I feel like when I sit down at the library to start researching, or maybe a topic a reader wants to talk about.

But for a while, one of these will be a monthly installment where I cover chapters from David Ball's Backwards and Forwards: a Technical Manual for Reading Plays.  If you haven't read this book, I recommend it highly!  So highly!  It has made all the difference in how I read plays.  You remember how you viewed movies before and after your Film Studies class?  Yeah, like that.  Except now you enjoy them even more, since you know what's going on.

Rock on,
Ben

Classic Trilogy Smackdown, coming soon!

Ladies and Gentlemen, for my first trick!


For my first 6 sets of posts I'm going to be doing a relatively straightforward operation - six plays in two trilogies.  It's Aeschylus vs. O'Neill!  The Oresteia goes round for round with it's (relatively) modern American Civil War retelling, Mourning Becomes Electra.  Here's my (optimistic) schedule:

First Post Guide to this Blog

What is this blog about?

This blog is both my attempt to stimulate the online popular literary discussion of plays, as well as an outlet for writing.  It will attempt to begin conversations through a series of posts for each play: A post about the Author, a post about the play, and a followup topic post, generally on a subject relating to the play and hopefully ripe for discussion.  Or at least enough to fulfill my quota of shouting into the void.

Posts might include information such as: