Transcription
This computer. I still don't see that it's recording, but my light is on, so that's always a good time. Yeah, it is recording. Remember, sorry, professor, but uh we democratically chose to be striking today and tomorrow. So, I don't understand. Are we going to be penalized? Record again. So, there we go. So, hopefully that'll be the extent of disturbances for today.
So I want us to think about New York and what we understand in response to New York and the advent of Broadway that how is Broadway different from other stages as it rivaled the West End and it became a very particular space that was in many ways elite um and set the bar for how we still understand success. um unfortunately um and then that can allow us to think about some of the problems with understanding success which would fall outside of the course. But hopefully as artists this is you'll be able to make a living through through venues that you deem acceptable whether it be Broadway or Fringe, whatever you like best.
What's also important to notice is that during this very little period of time, so roughly between the the end of World War II and Joseph McCarthy's reign of terror over American society where there were communist and queer and feminist witch hunts taking everywhere, taking place everywhere. This was an incredibly progressive time where really complicated subject matter started to move forward onto the American stage. The genre that we look at when we think of Americanism of this period of time would be American realism. Tennessee Williams was part of a group of writers who came up working in realism and in particular symbolic realism. In other words, ways to read a realistic storyline with symbolic moments that allow us to think about the deeper underpinnings of what might be happening in a given text.
Williams is also understood as a kind of modern Shakespeare where many many many characters of the Shakespearean era have in many ways been brought down with a very localized kind of setting. All of Williams's plays do this. The more successful ones like The Glass Managerie and Street Car Named Desire and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof have a very very small microcosm of what we're looking at.
What's important for us to understand is that New Orleans stood as very very different from the American world as a whole. If you look at the map of the United States from from Gaspayzi from like all the way right really far from us and up north all the way down through the Mississippi was New France. These areas of the United States were particularly French. New Orleans was sold to the Spanish, sold back to the French and then purchased for um I always botch the amount. Um I think it's either 1.5 or 15 million, but I could be wrong. I can Google it. in the Louisiana Purchase. Um, and New Orleans was bought by the United States. France had to give up New France because of the revolution. It could not support itself the way it did.
How is New Orleans different? We've got a whole bunch of important factors contributing to the difference that made up New Orleans as an urban hub. One, the most important thing to understand is New Orleans started to have a very developed working class far before post World War I. And this working class was made up of droo diverse groups of people which included um Latinos, Latinos, Latin X, afroamericans um and before this period of time before the emancipation of slavery, what was understood as free people of color. All of these marginalized groups had a lot more freedom in different parts of New Orleans. If you go onto a map of New Orleans and you look at the French Quarter in the areas to the north and to the east, TMA is one of the is the oldest African-American area. I I was going to say suburb, but it's not a suburb. It's in the city. Um and we have thriving languages and thriving cultures of which Street Car reflects with its diversity of characters. Its characters are important and its characters um reflect the diversity and social problems that existed during this period of time.
Part of Williams's realism is an expose of the parts of American society that had changed after World War II. Right? We're right right in that period of time right after it. But also parts of the American fabric that needed change. And this would make reference to linguistic and socio um socioeconomic and racialized divisions within society as well.
When we deal with American literature, American literature, right, that's the nervous laugh. American literature, American literature has a very difficult language within it itself. Many African-American writers, if not all of them, drop language that makes a lot of us uncomfortable as it is their lived experience. It's not our positions to judge. When I teach and I teach American literature, I modernize language. Problematic, aggressive language isn't part of this text. But antiquated antiquated language and reform to race is whenever I see a word I'm not comfortable with with and I'm looking at African-Americanism, for example, I simply replace it with black. Um, if you go on to read James Baldwin or Zoran Neil Hursten, Tony Morrison, Alice Walker, um, very, very famous African-American writers, they drop the end bomb like there's no tomorrow. So, I think as Canadians, we're not really used to that. So if you see language that doesn't make you super comfortable in your given corpus of American literature, one, I don't use words that offend people. So as I said, I would replace them. But also, we don't need to address areas that place us in positions that compromise our own socio um socio ethics.
What Street Car Named Desire does is it brings to life the French Quarter of New Orleans after World War II. Between roughly the jazz age, so I'd say even rag time before that. So roughly the 1890s, the French Quarter of New Orleans had a thriving music culture. This music culture is still alive today. This music culture still exists. and Williams does bring it to life very often through the symbolic realism of the play. You'll notice that music is used twofold. The blue piano is frequently played by um piano players who are described to be not white. So, we presume they would be African-American. that kind of talent that was was coming out of New Orleans during this period of time and would become part of the jazz age um and is part of the jazz age of this play is there and the blue piano in particular speaks to the mood within the play. There is supposed to be a mood of melancholy and sadness that would have existed during this period of time. Um, the sadness exists principally for the very complicated main character of Blanch Dubois. And her characterization is Williams's gift. Williams's women are amazing. From Laura and her mother and Glass Menagerie to Maggie on a Cat on a Hot Tin Roof to Blanch and Street Car Named Desire.
I've included a screening of Street Car for you which you could have watched close to reading it no problem. And these women function as the voice of modernism. As we looked at for the next couple as we looked at over the last past couple of weeks we realized that many writers especially in dramatic texts but novels as well use female characters as voices for social change. Um, I've got screenings for you on which I urge you to do and I'll give you roughly the second half of class or a portion of that to make sure you screen these. Um, Broadway in the mid 20th century, the life of Tennessee Williams and as well some information on the French Quarter after World War II.
Blanch herself remains so complicated because she is in many ways a modern Hamlet. She's flawed. She's complicated. She's She has a deep-seated sadness. And she's trying to carve a place for herself in in the world. This play, whenever it's put on, is put on rather successfully. and any actor would jump at the the the opportunity to have a chance to interpret a complicated character like Blanch and to move her forward in some kind of way on the stage Williams uses.
So from my scenography students, which I think the the the aggressiveness of the students who bomb the class, it's called Zoom bombing, by the way. Um had a number of people leave. But if you're scenography students, you might be thinking of the way that the play really exists within a very limited place. the surreal reality of the apartment on Alleian Field. So in the French Quarter and further east and up from French Market in what's understood as the Fberg Mariny and what would become by water in response to these areas. This is where we have this apartment which really has all of one bedroom. It's not a whole lot of big space. the courtyard that opens up to it to push it off back off the street is there where we can constantly hear the music playing where music works in twofold. We have the sociohistorically correct music of the time. Um this this this time is is is of the jazz age. But Blanch is also a character. So what Williams does do is he raises awareness to what we've really only started to talk about over the last 10 years maybe tops 12 wellness issues and Blanch suffers a lot a lot a lot. Her trauma is unraveled in through her actions through dramatic actions and dramatic irony. Um and then in in scene nine of the play which works as one of the climaxes where she is able to place forward her trauma for the audience to hear. So we realize how much she um she suffers and that she suffers from a place out of her control the same way that we understand I would think wellness issues today. We carry I I'm hoping empathy when someone suffers and we help them feel better about who they are through treatments and therapies to help them process. Blanch has none of these at all.
Where does this come from? Where does Williams's strong focal point on psychological wellness come from? Williams's sister Rose was a victim of the psychology of the time. She suffered rather acutely from um I guess what would be understood in response to being bipolar today and her mother opted for one of the treatments of the time, a frontal lobotomy. As we all know, going near the human brain will result in disaster and Rose was institutionalized for the rest of her life. If you look at photos of Williams, you'll constantly see him at events with someone someone who doesn't look 100% well, even though they're presented appropriately for for the venue. and he took his sister Rose with him as frequently as possible um to these events. He he tried to give her life some kind of normalcy in response to his own work. He also um made sure that his women characters Laura and Glass Menagerie and Blanch and Street Car echoed some of Rose's psychological and/or emotional um obstacles. And in many ways he gives his fictional characters. He does this again and suddenly last summer as well. Um he gives his fictional female characters their opportunity to give life to his sister who who who suffered greatly.
Comments or questions? So far I've disbanded the chat. So so um we we were attacked a little bit. So, if anyone has questions, you can feel free to unmute yourself. If you can't unmute yourself, just put up your hand um and I can do that for you. Do we have any questions or are we all thoroughly traumatized and will this be a somewhat flat class? Um you're not being judged for it, trust me. Right. I had to I had to call one of my administrators for um for some kind of help.
So how do we stage shake uh street car? A street car intersects women, social issues, feminist, even queer subtext done through camp and actual queer subtext through this very sort of intricate form of characterization of which makes Williams the most famous 20th century playwright. The play itself has been directed and produced in a series of different ways. I think the last big production was Kate Blanchett um on Broadway with with with um someone Edertton and they played the characters. I think Street has gone back to Broadway but Broadway has shorter stints so it's not really holding the plays the same way because of the post-covid market.
Normally for a street car, I would ask for readings. I don't think anyone in this class is going to feel um comfortable enough after the opening of class to read. I know I'm not. But if somebody does want to read, I can certainly um I can certainly do that. Otherwise, I can go through certain scenes to open this up. I want you to think about staging and social insubordination. I want you to think about the characters within this play as mitzv ways. Stanley and Stella's marriage, which functions as the title of the play, is in itself awkward. Awkward at best. You have two people from very different worlds representing the new class that would come into effect because of the destruction of the old south and the new south. you had people coming together. Um the impetus is really positive but as you all know through either reading or screening streaming screening street car is that the marriage itself is quite volatile and Stanley's character remains as complicated as Blanch's where um Stella's functions as a grounding force between these two characters. Part of Stella's marriage is a motif of domestic abuse which runs through the play with a harrowing third scene.
The play itself is set up on 11 scenes opposed to the more classically divided acts. You can get additions of this play which do divide it as per acts. These are liberty with the original text. I teach as per the 11 scenes within this play. Um, I think Williams does an exceptionally organized job on holding together the focal points of this play with 11 very tangible scenes of which we can work through. Does anybody have comments or questions for me? I know you're all probably a little traumatized. Morgan, yes, please. >> I just wanted to pop in and just say if you needed anyone to read for you, I'd be happy to do that. I know the class is a little quiet, so if you need help. >> Thank you. and they're allowed to be quiet. So, I certainly appreciate that, but I want the people who are here to know that you may be quiet. And Morgan, I might take you up on that, but I'm quite rattled. I think I'm holding it together quite well. >> You are. >> Thank you. But my telephone call with admin was not right. So, I kind of, you know, I purged it. I got some therapy and got it out of my system so I can at least have a recorded lecture of the play for the students who aren't here. And then hopefully the students who did um who weren't so nice to me could approach me when we're back and let me know why I was targeted for living out my contractual agreements that hold me as an employee to the university, a job I love and would not want to be fired for. So um we can certainly think about that too as we move forward. feminism, queer subtext, addictions, blend. Thank you, by the way, Morgan. So, if I forget to say thank you or if anyone notices I forget to follow up, I'm really staying very hyperfocused. It's kind of like, you know, going to an audition where you almost get hit by a car as you go in and then you're kind of like shaky a bit, but but it I seem to be organizing myself a bit. >> No worries. Just thought I'd offer. Thank you. Um I may I may we'll we'll see when we get there. >> Perfect.
How do we understand the play in response to feminism? When we look at the climaxes, we're going to think about the treatment of women as as as social commentaries. The central conflicts of the play are internal and external. And Blanch has as the the pivotal major character has two conflicts. one with with herself and Mitch and one with Stanley which become part of scene nine and scene ten. Scene eleven is is the resolution. It resolves what the play has built up on. We have rising dramatic action right through the play with a duma in scene eight and various in instances of dramatic irony happening throughout as well.
if we look at the first scene. So, so I I'm gonna I I'll I'll be um I'll be a little boring today. How does that sound given the circumstances? And we're going to look at the inscription to A Street Car Named Desire. But I came prepared today, my friends. Right. I came prepared today. I need to see. So, this is this is what happens when your eyes go on you. And and so it w I think I need to start over again. And so it was. I entered the broken world to trace the visionary company of love. Its voice an instant in the wind. I know not wither hurled, but not for long to hold each desperate choice. From the broken tower by Hart Crane. This speaks rather acutely to Blanch and her own obstacles going through the world. And Stella does explain this. She's searching for something that she can't find. And this rises in dramatic action until Blanch explains this to Mitch in scene nine. Perhaps if I'm feeling relaxed enough, I can read from scene with Morgan. We'll see if we we get there. So, thank you again.
Scene one itself. And remember what we're used to in response to stage direction. We end up with an incredibly detailed set of sage directives. One, two, three full paragraphs and one small one. And we know exactly how this scene is going to be said. The exterior of a two-story corner building on a street in New Orleans, which is named Alleian Fields and runs between the L and N tracks and the river. The section is poor, but unlike corresponding sections of other American cities, it has a roughest charm. The houses are mostly white frame weathered gray with rickety outside stairs and galleries and quainted ornamental gables. This building contains two flats, upstairs and down. Faded white stairs is send to the entrances of both. So, we know we're we're not in the fanciest areas area, but those of us who have lived south also know that the humidity eats away at paint. So, we certainly have this this this this notion of decay, the outside galleries and the outside um staircases of which we do see in Montreal. Um not best for our winters, but but quite good for New Orleans. And it's the oncoming of evening in early May. The play will start in early May and it's going to end in September. And there are two female characters or two couples rather that take place. Ununice and Steve who are a mixed race couple and Stanley and Stella who live below who come from two very different socio and economic classes. This is explained to us. The words that are used so that we can understand them in response to their lexicon are simply antiquated. Thankfully, the language of the slave trade is not incorporated with the nbomb, for example. And please remember that um African-Americans used the word negro in a very positive and liberating way. it changed its lexicon and became AfricanAmerican after that. Moreover, prior to the shifting to Africanamean, the problematic term of um colored was used. Why is colored problematic? Color doesn't sound like a troublesome term, but it was the term used to segregate and separate se separate those who presented as white American from those who did not. So the word itself is reflective of Jim Crow segregation and has a nasty bite. So if we read these words when we're reading, we could simply replace colored with POC. And if we find um if we find the word negro, we could pre replace it by black. And this way when we read, we don't have offensive language. Please note that many African-American playwrights will use language that possibly as Canadians may make you uncomfortable. It's certainly not our space to correct them if the lived experience doesn't belong to us. That's how I understand it.
As we enter into the play, we're enter we enter into a a somewhat workingclass environment uh with everyday characters, right? Common place as they would have been understood in England. And from there, we're introduced to to um to Blanch, who enters once the characters kind of exit. Stanley, Stella um leave the stage and Ununice, the upstairs neighbor, is there and meets Blanch. Blanch surfaces and her entrance is dramatic. In part, it could be understood as dramatic irony, but I'm going to suggest it's dramatic realism. And she stands very apart with these characters in dress and presentation. And the the text itself tells us that she's looking for um Stanley and Stella's house, but she's dressed as if she was going to a garden party, i.e. the garden district uptown and not the French Quarter. Even the names used for the street cars of which Blanch takes are important. and Blanch's first lines to Ununice who asks her, "What's the matter, honey? Are you lost?" And Blanch replies, "They told me to take a street car named Desire and then transfer to one called Cemeteries and ride six blocks and get off at Alleian Fields." So, the title of the play is mentioned almost right away. And Blanch moves from cemeteries, which is now a bus in case you're curious, to Desire to arrive at where she is. And we do have a tango throughout the play of death, something that's dead or things that have passed, as Blanch's monologue will reveal in scene one or introduce because this will happen throughout. And desire, a very important question would be, what does Blanch desire? What is she searching for as a character? What makes her incomplete? And when Stella shows up, her sister, her younger sister, they embrace uh with a very happy reunion. Why is Blanch there? She's a school teacher and it's still term. So, we need to find out, okay, what is Blanch doing there? Why is she so nervous? Before Stella shows up, Blanch finds um finds whiskey in the flat itself and knocks one back as she shakes. She's nervous and she's she's constantly taking a shot. The shot, as it's described, is very very very important because it will lead us up to the climax of of of of scene nine. And Blanch reveals the truth, but only in part, much like the ghost of Hamlet. So, not Hamlet himself, although there are similarities between Hamlet and Blanch as tragic characters suffering from wellness obstacles. Blanch Blanch speaks in poetry in some ways. She speaks in partial truths. She speaks her own particular language. And it appears that Blanch has lost Bel Reve, her family plantation. Williams's signal that the old South is no more. So Blanch and Stella come from Laurel, Mississippi, just kind of north. Hopefully I got my geography right. Norththeast. Yeah, northeast of of of Louisiana. And the plantation has been lost. I always ask my students to think if you have a sibling who who only works as a high school teacher and you know is suffering from forms of um wellness issues, would you have this person take care of a very big estate? What would be the success rate? It would probably be quite quite weak. And Blanch does lose the estate, which in scene two fuels Stanley's anger. He doesn't understand her in response to her own wellness obstacles. We can't hold her accountable. She's she's suffering. We don't people who suffer, we don't hold them accountable. But Stanley shows her no remorse, which is really exemplified in scene eight in the DUA, where everything crashes through before the climaxes. When Blanch tries to explain herself, she does so through her symbolic realism, her her poetic language, and she doesn't really explain to us exactly what happened, but instead she reveals this to us in different ways. She explains to Blanch, "I took the blows in my face and my body, all those deaths, the long parade to the graveyard. Father, mother, father, mother, Margaret, that dreadful wave so big with it, it couldn't be put in a coffin, but it had to be burned like rubbish. You came home just in time for funerals, Stella. And funerals are pretty compared to deaths. Funerals are quiet, but deaths not always. Sometimes their breathing is horse, and sometimes their rattles, and sometimes they even cry out, "Don't let me go." Even the old sometimes say, "Don't let me go." As if you able to stop them. But funerals are quiet with pretty flowers and oh what gorgeous boxes they back them away in. Unless you were there at the bed when they cried out I'd hold me. You'd never suspect there was even a struggle for breath and bleeding. You didn't dream, but I saw saw saw. Now you sit there telling me with your eyes that I let the place go. How in the hell do you think all that sickness and dying was paid for? Death is expensive, Miss Stella. Little cousin Jesse's right after Margaret hero's mother. The grim reaper put up his tent at our doorstep seller. Bel Reve was his headquarters. Honey, that's how it slipped through my fingers. Which of them left us a fortune? Which of them left us a scent of insurance even? And Blanch reveals to us her trauma in trying to keep afloat everything that's been lost.
The play builds through scene two where Stanley pretty much interrogates Blanch and he begins to raid her own personal belongings. He doesn't understand what he sees as he explains to Stella as he flips through her trunk, tossing out all of her belongings. And think about, you know, think about your privacy when you come to class. How would you deal if the person sitting next to you went into your into your backpack and started grabbing everything and throwing things out? You wouldn't feel so good. And Stanley's character is foreshadowed here, not just in response to the the volatility that exists, but within the symbolic assault of Blanch's property. Stella explains they're they're they're cheap. They're thrift shop finds. They're they're rhinestones. they're not anything particularly real. But Stanley doesn't really get that. And instead, he explains that the Louisiana code means that as Stella's husband, he's responsible for half of what she had coming into the marriage, which would be half of her half of Bel Reve. Hopefully my law wasn't too bad. And he's angry.
Scene three begins and it's the poker night and we end up with a huge description for us that draws attention to Van Gogh. By the way, if you'd like to appear like an art historian or an artist, they pronounce his name in Dutch. So, it's Van Gogh. So, it kind of hurts here. Dutch is has that sound back there. But then goes billiard parlor um painting is in sight. Unlike the faded whites and pastel blues and pastel grays that we've seen in the play were all of a sudden given deep dark colors and Blanch and Stella come home early at this soiree where Stanley is playing cards with his guy friends and drinking. Blanch meets one of his friends Mitch who seemingly takes a shine to Blanch. And as they take a shine to one another and agree to meet, it's interrupted by Stanley's anger and frustration. And he loses his cool and aggressively assaults his wife. This is staged very differently in different versions. The very boyish Marlon Brando in the film version does does punch Stella. Alec Baldwin, whose Towers, although they do cast a very I think it's Kim Hunter. Um, it No, it's not. I think I botched my actresses for for Stella. He just kind of slaps her to kind of downplay because he's so much visually far more imposing. In the version you have, you'll be able to look at a sort of cross between the two. He's boyish like um like Marlon Brando, but he's he's there's something college boy about him as well. So that threat is kind of there. And Mitch comforts Blanch at the end.
The next day, we're brought into daylight in scene four and Stella explains that she's fine with everything. Blanch is like, "I got to get you out of here. I've got to get you out." And Stella's like, "But I don't want to leave." Williams places forward a very avant-garde understanding of the problems with marriage. Problems we we are talking about now. Where did this come from in Williams' creative process? Williams's father was explosive, but his mother stayed the whole time. When Williams moved to the French Quarter in New Orleans where he spent most of his life, um the Tennessee Williams Repository is on Tuloo Street, the the home he actually bought there with a lovely garden. I had the honor of speaking for the Tennessee Williams Society once and um it was just beautiful. I practiced my talk amidst orange trees in the in the courtyard. It's now a repository, so you can gain access to go through the the records and the writing. Um, earlier on when William lived closer down to Pirates Alley, which is off of Jackson Square, he he actually had one of his lovers had a wicked temper. Williams didn't stay. He laughed it off and found it so over-the-top that he constructed Stanley sort of in response to his father and kind of some sort of maybe purging of growing up in a house like that. Williams was subject to emotional and probably psychological abuse by our definitions, but he he really mirrored this this off of this ex-lover he had who he got rid of shortly thereafter. Stella lets us know that she loves Stanley and she has no desire to go anywhere. Um, and she then begins to ask about Mitch and feels that she is at her wit's end, that Mitch could be her last chance. So, we have a little bit of desperation happening there.
What happens at the end of scene four is consequential in the rising action of the play. Stanley is listening to Blanch by the window. So, he's kind of just below the house or or the flat and Blanch tells Stella exactly what she thinks of Stanley. So, not only is he angry at her in response in response to what's happened with the loss of Bel Reve, but he's he's going to hear what Blanch really thinks of him. Stella cues on Blanch and says, "Go on, say it all, Blanch." And imagine saying this about someone in being overheard. He acts like an animal, has an animal's habits, eats like one, moves like one, talks like one. There's even something subhuman, something not quite to the stage of humanity yet, yet something ape-like about him, like one of those pictures I've seen in anthropological studies. Thousands and thousands of years have passed him right by. And there he is. Stanley Kowalski, survivor of the Stone Age, bearing the raw meat home from the kill in the jungle. And you, you here, waiting, waiting for him. Maybe he'll strike you or maybe he'll grunt and kiss you. That is if kisses have been discovered yet. Night falls and the other apes gather there in front of the cave. All grunting like him and swilling and gnawing and hulking. It's poker night, you call it. this party of apes. Somebody growls, some creature snatches or something. The fight is on, God. We may be a long way from being made in God's image, but Stella, my sister, there's been some progress since then. Some things is art and poetry and music. Some kinds of new light have come into the world since then. In some kinds of people, some tender of feelings had some little beginning that we have had make them grow and cling to and hold as our flag in this dark march towards whatever it is we're approaching. Don't don't hang back with the brutes. Stanley hesitates before entering according to the stage direction. And this obviously fuels Stanley's desire. He makes reference to this in scene eight. He'll hold it in for them.
Um, how does Blanch get further complicated? She's quite correct about Stanley, right? She calls it like it is. I don't think anyone reads or produces this play and sees Stanley as this victimized character of toxic masculinity. He is toxic masculinity and product of a of a system. And Williams critiques this system through Stanley. But Blanch is very very lost. She's described as moth-like. And prior to this, when Stella asks her about herself, she says she says, or is it right after this? I think it's right after. Um, no, it would have been before. Forgive me. She says, "Soft people are soft. They got to shimmer and glow. They got to wear the soft colors of butterfly wings, but it's not enough to be soft. Y'all done got to be soft and attractive, and I don't know how much longer I can keep turning the trick. I'm fading now." And Stella ignores her. And she says, "Are you listening to me, Stella?" And Stella's like, "Well, not when you're being morbid." Blanch has a deep-seated sadness. And in scene five, we're able to see this sadness come even further. We've realize there's moments in the staging where she kind of sits back and and tries to bring herself together, where she slaps the kind of furniture or herself to to kind of grab a grip. In scene one, she has three shots, though she says to Stanley, "One's her limit." So, she's not 100% honest. She at very least suffers from emotional turmoil. And moreover, she's also she's drinking a lot, right? It's implied that she suffers rather acutely from alcohol abuse. Um, and she explains to us, so sorry, I was right. It's right after in scene five when she explains to Stella that Stella that she's soft, she's fading, she's not she's not solid enough for the world that she's in. And she asks her about Mitch and Stella says, "Do you want him?" And she says yes. And she has a date with Mitch. she's going to come and pick her up and take her out. And Stella and Stanley leave to play bowling. And what's been presented in the play itself becomes very very confusing depending on the staging and the film version will kind of do a a blur. There's the end of scene five which is quite troublesome. Um, Morgan, are are you still okay to read? How do you feel about that? You could say no. You would say, >> "No, I am good to read." I'm just I'm trying to find where we are. Is Is there a a version on the Moodle or should I just find one online? >> I don't think there is, but we don't have to read I'm at the end of scene five. Do Do you If you Google a version, are you able to find it? >> Yeah, I've got what version pulled up. I just I don't know if the sometimes they're like not exactly the same because of like copyright and stuff like that. >> Do you do you have 11 scenes in your version or do you have it divided into acts? >> I've got scenes I believe. >> Great. >> I'm looking for Hold on. Let me Scene two, scene three, scene four, scene five. You said end of scene five. At the end of scene five, Blanch is going to be left alone and she sinks into her chair with a drink. And I can read the stage direction. So, it's a stage direction in square brackets in my edition. Yours might not be like that. And it says, "Blanch sinks faintly back in her chair." >> I'm just scrolling. Sorry, everyone. >> It's okay. If not, I can describe it. If you're not able to pull it, it's okay. >> I've got it, I think. Yes. >> Okay. Great. Are you able to be the young man? >> Yes. With pleasure, but I will not be able to do the lovely accents that you're able to do. >> Oh, no. No, no problem. You don't >> Everyone keep in mind I'm creative writing. I'm not >> It's >> in the theater department whatsoever. >> Did anyone else want to read? Because we do have a stage director, but I could leave it out and I could read as well for that. So if anyone wants to read, you could put up your hand and let me know. But if you're feeling a little sensitive today, I completely understand. Going once, going twice. Okay. So I'm going to read the stage direction and then we'll leave it out after that. Okay, Morgan. So I'll read just the first part of the stage direction so we can try and understand what's happening to Blanch. So I want us to think about what's going on in Blanch's mind. And then I want us to look at all of the empathetic realities I've placed forward, wellness issues, um, addiction issues, things we are sensitive to are going to get very complicated in this scene. And I know my students, my younger ones at the end of this scene get really they their view of Blanch shifts. And I'm Williams does this for a reason. We'll talk about that after, but it will shift our understanding of the character at the halfway point of the play, probably before where the intermission would be. Blanch sinks faintly back in her chair with her drink. Ununice shrieks with laughter and runs down the steps. Steve bounds after her with goat-like screeches and chases her around the corner. Stanley and Stella twine arms as they follow laughing. Dusk settles deeper. So those of you who are writing plays, think about the use how how amazing Williams is is setting this for us. The music from the four deuces is slow and blue. Oh me. Oh me. Oh me. Her eyes fall shut and the palm leaf fan drops from her fingers. She slaps her hand on the chair arm and a couple of times. There is a little glimmer of lighting about the building. A young man comes along the street and rings the bell. Come in. The young man appears through the portier. She regards him with interest. Well, well, what can I do for you? I'm collecting for the evening star. >> I didn't know that the stars took up collections. >> It's the paper. >> I know. I was just joking, Feebi. Um Um Y'all have a drink? >> No, ma'am. No, no, thank you. I can't drink on the job. >> Oh, well. Now, let me see. H Nope. I don't have a damn. I'm not the lady of the house. I'm a sister from Mississippi. One of those poor relations you've heard about. >> That's all right. I'll drop by later. He starts to go out. She approaches a little. Hey. He turns back shyly. She puts his cigarette in a long holder. Y'all give me a light. She crosses towards him. They meet at the door between the two rooms. >> Sure. >> He takes out a lighter. >> This doesn't always work. >> Oh, it's temperamental. It flares. Thank you. He starts away again. Hey. He turns again. Still more uncertainly. She goes close to him. Um. Uh. What time is it? >> 15 of 7. Ma'am. >> So late. Don't you just love these long rainy afternoons in New Orleans when an hour isn't just an hour, but a little piece of eternity dropped into your hands and who knows what to do with it. She touches his shoulder. You um you didn't get wet in the rain? >> No, ma'am. I stepped inside >> in a drugstore and had a soda. >> Uh-huh. >> Chocolate. >> No, ma'am. Cherry. >> Cherry. >> A cherry soda. >> You make my mouth water. She touches his cheek lightly and smiles, then goes to the trunk. >> Well, I'd better be going. >> Stopping him. young man. He turns. She takes a large gossamer scarf from the trunk and drapes it about her shoulders. In the ensuing pause, the blue piano is heard. It continues through the rest of his scene. In the opening of the next, the young man clears his throat and looks yearningly at the door. Young man, young young man. Has anyone ever told you that you look like a young prince out of the Arabian Nights? The young man laughs uncomfortably. And he stands like a bashful kid. Blanch speaks softly to him. Will you do, honey lamb? Come here. Come here. I want to kiss you just once softly and sweetly on your mouth. Without waiting for him to accept, she crosses quickly to him and presses her lips to his. Now run along quickly. It would be nice to keep you, but I got to be good. Got to keep my hands off, children. She stares at her a moment. She opens the door. She stares at him a moment. Yeah, sorry. He stares at her a moment. She opens the door for him and blows a kiss at him as he goes down the steps with a dazed look. She stands a little drearily after he has disappeared. Then Mitch appears around the corner with a bunch of roses. Look who's coming. My roen. My rose and Cavalia. Bow to me first and present him. Oh, me. She looks at him over them, coetishly pressing them to her lips. He beams at her self-consciously.
What did that just do to the play and the characterization of Blanch? It messes everything up. All of a sudden, we're starting to get foreshadowing of why Blanch might not be teaching anymore, right? You've all been expected to see this. So, the the foreshadowing is there. And as readers, viewers, we're put into a very uncomfortable position. So, thank you, Morgan, for reading the uncomfortable scene. Um, staging Vivian Leigh, her version of Blanch, is really petite. Uh, she she she has some speech particularities. She's she's she's really really little. So, the scene loses some impact because there's a softness to her. I don't know how she does it, but she does deliver these lines where the bite is softened. The directors of um it was originally Kim Basinger and on Broadway and then it was Jessica Lange in the film version that uses the Broadway cast. She's played off of Alec Baldwin for Stanley just so you can get some visuals. Um Jessica Lange is the voice of Jessica Rabbit. She looks like Jessica Rabbit. So, she's um she's very voluptuous. There's a lot of sensuality to her in her presentation that is played up. So, you have a lot more physical presence. But here, I'm going to complicate more. The boy isn't 14 or 15. He's a college stage student who's um taller than she is. So, there's this whole funny thing going on where you're like what just happened because you end up from from the sort of the sexual advancements coming from both sides. Here's the end product. Our end product is obvious. It raises the reality that Blanch suffers. What she'll explain in scene six to Mitch is that her trauma, her traumatic break is she married very very young. She married a boy who was homosexual and shoots himself in the mouth to liberate himself from the marriage because she has caught him with his male lover. Blanch is traumatized at this point and her development thereby arrested. She sees younger men. Well, they're not men yet. She sees younger people and imagines them as Allan, the husband she lost. Does this excuse the behavior? No. We're not looking to excuse the behavior. We're looking at if we're going to treat her psychologically using all the modern psychology we have now, we have to understand where she's coming from. And to understand that, we then can figure out the treatment on how to hopefully work her through this. She's a fictional character, so we're in a little bit of a different boat. She has her date with Mitch and the date itself remains problematic. She um she speaks French to him. All of you speak French. And if you go into scene six, what she says to him is um to little Kashan, right? Um and she says it revealing to us and this is what we should be acting by this point. So just just a couple of pages after that really difficult scene that that that we read a moment ago that in the midst of being very bohemian, she says in French, "Do you want to sleep with me?" And we realize that there can be sexual compulsion tied into her psychological makeup as well. Um, Williams's sister in her suffering had, I guess, what would be referred to today as a kinds of Tourette's where she would she would kind of lose it and bark out um sexualized phrases. And this is what her mother responded to for the lobotomy. We would have all kinds of treatments for people now from behavioral treatments to medications to help them not do that. Um but but Rose's own situation in her own life is is camped here. Williams actually wants us to laugh at this sequence. Uh, Williams had a an over-the-top sense of humor, and the serious underpinnings that are important for us to discuss, especially staging it, were a form of Williams' camp, this very queer aesthetic, as a way to drag the text, much like Wilde's Women, Blanch can be read as a drag queen. If you look at Jessica Lange's version of Blanch, even an Margaret's though she's toned down in the version I have for you, I found I wanted someone right in the middle of these extremes. She she she has this very sort of draggy quality to her um that that allows her to transgress the spaces of gender. And it's here that that gender really becomes very very complicated. Toxic masculinity is critiqued. The subservience of women in violent marriages. Domestic violence is critiqued. And scene seven reveals Stanley's revenge. So you have a character and it's already mid-September. So by scene seven, we've we've we've moved June like four months. Imagine having a house guest living in your space for four months. Would you be able to handle it? And what happens here is Stanley seeks his revenge. Blanch's birthday is coming up, but Stanley has been doing all of his undercover work and he's found out some information about Blanch that is um that Stella St. Stella doesn't want to believe. Part of losing Bel Reve for
Blanch included that she had to find extra work. Right? If I said to you guys, okay, make an Excel sheet where you have to fund a large home, a chateau, a big big house, you'd have a pretty big Excel sheet. And then if I said, I want you to take a school teacher's salary and fund it, you would all be like, well, we're bankrupt by month six. I had to double mortgage the house and month nine I had to sell it to the bank.
Blanch has these same realities happening and it's implied that she's taking work as an escort at a um at a a hotel that wouldn't interfere with their clients. In other words, where someone could go into the hotel with a sex worker and not be questioned by the hotel staff. So, this is what the hotel flamingo is.
Scene 8 is our day new mom, right? So, we've got our our our dramatic action is is waiting to happen. And before that, Williams dips it down and nobody shows up to Blanch's birthday party. Kind of like this class which has 66 students and um Blanch is left alone and her heart is broken and Stanley rages against her. She's drunk and insults him. She's in the bathtub and comes out tinkling a a highball as he's he's waiting. He needs to go to the bathroom. He's pounding on the door before the the supposed party. And she's taking her time in in the bathtub. So, she's a house guest. She's in New Orleans. It's about 105° Fahrenheit in September, just so you know. And she's taking a hot bath to calm her nerves. And finally, she swings open the door drunk as a skunk because she's been singing in the bath beforeh. And she says, "Nothing like a tall cool drink and a long hot bath to give a girl a brand new outlook on life."
Stanley just has to go to the bathroom. He needs to relieve himself. He's not going to get Blanch's quirky, campy sense of humor. And Mitch never shows up and a fight ensues. In other words, everything gets very heated. Blanch is going home. Stanley's bought her a ticket on a bus back to Laurel. But who saves the day? Stella goes into labor and the scene ends.
Comments or questions? We're going to look at the climaxes and then the resolution. I need some more water. So, you're going to give me a few minutes and I'll try and get you out of here as much as possible. I'm sorry, my friends, that I did have to disband the chat because I do know that it really does work as an effective way if people are feeling shy. I've never had a Zoom class so frozen before. So, hopefully when we go over the assignment, you'll feel free enough to ask something. I think we're safe. Um and and um maybe the administrator I spoke to was able to get the message across to to theater students that they they're they're not allowed to interfere with the teaching. So I think we we're going to be safe. So please give me just like a couple of minutes. Thank you.
I am back. Um, if you're ready for me and I'm going to look at the the rising action. Sorry, the camera keeps right. Um, the the the rising action that builds up to two actual climaxes. The first one where Blanch's conflict with Mitch, in other words, will she find love is comes comes to where it has to come to. And then the second climax of which I never read in class which is the presumed um sexual assault sequence where Stanley says "we've had this date from the beginning" and Blanch's character passes out and he carries her to a bed and all critics read this as some kind of sexual assault. Every time I read it, I'm like, I I see what Williams is doing, but Blanch is um she's been drinking all afternoon. So, if this were a sociology class, I'd say, "Well, why don't you start drinking at 3:00 in the afternoon and let me know how you're doing by by midnight?" And she's drinking hard alcohol, so I don't think she's in any state to kind of do that. But Stanley's character is supposed to be that awful, that horrible, which is something as well, you know, you could think about um should you choose to write on this play.
Scene nine is the first part of the climax, and I'll try and read some of it with Morgan. Hopefully Morgan will still want to read with me a little bit. It's certainly easier than the previous scene. We'd read from the start of scene nine and the directions say "a while later that evening," Blanch is seated in a tense hunch position in her bedroom chair. But this time we do have a shift in the music, my friends. And Blanch's wellness, her break from from from the present, her break from reality within the play is symbolized. So if we think about symbolic realism is symbolized through the vars suviana a pula music that was presumably playing or was playing according to her and the stage directions on the night that Allen shot himself. So when Blanch loses it, when she has a really tough time, this music is played, revealing to us what we understand now in response to wellness issues as PTSD. Right? Blanch is really suffering from a lot of trauma. Um, at the end of the stage directions for scene, Mitch comes around the corner in his workclo, blue denim shirt and pants. He's unshaven. He climbs the steps to the door and rings.
Blanch has been drinking all day. Mitch missed the birthday party. He missed the date. How would you guys feel if um how would you guys feel if if if someone missed uh a birthday date, someone you'd been dating for roughly four months, and then randomly shows up. This show up scene is going to show us the complicated gendered spaces of the time and Williams critique of these gendered spaces as well. Blanch will out her past and the the complicated nature of her own psychology through this play. Williams asks us to think about how fragile human psychology is and how complicated and and sensitive we become when we do go through something that um shakes us up in some way. Are you ready, Morgan? >> Yeah. >> And and we'll we'll probably stop. I'll read some of it and then we'll stop before the flower vendor shows up. So, right before the end, maybe. And then I'll I'll talk about that and then because I need more readers, which I don't have. And then we can um move forward.
"Who is it?"
"Please."
"Me. Mitch."
The pulcat tune stops. Mitch. Just a minute. She rushes about frantically, hiding the bottle in her closet. So note, my friends, we do have uses of closets of closeted spaces and things hidden. Crouching at the mirror and dabbing her face with cologne and powder. She's so excited that her breath is audible as she dashes about. At last, she rushes to the door in the kitchen and lets him in.
"Mitch, you know I really shouldn't have let you in after the treatment I received from you this evening. So utterly unavalier. But hello, beautiful." She offers him her lips. He ignores it and pushes past her into the flat. She looks fearfully after him as he stalks into the bedroom.
"Mama, what a cold shoulder and such such uncou shave. the unforgivable insult to a lady. But I forgive you. I forgive you because it's such a relief to see you. You stop that poker music in my head. Have you ever had anything caught in your head? No, of course you haven't. You dumb angel puss. You You never have anything awful caught in your head."
So, she's talking to him, but she's having this conversation with herself. He stares at her while the while she follows him while she talks. It is obvious that she has had a few drinks on the way that he has had a few drinks on the way over.
>> "Do we have to have that fan on?"
>> "No,"
>> "I don't like fans."
>> "Then let's turn it off, honey. I'm not partial to him." She presses the switch and the fan nods slowly off. She clears her throat as Mitch plumps himself down on the bed and in the bedroom as the lights and lights a cigarette.
So, here we have dramatic irony. It's 105 degrees in New Orleans at this point in Fahrenheit/ American. Has anyone been to New Orleans? No one's going to answer today. It's hot. How could you not be partial to fans before air conditioning? There's a dramatic irony there. The heat is rising. Williams is doing this to us through the play and through this stage direction.
>> "Um, I don't know. I don't know what there is to drink. I haven't investigated."
>> "I don't want Stan's liquor."
>> "It isn't stands. Everything here is in stands. Something's something's on the premise. I actually mine. How's your mama? Is your mother well?"
>> "Why?"
>> "Something's the matter tonight. But never mind. I won't cross-examine the witness. I'll just" She touches her forehead vaguely.
The PA tune starts up again. "Pretend I don't notice anything different about you. Oh. Whoa. That music again."
>> "What music?"
>> "The Vuviana. The poker they were playing. When Alan, wait." A distant revolver shot is heard. Blanch seems relieved. "Oh, now then the shot. It always stops after that."
So, we've got two shots happening, right? The shot of alcohol she takes throughout the play, the shot that killed Allan, and the way it's used here. The PA music dies out again.
>> "Yes, now it's stopped."
>> "Are you box out of your mind?"
>> "I'll go and see what I can find in the way of" She crosses into the closet, pretending to search for the bottle. "Oh, by the way, excuse me for not being dressed." She's in a house coat at this point, my friends. "But I've practically given up on you. Had you forgotten your invitation to supper?"
>> "I wasn't going to see you anymore."
>> "Wait a minute. I can hear what you're saying. And you've talked so little that when you do say something, I don't want to miss a single syllable of it. What I am What I am looking around here for. What am I looking around here for? Yeah. Oh, yes. Yep. Oh, we've had so much excitement around here this evening that I am boxed out of my mind." She pretends suddenly to find a bottle.
He draws his foot up on the bed and stares at her contemptuously. "Here's something. H southern comfort. What is that, I wonder?"
>> "If you don't know, it must belong to Stan."
>> "Take your foot off the bed. It has a light cover on it. Of course, you boys don't notice things like that. I I I've done I've done so much with the place since I've been here."
>> "I bet you have."
>> "You saw it before I came. Look at it. Now this room is almost dying. I I want to keep it that way. I wonder if this stuff ought to be mixed with something sweet. So sweet. It's terribly terribly sweet. Why? It's a leo, I believe. Yes, that's what it is. A leure."
>> Mitch grunts. "I I I'm afraid you won't like it, but but but try it and maybe you will."
>> "I told you already. I don't want none of his liquor, and I mean it. You ought to lay off his liquor. He says you've been lapping it up all summer like a wild cat."
>> "What a fantastic statement. Fantastic of him to say it. Fantastic for you to repeat it. I don't want to descend to the level of such cheap accusations to answer them even."
>> "It's in your mind. I see something in your eyes."
>> "It's dark in here."
>> "I like it dark. The dark is comforting to me."
>> "I don't think I ever seen you in the light. That's a fact."
>> "Is it?"
>> "I've never seen you in the afternoon."
>> "Whose fault is that?"
>> "You never want to go out in the afternoon."
>> "Well, Mitch, you're at the plant at the plant in the afternoon."
>> "Not Sunday afternoon. I've asked you to go out with me sometimes on Sundays, but you always make an excuse. You never want to go out till after 6 and then it's always some place that's not lighten lighten lighted much."
Pause. So, no one's going to answer and it's okay. But what famous playwright has a play where light and dark is used repeatedly? In this play, light and dark are used to reveal the differences between truth and lies and also reality and illusion. This kind of mimesis in a way is borrowed from Shakespeare who uses light and dark and alello to amplify the racialized places within the play. So we do have authors, writers, creators having conversations with one another through their works. Um, okay. So it's it's my turn now. There is some obscure meaning in this. But in this, but I failed to catch it.
>> "What it means is I've never had a real good look at you, Blanch. Let's turn the light on here."
>> "Light? What light? What for?"
>> "This one with the paper thing on it." He tears the paper lantern off the light bulb. She shuddters a frightened gasp. "What? What did you do that for?"
>> "So that I can take a look at you. Good and plain. Of course, you don't really mean to be insulting."
>> "No, just realistic."
>> "I don't want realism. I want magic. Yes. Yes. Magic. I try to give people that I misrepresent things to them. I I don't I don't tell truth. I tell what ought to be truth. And if that is sinful, then let me be damned for it. Don't Don't turn on the light."
Mitch crosses to the switch. He turns the light on and stares at her. She cries out and covers her face. He turns the light off again. Pause.
So, we've got our our dramatic a rising drama here. We have in part a little bit of dramatic irony as the light shedding the truth on the situation should solve a problem, but it actually doesn't. Right? It it it Blanch is too far gone and her her obstacles are far too complicated for just a little light to shine on the situation and fix it. Go ahead.
>> "I don't mind you being older than what I thought, but all the rest of it. Christ, that pitch about your ideals being so old-fashioned and all the malarkey that you dished out all summer. Oh, I knew you weren't 16 anymore, but I was a fool enough to believe he was straight."
>> "Who told you I wasn't straight? My loving brother-in-law. And you believed him?"
>> "I called him a liar at first, and then I checked on the story. First, I asked our supply man who travels through lore. And then I talked directly over long distance to this merchant."
>> "And who is this merchant?"
>> "Kyifa."
>> "Ah, the merchant Kyber of Laurel. I know the man. He whistled at me. I put him in his place. So now for revenge, he makes up stories about me."
>> "Three people, Kai, Fabber, Stanley, and Shaw. Swear to them."
>> "Ruba dubdub. Three men in a tub. And such a filthy tub."
>> "Didn't you stay at a hotel called Flamingo?"
>> "Flamingo? No. Tarantula was the name of it. I stayed at a hotel called the Tarantula Arms. tarantula."
The stage direction before Mitch's line is stupidly, so Williams really makes sure we understand what's going on. Yes, a big spider. That's why I brought my victims. She pours herself another drink. "Yes, I I I had many intimacies with strangers after the death of Alan. Intimacies with strangers was all I seemed to be able to fill my empty heart with. I think it was panic. I think it was panic. just panic that had that that drove me from one to another, hunting for some kind of protection here and there in the most unlikely of places, even even at last in a 17-year-old boy. But somebody wrote the superintendent about it. This this woman is morally unfit for her position." She throws back her head with compulsive sobbing laughter. Then she repeats this statement, gasps, and drinks. "True, yes, I suppose. Unfit somehow. Anyway, so I came here. There was nowhere else I could go. I was played out. You know what played out is? My youth was suddenly gone up the water spout. And I met you. You said you needed somebody. Well, I needed somebody too. I thank God for you because you seem to be gentle and cleft in the rock of the world that I could hide in. But I guess I was asking hoping too much. Stanley and Shaw tied an old tin can to the tail of a kite."
There is pause. Mitch stares at her dumbly.
>> "You lied to me, Blanch."
>> "Don't say I lied to you."
>> "Lies, lies inside and out. All lies."
>> "Never inside. I didn't lie in my heart."
A vendor comes around the corner. She's a blind Mexican woman in a dark shaw carrying a bunch carrying bunches of um goddy tin flowers. um that are in display at funerals and other festive occasions. She's calling fairly audibly. Her figure is only faintly visible outside the building. "Flores. Flores. Paras Muertos. Flores. Flores." And as Blanch and Mitch continue, this same pretty anonymous Mexican vendor keeps calling "Flores. Flores Paris Mutos." She keeps trying to say, "Do you need flowers for the dead?" So, we ask ourselves as an audience, what is dying here or what is dead? And Blanch goes on to explain everything that's dead as she does start in scene one. Her mother, her life, her job, everything lost, everything dead until finally at the end of the scene, um Blanch, maybe we could go back to that, Morgan, if you're okay. It'll be Blanch's line. Uh, what do you want? Do you have that line? We could read the last few lines.
>> "Yes, I do."
>> "Okay. What do you want?"
>> "What I've been missing all summer."
>> "Then marry me, Mitch."
>> "I don't think I want to marry you anymore."
>> "No,"
>> "You're not clean enough to bring in the house with my mother."
>> "Go away then." He stares at her. "Get out of here quick before I start screaming. F." Her throat is tightening with hysteria. "Get out of here quick before I start screaming. F." He is still remaining. She suddenly rushes to the window with its pale blue square off of the soft summer light and cries wildly, "Fa!" And Mitch finally leaves.
Normally I do a more dramatic version of the fire, but but my my voice is kind of going from just talking the whole class. Blanch's truth is outed. We know that that that Allan is dead. We know this already. Uh her PTSD is confirmed. We're told that she definitely lives in sorry, she worked as some kind of escort. Definitively, we don't know that she definitely has sexual compulsion problems. She lets us know in between the Mexican vendor offering flowers for the dead. She has a flashback where she's wondering uh remembering all these people, these these men from the nearby military camp showing up and calling to her and her mother being too deaf to hear them and she sneaks out the window. So, it's implied that that she um is intimate with them. There's all kinds of complications happening.
And in scene 10, which is the hardest scene, and I never read it when we teach, Stanley and Blanch have it out. And the implied ending of this scene is there with menacing directives from the the scene air from the scene descriptors and the synography of of menace figures almost dancing and it's uh implied that Stanley assaults her. Scene 11 is the resolution. What can the play do during this period of time? Williams critiques psychology. He critiques the treatment of people who are suffering. And Blanch is carded off to an asylum. She's removed. American society at this point in time did not have place for someone suffering. And it gets audiences from that point forward all the way to now to sit back and realize that people who suffer don't choose to suffer. And as a result, we need better social systems in effect to make sure they're supported. Um, and Blanch functions almost as a fictive martyr of this. um created through Williams's sister Rose who who had no life after the part of her brain was removed.
Comments or question? I guess not. Do you guys have any questions? Is anyone brave enough to ask me anything? You don't have to be. Okay, Morgan, thank you for reading. Um, I'm going to pull up your midterm reading exam if that's okay and we'll have a look at it. And I will do a screen share as well. Sorry for the foundational reading exam. Forgive me, not the midterm one. It just came up a little late. So, um, as a result, it's later than foundation. So, I think our mid other midterm ones still will be kind of almost sort of midterm. So, I've got the exam open now and um I'm going to screen share with you all and we're going to go over the directives and please feel free to ask me questions if you can.
[Music] doesn't seem to be allowing me to. How many participants can share at the same time? Um, that said, give me one moment. Um, yeah, it seems to be correct, but I I'm having a little trouble getting the screen to share. I'm going to resume the recording so that people who aren't here have access to this information. Um, make sure that when you organize your work and you save it that you you save your documents on double so I could read it. That would mean if by going into um I don't think this one will let me do it, but you'll need to go into paragraphing and set your spacing on double. You may save your document as a word or a PDF. PDF is used if you're using Mac. If you save um something as pages, I can't open it. So, make sure that you save your work accordingly. Have your four paragraphs, one for each response. and make sure that each paragraph starts with a te clear topic sentence and works with the text in question to create a tangible response. So um as we're working with sha with with um street car think about how what you might pull from the play to do that. If you're working with a screening of a play, which you can, this is a theater class, of course, you can do a misan and you could describe the scene where it happens, but you still might want the script out. So, especially if you're paying attention to wording, you'll be able to get there. Make sure each response starts with a topic. We'll we'll animate this in a bit. Um, and from there, you can develop your idea clearly. for example. So, as I'm scrolling down, Morgan, are you able to see the questions now?
>> Yes, I am.
>> Okay, great. So, let's go over all the questions and make sure everything is okay. One, I want the importance of being earnest to be understood as satire. We spoke a lot about social convention, so we need to understand it as a satire to see how it works. Um, think about the play in a in the ways that it challenges social convention. It's not an inscription of social convention. So if your topic sentence is um the importance of being earnest reveals uh Wild's position on endorsing the social convention of the time that's a misread and you could choose one of these areas. For example, the importance of being earnest uses satire to critique social convention and sexuality. You might open that up. The character of Alternon seemingly has a mass sexuality and through his mass sexuality challenges or I'd use another word than challenges uh questions the norms of the time. The consistent use of the word bunbury raises an eyebrow as it's not really a word but could be understood as Altron's coding of his own non-normative sexual practices and then you would develop that. Does that make sense to everyone who's in the room? Can you guys thumbs up or thumbs down or or just something so I know it makes sense to you? Oh, great. Thanks, Danielle and Tasha. Okay, so you guys have that. Good. We'll we'll work. Thanks, Thomas. We'll work through all of them. Thank you guys so much. Um, keep pulling up the wrong document. There we go. Vimar Berlin. So, you have a lot of materials here. And another student had asked me this through through Outlook. Um, think about Vimar Berlin as as creating a space for sexual diversity. Look at the resource materials that that that historically understand um Vimar Berlin. What was different about Vimar Berlin? Think about the Hersheel Institute that we talked about. Think about the speak easy stage, the the advent of of of of the everyday stage of the kind of cozy kind of informal club that created the subculture that was a response for gender and sexual diversity during this time. Think about the women who passed in more masculine clothing from Marina from from Radcliffe Hall to Marina Dietrich. And um think about the sexuality they embodied as well with the documentary. There's a huge what was understood as safic which we we spoke about as well. This kind of sappic subculture which was different than just straight up lesbianism or what we might understand as as homosexuality/quer. It becomes a little more complicated than that. So this is your most historically based question and you really want to look at the shifts in the spaces of this stage. Two sets the foundation for three. We're working from mainstream stages to the kinds of stages we might have access to. Question three, how does cabaret represent the last moments of why Marlin? So this is nice and open and think about gender and sexual progressiveness in the early 20th century articulated through the play itself. The fourth question asks you to think about the social issues in street car and symbolic realism. What we did today? Um, how does street car address these these issues? mental health, addiction, domestic violence, new workingclass, complicated sexuality, gender, misogyny. It goes on for days, right? The list goes on for forever. And um Thomas, I'm coming back to you and asks for a lot. Yes, Thomas, please.
>> Uh can you hear me?
>> I I can. Thank you.
>> Yeah. Awesome. Um, so I just had a question uh because in the prompt it was saying that we have to use quotes or like for each paragraphs or at least quotes the text but for question two is it referring to cabaret or do we quote an article because it doesn't refer specifically to a text itself.
>> You'd be you'd be um paraphrasing the the the the resource material and for cabaret too you can paraphrase as well. So if you
>> we don't have to directly quote.
>> No, as long as you paraphrase is clear, right?
>> If the paraphrase isn't clear, then I could get lost. So make sure you paraphrase accordingly.
>> Okay. Thank you.
>> No problem. Very good question. Um so the foundational exam creates the foundation of the course. It asks you to think about social convention, subculture, sexuality, cabaret, liberlesque, and social issues. Lots of them with street car. Do we have any more comments or questions? Um, back to you guys.
>> Anyone?
>> So, just that Hi, how are you?
>> Hi, Pasha. I'm okay. I'm hanging in there.
>> I know. Sorry. Rough go, right?
>> Yes. Um, so for for when we're doing these, are you looking more for a sort of academic um approach or do you looking for really our own opinions on how we're synthesizing the information? Because some professors like you to be super academic, some people just want it to be more of like how you uh digested the information for how to
>> I'm going to suggest because this is your theater history class that we do want you to be academic to a certain extent, but many of you are working in the arts, right? Many of you are creators andor artists. So you need to be able to have skills that shine through that as well. So having a more aesthetic approach to the material where the aesthetics are evaluated is also totally fine. In response to reader response, try and ground it because all of these texts are um they're historical. So if you dehistoricize the text, you could lose track of the answer and end up going off topic, which I don't think you would. Okay, perfect. I just wanted to make sure because um I think the word aesthetic is is what I was looking for and I appreciate that because that helps me give a direction and how I want to respond and just in case anybody else because in another class we spent a lot of time uh talking about we're something we're going to see but he doesn't want it to be academic more just more of us how we see the art and how we feel this more sensatory but this is more of a balance. So thank you for that distinction. I I don't think the questions will allow the sensory response, but if you're really good at that, you could go for it as well, right? That that that that if you're being trained that you're able to look at a performance and have a sensory reaction ex I think this would work well with cabaret, right? especially um if you're looking at the sensory reaction to Bob Fosty's choreography or a sensory reaction to Alan Cummings's version of the MC, I think you could go into a very effective response from there.
>> Okay, that's what I was kind of thinking because it's one of the questions I'm really circling around. So, thank you for that. Appreciate it.
>> No problem. No problem. Had we been on campus today, I would have had more kind of workshopppy activities. But I mean, if if if the class kind of had had a presence on Zoom, I'm presuming campus must be a little um a little intense today. So, so, so it the more of you could ask me questions here, the easier it's going to be for you. Anyone else with questions?