Each time I launch a new semester and welcome new students to the Dramaturgy class at the University of Arizona, I feel a little bit like I'm boldy going where no one has gone before. Each new ensemble of dramaturgs has its unique structure--just like each play we read. Indeed each play has a bit of a rebirth--a metamorphoses--with each production, and with each ensemble's unique perspective.
I think Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa offers us plays that acknowledge that uniqueness in particular ways. In Rough Magic, Aguirre-Sacasa not only consciously toys with past dramatic structures, borrowing characters from classic texts, but gives us a central figure that we can easily champion in this class. Melanie Porter is a dramaturg.
So...as you asked Elinor Fuch's questions of Rough Magic, were your questions the same that Melanie was asking of her text(s), or were they different? What questions were raised for you as you explored the uncharted country of Rough Magic?
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When I began reading Rough Magic, I analyzed it the same way I have usually analyzed plays in the past. I started off by looking at the characters. Most often when I read a play, I look at the characters and try to understand who they are and how they think. As I do this, I branch out and analyze how they interact with other objects and why they do so. By analyzing the characters I figure out what their world truly is through their own perceptions. So, I was very surprised when I read this article by Elinor Fuch that was basically telling me to do the complete opposite of what I have always done.
By taking Elinor Fuch’s advice, I found her approach entirely more effective then mine. It opened up how I was looking at the play. It led me to ask more questions and thus, come to more answers. My biggest question was, “Do the people in this world actually believe in magic or not?” Many of the people seemed surprised by the concept of magic yet Linda is studying it as a Graduate student. By analyzing just the people first I had a hard time figuring this question out but by looking at the world of the play itself it helped give me a better understanding that people may believe but they try to rationalize and hide it away. Also, a question that I am still trying to figure out is “why would Melanie become a Dramaturg?” Her gift of being able to bring characters in stories to life scares her. So why would she choose a career that involves people trying to bring characters in stories to life on the stage? I still haven’t figured it out. But, I am glad that I learned about Elinor Fuch’s technique because it helped me understand the world of the play better and not just the people living in it. It almost made it seem more three dimensional.
Reading this play was rather enjoyable, and I didn't find myself asking any particular questions from the start. I tend to read plays twice when I am looking to analyze them; the first time for enjoyment, the second for a deeper understanding. After reading the play, I started to think first of the world of the play and how all these characters fit into it. Are there more people like Melanie, who can perform some kind of magic? Are we to believe that this is fairly common in the world of this play?
I also began to wonder about how the world quickly changes from "normal" to something of chaos. While our main focus is the set of characters given to us, I can't help but wonder what other people in this world are thinking. How does Chet's mother feel? What about the people who died or witnessed these fires? I then asked myself what the characters in the play must be thinking, and I noticed the way that all of them are connected...nothing is by accident.
The way Elinor Fuch asks us to question a play is similar to the way I questioned things, although maybe not in the logical order she sets out. I tend to find myself wondering about the things that we don't see or find out about because I think the extra knowledge really lends to the story.
In her article, she says that "in the world of the play there are no accidents...nothing in the play is without significance." I found this to be especially true of this play, and it really helped to follow it's structure and meaning.
I read Fuch's article after I had finished Rough Magic. I found myself adapting the theory of a "play planet" into a "play solar system," because this piece exists on two realms - Prospero's and Melanie's. They begin as separate entities, bouncing back and forth. They then merge, and eventually they swap places. Melanie's "home" became the fantasy world she only experienced through her books and magic, and her fantasy world became what used to be her reality.
Instead of questions, I found myself contemplating possibilities throughout this piece. While Melanie asked questions about the texts she utilized, I accepted them and the circumstances as another facet of a potential reality. What is stories truly exist on another plane? If authors in this realm write about those stories, how do they get their inspiration? And the authors sometimes get the stories wrong, as seen with Shakespeare's The Tempest within Rough Magic. All of the expectations we had of the characters within the Tempest were thrown out the window and discarded.
But, the biggest contemplation I had while reading this play was this: What if people around you, people you know, have escaped or been released from plays? When you read a play and think "Oh, so and so is ridiculously similar to this guy..." What if he IS him? What if he's an actor that ends up being cast as himself in the play that he's been released from?
****Made an awful mistake that I caught after I had posted! Whoops. Fixed now!
When I began reading Rough Magic, I honestly wasn't looking to analyze. After reading and finding myself mildly amused, I began to think about the text itself. In her article, Elinor Fuchs suggested techniques to visualize and help the “world” of the play itself. Using these, I found myself able to analyze Rough Magic more efficiently and effectively.
The play revolves around Melanie, a magical dramaturg who has the ability to pull things out of plays. "What is the significance of this?" I asked myself. Perhaps it is a loose connection (but a connection just the same), but a real-life dramaturg has the ability to "pull out" information from a play, to better understand and/or utilize it.
The play could possibly be interpreted as a "modernized version of Tempest", as it draws much of its plot from the characters of Tempest itself. However, I would submit that Rough Magic is not a modernized Tempest, but instead a commentary on scripts and plays in general. There is a quote in Rough Magic, in which a character proclaims “The magic is in the words.” This relates to Rough Magic (as well as theatre as a whole), and is personified through Melanie the dramaturg’s magical ability. The quote exemplifies the need to be able to sift through the murky waters of a script and pan out the golden nuggets (whatever they may be) existing within a play.
Fuchs challenges us to “be someone who is aroused to meaning,” for within a play’s many confusing layers and complex characters, “the puzzles may hold the key.” It is my hope that I will be able to be that someone who is aroused to meaning. I hope that I, too, can discover for myself the “magic in the words” for future scripts.
I read this play initially before reading the Fuch's article (intentionally) so that I could glean from it my own enjoyment and feelings, before analyzing it through the lens of the given article. I found the play the be exciting, magical; full of intrigue and history. It read to me as a very original idea, somewhat a la The Pagemaster, that would otherwise be fun to stage and embraced dramatic history in an engaging way. After reading the Fuch's article however, and skimming over the whole play again, the play, and the character of Melanie especially revealed themselves to be much more three dimensional.
The relationship between the play and the article that grabbed me the most was Fuch's idea of how different dramatic texts relate to each other, and in this play, quite literally. We are asked by Fuch's to consider the world of other plays and their sphere of influence as it were, when considering our own. What I thought was so interesting about this is that in Rough Magic, Melanie's magic is almost more her understanding of the relationships between texts than anything else. It is only by understanding Coriolanus and Caius Marcus as a character and a text that there is any relevance to his aid to her cause, and the need to summon him. Her magic brings these characters to life, but as mentioned with her Romeo situation, she doesn't garner any real control of them by default. Her magic is a useless parlor trick in this case without the ability to really dig into these characters, manipulate their fears and desires, and see how they all fit together in the world of the text, and the world at large.
Fuchs also begs the reader to consider what imprint the dramatic text leaves on you as the reader. What do you bring to the play, and what, in return, does it bring to you? This was a really fascinating lens to re-examine the play through. Melanie cavorts among her more docile living characters, even seeking protection in their mythical qualities, almost the way one takes refuge in imaginary friends, in her case, based from literature. I found myself asking how literally I was to interpret the fever dream of this play. Given the aspects of the heat wave described, and the carte blanche attitude most of the characters seem to have towards wildly fantastical magic, I wondered a lot if the play could be some kind of personal delusion by someone whose head is filled with centuries of lives of characters. With that idea, could all of these characters be imaginary to Melanie? If so, has she not then super-imprinted them on her life in the way she chose to interpret their characteristics and lives when she read and analyzed them? If these characters are real, and seem to exist at Melanie's beck and call for greater or less favor, is their station based at all on her interpretations of them as characters, or are they identities all their own, once corporeal?
After pondering all of these ideas, I found a strange solace in the idea that nothing in the world of the dramatic text is a mistake. That one idea alone really provided a whole new lens and focus through which to interpret and regard the words and actions of dramatic characters, and the world of the play [read: all plays] at large. I don't know how much insight it necessarily gives, but it creates this sense of manifest destiny within each work. This solidified idea, like in mythology, that all that happens has happened because it was always going to happen. It takes a lot of the "what if?"s out for me, and replaces them instead with "how come?"s.
I enjoyed Rough Magic because it gave a new perspective to how I look at Shakespearean plays and the role of language in plays. Before reading Elinor Fuch’s article thought I had a pretty good understanding of how to analyze a play, however after reading the article I realized how many aspects of analysis I had been ignoring. By addressing the questions that Elinor Fuch raises I was able to get a deeper understanding of the play that I would have otherwise missed. For example, after taking a closer look at how time passes in the world of the play I realized that Rough Magic mimics a Shakespeare play in the sense that everything happens in the span of one day.
Based on the article I asked myself why would the playwright chose to set the play in New York City. I quickly realized where else would characters taken out of plays (like the furies) be able to blend in without attracting too much attention? Because of the article I began took a closer look at the language. Upon closer analysis I began to wonder why once a character comes out of the play they speak modern English instead of the language that was spoken in their play. Maybe it is part of the magic or maybe it was a decision by the playwright to make it easier for the audience to understand.
Aguirre-Sacasa’s Rough Magic offers us a very unique look at both dramaturgy and the world of Shakespeare’s plays. Because of this unique look, we are easily able to apply the questions and thoughts that EF poses. We are actually creating a new world within which we can function, live, and learn. This world, much like our own, features Melanie Porter as its central figure. She, with the power to summon characters from texts past, brings warriors, vicious drag queens, and others to help fight the evil that is a real-world Prospero.
This ability changes the world from what we once perceived as similar to our own—into something rather unrecognizable. It is a place where anything is possible. (I feel comfortable saying that anything is possible in Melanie’s world for the sole reason that anything is possible in the works of literature—up to the author’s discretion.) This makes for a really interesting portrayal of reality and of classic text.
To answer the posted question, however, I think that the questions Melanie was asking of her texts are quite similar to the questions which EF poses: To open the door to a text, unlocking the secrets that lie within. EF requests that we formulate an entirely new planet to house the characters, events, and lives of a play—leaving behind all preconceived notions. Melanie essentially does the same thing when she opens the door to these other worlds—giving up all notions of what these characters and people could actually be.
To dissent against the similarities between Melanie and EF, however, is equally as plausible. EF notes that characters and events in a play know only what is written. They are not capable of rational or individual thought or action—only what the author intended them to do. Melanie, however, brings these characters out of their respective plays and gives them the freedom to roam around and live their own lives—something impossible, according to the rules of EF’s small planet.
As an avid fan of "The Tempest", X-Men, and the technique of post-modernism, I was quite curious to see how Mr. Aguirre-Sacasa blended the magic of Shakespeare with his comic book genre. The structure of the play itself whirled about my analytical mind and forced me to regress back to my awkard middle-school adolescence where my attention was intrigued by nonsensical little boxes of action and heroism. The lack of transitions that were common in the world of the X-Men introduced the reader to a concept of understanding the story individually one piece at a time. For "Rough Magic" a curveball is thrown at as from the beginning with the introduction of this alternate Prospero, and now the world of the play becomes an old-fashion vase you'd find collecting dust on your grandmother's mantel...if it shattered, it'd still take time to re-configure the familiar picture that is embedded in your mind. I think Mr. Aguirre-Sacasa purposefully makes the staging of the play unorthodox, for its a sure-fire method of getting the audience to keep asking questions.
A question that plagued me through the entirety of reading this play is 'what does the author want us to understand about the concept of fate and determinism?' It is the destiny of Melanie, Chet, and Caliban to rescue the world from Prospero's dark magic, but in a society that makes us believe that we have the power and freedom to do whatever we choose (as long as we "believe in ourselves") how do these characters manage to accept their fates. The obligation to a higher cause is something Melanie feels trapped by, and no form of political correctness can rescue her from her duty. Like the mutated X-Men, Melanie suffers the burden of saving a society she feels distanced from herself. But is this what the author is saying? Probably only one of Prospero's spells can unlock this groovy mystery.
Perhaps the biggest tip of advice Elinor Fuch granted me was to never begin constructing the world of the play through its characters. It seems so obvious to me now, but before I would begin my interpretations through the text and dialouge. But as Fuch suggests, beginning with the characters is like staring at the world too closely. The hard part is detaching one's eyes from the text, and pushing the characters back far enough to see the conditions that actually make them characters to begin with.
I read this text as i always do, in the mindset first as a scenic designer then as what it would be like to be an audience member. the overall arching questions i had were mainly, 'how would this even happen?' and 'should i know more about these characters already?'. I was worried reading these things that even though I have heard of the plays Roberto mentions I do not know enough about them to fully get the scope of what he wants me to understand, or I wont understand the full impact they are suppose to have.
When reading the article by Elinor Fuch I was thinking how good this made me feel knowing how easy it really was to breakdown a script to help answer the questions underneath. I am one of those people that get entirely too over whelmed just from trying to read the script. she helped me to understand that breaking it down in this certain way can definitely make a difference. just realizing that everything is there for a reason, or even anything that is NOT there is also for a reason.
Before reading the article by Fuch, I asked myself the question, what was it about this play that made me understand what was going on. It may sound weird being a theatre major and all, but I rarely ever understand plays the first (and sometimes second, third, and fouth) time i read them. But this play was different.
But because I was actually able to understand what was going on, it gave me the opportunity to use some of Fuch's approaches in asking questions. I did this while reading the script a second time, and it made things even clearer. Asking questions, even when you don't understand anything that is going on, is sometimes the only way to figure it out.
I really enjoyed the character leap that Rough Magic took when placing characters from the Tempest into a modern America. Although we know basic places of New York, we were placed in another world. EF’s article on making a play into its own small planet really tied in with what Rough Magic was about. Aguirre-Sacasa really took a chance on if Shakespeare based his characters off real people what would they be like, and how similar they would be to what Shakespeare wrote about them. I liked how Caliban is more human in Rough Magic but as he turns into a monster Shakespeare’s Caliban begins to show. This melding of different worlds brings a new kind of order and laws of nature for this production.
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