Let's Read Play Wrap-Up

In November last year Fanda decided to host the Let’s Read Plays challenge. I review at least one live theatre show each week at Stage Write Indy and have been doing so for 8 years. So reading more plays is always high on my list. I think that plays are meant to be seen, but reading them can give you more time to process the text and can give each play more depth.

Fanda selected categories/authors for each month from November 2012 to October 2013. I stuck with the challenge and made it through all 12 of my chosen plays (see all review links below). I read a Greek tragedy, an American classic, a Russian play, a witty piece from Wilde and a lot of Shakespeare.

SHAKESPEARE

Over the years I’ve focused a lot on Shakespeare’s work. I took a class solely devoted to his plays in college. I’ve seen live performances at the Globe Theatre in London and attend an outdoor Shakespeare theatre weekend every year in Wisconsin. I love him more than any other playwright I’ve read. I’ve read all of his major plays, but I wanted to use this challenge to dive into his lesser-known works. I can’t say that these plays are new favorites, they’re called problem plays for a reason, but I’m glad I read them. I think seeing the whole body of his work helps me understand his development as a writer. He uses many of the same themes and devices in these early plays that he does in his more successful plays later on.

CHALLENGE THEME

I realized about halfway through the challenge that many of the plays I read focused on loneliness and rejection in some way. Troilus and Cressida deals with betrayal in love, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is about Brick and Maggie’s mutual loneliness, the three sisters in Chekhov’s play are all lonely in their own way. Oresteia deals with revenge and betrayal. The Iceman Cometh is about loneliness and the disillusionment of the American dream, Coriolanus is about being rejected by the people who once embraced you. I think it’s fascinating that I unintentionally had a theme throughout the challenge.

MEMORABLE CHARACTERS

There are quite a few characters that will stay with me for a long time, but I think Maggie from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is the one who comes immediately to mind. I’ve never encountered a character that ached so badly to be loved. I felt myself understanding that desire, but also hurting for her because she couldn’t make the man she loved reciprocate her feelings in the way she needed.   

Here are the plays I read:

Nov '12 Shakespeare's Tragedy: Troilus and Cressida

Dec '12 Shakespeare's Comedy: Love's Labour's Lost

Jan '13 freebie: The Iceman Cometh by Eugene O'Neill

Feb '13 Shakespeare's History: Henry V

Mar '13 Greek: Oresteia by Aeschylus 

Apr '13 Shakespeare's Tragedy: Coriolanus

May '13 Shakespeare's Comedy: Two Gentlemen of Verona

Jun '13 Oscar Wilde: The Importance of Being Earnest

Jul '13 Other author: Cat on a Hot Tin Roof by Tennessee Williams

Aug '13 Shakespeare's Comedy: Comedy of Errors

Sep '13 freebie: Three Sisters by Anton Chekhov

Oct '13 Shakespeare's Tragedy: Cymbeline

  

A huge thanks to Fanda and Ngidam for hosting the Let’s Read Plays yearlong event!

Top Ten Books I've Read So Far In 2013

June 25: Top Ten Books I've Read So Far In 2013:

This week's Top Ten from The Broke and the Bookish asks for the Top Ten Books I've Read So Far In 2013. These are the ones that came to mind. Who knows what the rest of 2013 will hold!

1) Re-Reads: The Great Gatsby, Persuasion, and Little Women

2) Where'd You Go, Bernadette

3) Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

4) Cold Sassy Tree

5) The Night Circus

6) Mythology

7) Song of Achilles

8) State of Wonder

9) Tell the Wolves I’m Home

10) The Green Mile

Painting is "The Reader" by Buffalo Bonker

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

by Tennessee Williams

★★★★★

A southern family gathers to celebrate its patriarch Big Daddy’s birthday. His two sons are as different as can be. The elder, Gooper, is married to a nauseating woman and has five obnoxious kids with another on the way. The younger, Brick, is an alcoholic struggling with a horrible depression. His wife Maggie is beautiful, but is cracking under the strain of trying to hold her marriage together. Their complicated relationship seems irrevocably broken, though we don’t know why at first.

The play won the Pulitzer Prize for its deft portrayal of a family full of secrets. Contempt, greed, adultery, etc. the story is ripe with issues. Williams has a wonderful talented for capturing the fissure in relationships and people’s psyches. Brick is horrible to Maggie, talking to her with utter contempt. His treatment of his wife is a learned behavior. His father, Big Daddy, has treated his own wife with disdain for forty years. In his own words…

“All I ask of that woman is that she leave me alone, but she can’t admit to herself that she makes me sick.”

Maggie the cat’s loneliness is palpable. I’ve never encountered a character so isolated and trapped in her own life. Her husband Brick is so broken, whether it’s because of his feelings for his dead friend Skipper or his guilt over Skipper’s death or both. We know that Skipper loved Brick, but we don’t know whether Brick felt the same, only that he was so bothered by Skipper’s confession that he hung up on him.

BOTTOM LINE: The play is an enthralling portrait of loneliness. You can't look away.

**The edition I read had two versions of the third act. The first was the ending as Williams originally imagined it. The second was a rewrite that Elia Kazan encouraged Williams to do. Both are interesting, the major change is the absence or presence of Big Daddy.

 “Living with someone you love can be lonelier – than living entirely alone! – if the one that y’ love doesn’t love you.”

The 1958 film version makes a few major changes, notably the absence of any reference to homosexuality. It completely leaves out the bits about the former owners of the plantation. It makes Brick and Skipper’s relationship into a dependant friendship, but never touches on the issue of homosexuality. It also leaves us with a much more hopeful ending than the play does. It stars Paul Newman and Elizabeth Taylor; she is particularly mesmerizing as Maggie.