How I Learned to Drive

1. 1. At what point in Li’l Bit’s life do you think Uncle Peck started to desire her sexually? Do you think he desired her before she was a pre-teen?

2. Li’l Bit’s family frequently talks and jokes about sex. What influence do you think this had on Li’l Bit allowing Uncle Peck to have a relationship with her?

3. What do you think would have happened to Li’l Bit and Uncle Peck if she had admitted to having feelings for him in the hotel room?

4. When Li’l Bit is 11 and wants to go to the beach with Uncle Peck, her mother refuses. She eventually lets her go but tells Li’l Bit that if anything happens she’s going to hold Li’l Bit responsible. How do you think this affected Li’l Bit as her relationship with Uncle Peck progressed? Do you think she felt responsible for his actions?

5. After losing contact with Li’l Bit, Uncle Peck becomes an alcoholic again and divorces Aunt Mary. Even though they are divorced she continues to bring him food. Why do you think this is? Do you think she knew about his relationship with Li’l Bit?

6. The character of Li’l Bit changes ages frequently throughout the play. How would you deal with this in casting?

7. If you were staging this production, how would you stage the scenes with the car?

8. Do you think Uncle Peck genuinely loved and cared for Li’l Bit, or was he just trying to manipulate her sexually? How do you think Uncle Peck’s story about fishing relates to this?

“How I Learned to Drive” was written by American playwright Paula Vogel and premiered off Broadway in February on 1997 at the Vineyard Theater. The play received the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 1998. It also won the Lortel, Drama Desk, Outer Critics Circle, the New York Drama Critics Awards for Best Play, and an OBIE. Vogel was born in Washington D.C. in 1951 and is a graduate of Cornell University. She is married to Brown University professor Anne Fausto-Sterling and now directs the MFA playwriting program at Brown. She has written many notable plays including “The Baltimore Waltz”, “Hot ‘N Throbbing”, and “The Oldest Profession”. Her writing tends to deal with sensitive, often sexual issues. She has said the she only deals with issues that have directly affected her life in some way, such as her brother’s death from AIDS in 1988. She often uses the emotions and situations of her plays to create a character. Vogel uses many theatrical devices in her writing such as dream sequences and addressing the audience directly. She wants each piece to have a distinct texture.

Hamletmachine

by Heiner Müller

About the Author

Heiner Müller was born on January 9, 1929 in Saxony, (East) Germany. His father was taken by the Nazis when Müller was only four years old. He was part of the Hitler Youth. In 1947 he joined the Socialist Unity Party of Germany. Müller was thought to be the most important postdramatic writer/poet/essayist/dramatist/director since Brecht. In 1992 he joined the directorate of the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm, Brecht's former company and before his death in Berlin on December 30, 1995, he was the sole artistic director.

About the play

Hamletmachine, or Die Hamletmaschine, was completed in 1977 and had its world premiere in 1979 at the Theatre Gerard Philipe in Saint Denis, France. It is loosely based on William Shakespeare's Hamlet. Müller found inspiration in it while translating Shakespeare's Hamlet for a production by Benno Besson in East Berlin. He condensed the 200 page play into 8 pages which he called "the shrunken head of the Hamlet tragedy." Also, it's been performed as a radio drama, set to music, and released on CD.

Questions

1. Why would Müller write some of the lines (the ones with asterisks) in English instead of keeping the whole text in German?

2. For those of you who are stage savvy, what would your set design consist of?

3. In scene four, the actor who plays Hamlet says, "The set is a monument. It presents a man who made history, enlarge a hundred times." Who do you think the man who made history is?

4. According to Müller, "The main character here could rather be Ophelia than Hamlet. I wouldn't consider this a disadvantage... it was my intention to make Ophelia a character of equal importance. That could become an interesting aspect in the U.S." Do you feel that Ophelia is more of a main character than Hamlet? Do you think she should be?

5. Why does Hamlet dress in Ophelia's clothes in the third scene, and why does he want to be a woman?

6. How does this Hamlet compare to the Shakespeare's Hamlet? Are they anything alike?

7. In your opinion, who is more Brechtian: Müller or Brecht himself?

Dog Sees God: Confessions of a Teenage Blockhead

Bert V. Royal

-Moved to NYC at age 21 with no college degree.

-Worked his way into Theatre working for a casting office.

-Five years later left casting to begin writing.

-Wrote a few unsuccessful scripts but his latest "Dogs Sees God" was hit.

-Recently wrote "Easy A" for Paramount", which he boast to have written all but the final ten pages in five days

"Dog Sees God"

-First read through at the Barrow Street Theatre in May of 2004

- World Premier at SoHo Playhouse in the 2004 New York International Fringe Festival

-Another Reading in May of 2005, at the Westside Theatre

-Off-Broadway premiere at the Century Center for the Performing Arts, opening December 15, 2005

1. The play was loosely based off of the well-known cartoon "Peanuts". I was unaware of this until after I had finished reading the play and began research. After reading more into this it was very obvious and I was a little shocked at how I missed the connection. Did anyone catch this and if so did it make the play an easier read having some context of the characters backgrounds?

2. In an interview prior to the opening Off-Broadway Bert V. Royal says “Ultimately, the play is about your creator and the life that you’ve led in your creator’s eyes. It becomes very much about looking outside your world.” There are many themes in the play that many of us currently deal with or have dealt with before. What did the play say to you? What message did you take away from it?

3. Do you think that Matt is gay and has feelings for CB?

4. What was your reaction to how the play was written in short stories and the continuos jumping?

5. How would one stage this? With the constant jumping around, I feel it would need to be a somewhat subjective set, and done with lots of projections. What's your initial thoughts on the staging, set, and lighting for the show?

6. Knowing that the show is based off the characters from "Peanuts", how obvious would you want to make the costuming? the production in general? Would it be something that as a designer/director you want to highlight? or attempt to make the production its own and let the script portray the characters as such?

7. What was your reaction to the CB throwing himself on Beethoven? Do you think he is actually gay or really just attempting to try something new?

Betrayal

Harold Pinter was born on October 10, 1930 and died on December 24, 2008. He was an English director, actor, screenwriter, political activist, and last but not least, playwright. In the span of his career he produced twenty-nine original plays, twenty-seven screenplays, and many other forms of literature. His best-known plays are The Birthday Party, The Caretaker, The Homecoming, and Betrayal. All four of these plays were adapted to film. In the 1980s his work became more political. His interest in politics was very public. He spoke out particularly about the abuse of state power around the world and was highly criticized for his left-wing political activism. Even so, he received many awards including the Tony Award for Best Play for The Homecoming in 1967. In 2005 the Swedish Academy awarded him with the Nobel Prize in Literature. He was also awarded the Shakespeare Prize, the European Prize for Literature, the Pirandello Prize, and the David Cohen British Literature Prize. He was made a Companion of Literature by the Royal Society and received honorary degrees from eighteen different universities.
Pinter wrote Betrayal in 1978. The National Theatre in London first presented it on November 15, 1978 with Penelope Wilton as Emma, Michael Gambon as Jerry, and Daniel Massey as Robert. It was directed by Peter Hall and designed by John Bury. The play was inspired by a seven-year affair that Pinter had with Joan Bakewell, a BBC Television presenter of the time. The play itself shows betrayal of all shapes and sizes, relating to the seven-year affair but occurring over a nine-year time period. Pinter uses reverse chronological order to tell his story.


Questions:

1. As stated by Scott Simon of NPR, “Harold Pinter is noted for his use of ‘silence’ as a playwright. Long, tense pauses between his characters became a technique and a trademark of his plays, often making audiences squirm and wonder what people do not – and perhaps cannot – say to one another.” In other words and as put by Holly Kline, a writer for the Yale Herald, “The exchanges between the three characters are nearly always awkward, strained encounters in which each character cloaks honesty with social pretense.” Take the opening scene for example. There are pauses between nearly all of their sentences and Jerry even goes so far as to say “You remember the form. I ask about your husband, you ask about my wife.” How did you feel about this tension? Did it make you uncomfortable? Engaged? Annoyed? Do you find this cloaking of honesty with social pretenses to be a real struggle both in Betrayal and in the lives of the people you know?
2. How do you feel about Jerry’s character? Did your opinion of him change for better or worse in the last scene of the play (when he is drunk and confessing his love for Emma for the first time)?
3. What about Robert’s character? I in no way support cheating, but I personally found myself judging Emma a little less and understanding why she would cheat. There were two main things that made me feel this way. One was when he talked about how he didn’t want her around for squash or for lunch and even said to her face that he wanted to be able to talk about women at lunch without feeling weird. The second thing that really bothered me about him was when he tells Jerry that the best day on he and Emma’s trip was the day when she wasn’t with him. Burn. Did anyone else feel the same? Elaborate.
4. How did y’all feel about the fact that Emma had an affair with her husband’s best friend? And on top of that in the first scene we find out that she is seeing Casey, who we eventually find out is also someone close to her husband.
5. Why does Emma cry on Robert’s shoulder at the end of the fourth scene?
6. As I stated in the first question each of these characters cloaks honesty with social pretense throughout the entire play. Please re-read the fifth scene and pay special attention to the immense amount of passive aggression going back and forth between the characters. Comment.
7. More particularly about scene five, how did you feel about the way that Emma told Robert about her and Jerry? (“We’re lovers.” Plain and simple. Direct. To the point. Not at all like the rest of their conversations.)
8. The reverse chronology of the play creates one huge question: If they knew where they would end up after their seven-year affair would they still make the same choices? How do you think the play would have worked differently if the chronology of the story hadn’t been reversed?

Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

the man:

 

Edward Franklin Albee III was born March 12, 1928, in a now unknown location in Virginia and taken in by the wealthy Albee family when two weeks old, making him the adopted grandson of powerful vaudeville impresario Edward Franklin Albee II (whose company would later become the RKO motion picture company through a series of mergers and transitions). At the age of 22, Albee distanced himself from his adopted family, although he later attempted to reconcile with his mother.

A badly behaved and unwilling student from the start of his educational career, Albee attended Trinity College in CT for only a short while. His college experience mainly consisted of skipping class and refusing to attend compulsory chapel, and thus he was expelled (or “dropped out”) for his behavior.

That’s cool though, because after starting his writing career at the age of 30, Albee is now respected alongside great American playwrights like Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, and Eugene O’Neill. He is also credited with Americanizing the Theatre of the Absurd.

Along with his three Tony Awards and the 1996 National Medal of Arts (take that, Trinity), Albee has won three Pulitzer prizes; however, none of them were for “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” Although it received the winning vote from the Pulitzer Prize drama panel in 1963, the Pulitzer Committee vetoed their decision, ultimately deciding the play did not represent a "wholesome" view of American life. The drama panel rebelled (many even resigned), resulting in no prize being awarded that year.

Still alive and writing, Albee currently teaches at the University of Houston. His other notable plays include “A Delicate Balance,” “Seascape,” “Three Tall Women,” and, most recently, “At Home at the Zoo.” He is to be presented with the Edward MacDowell Medal for lifetime achievement August 14.

 

the play:

 

“Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” opened on Broadway at the Billy Rose Theater on October 13, 1962, directed by American theatre director Alan Schneider (who also directed the American premiere of Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot”). It ran for 644 performances and was controversial as well as outrageously popular.

The name is a play on the title of the song "Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?" from Walt Disney's "The Three Little Pigs" and is named after the famous English novelist. The title predated the play – Albee saw the line scribbled on a wall in a bathroom and thought it amusing, as well as an example of the sort of humor singular to universities, and was thus inspired to write the play. He claims the characters of George and Martha were based off of real-life NYC socialites (and tumultuous married couple) Willard Maas, a teacher and poet, and Marie Menken, a documentary filmmaker.

Due to the title, Albee is credited with substantially raising interest in Woolf’s work in 1960s America.

“Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” won both the 1963 Tony Award for Best Play and the 1962-63 New York Drama Critic's Circle Award for Best Play, while its stars won the 1963 Tony Awards for Best Actor and Actress. It would have won the Pulitzer, but, well. We already went over that drama.

It might be useful (or at least interesting) to know the setting in which the play originated. In 1961 and 1962, around the time that Albee was writing the play, these were some of the important events occurring in America:

In 1961, the Cold War continues, J.F.K. (VP: Richard Nixon) enters the White House after Eisenhower, Khrushchev is still leader of USSR, the Bay of Pigs Invasion (April 17-19) fails, Alan Bartlett Sheppard, Jr., becomes the first American in space, Judy Garland makes a comeback, the Freedom Rides take place coinciding with escalating violence in the South, and J.F.K. decrees his goal to place a man on the Moon by the end of the decade -- and in the first half of 1962, the U.S. embargo against Cuba begins, the Supreme Court rules that photos of nude males are not obscene (thus decriminalizing pornographic male magazines), and Marilyn Monroe is found dead from “acute barbiturate poisoning.”

 

questions:

 

1. First off, what was your general reaction to the play? Did you sympathize with the characters at all? Was the story interesting?

 

2. Since this story takes place in a university, it obviously hits a little closer to home than, say, “Ubu Roi” with its abstract royal setting. As members of a university, do you think Albee portrays university life accurately? In what ways did he fail to do so, and/or in what ways did he succeed?

 

3. Martha and George obviously aren’t psychologically healthy people. What do you think their problems are? What is their motivation for acting like they do?

 

4. What do you think Albee wants you to take away about people who choose to become university professors (or just university in general)?

 

5. What were your thoughts on Martha and George’s relationship at the beginning of the play compared to at the end?

 

6. One of the more obvious themes in “Woolf?” is illusion. What parts of the play represented that? Or if not illusion, what did you think the theme of the play was?

 

7. Do Martha and George actually like one another?

 

8. Designers, actors, directors: How would you design/act/cast for this play? Also, Albee doesn’t give many stage directions in the script. Is that freedom a good thing?

 

9. How do gender, sex and sexuality function in the play? Do you think it’s significant that Nick and Martha are the more confident and gregarious, while George and Honey are the more repressed (if that's how you understood the characters)? Or that we’re never told Martha or Honey’s subjects of study (if they have one)?

 

10. If you had to explicitly label the role of each character (feel free to be creative with your labels, e.g. The Instigator, The Downer, The One Who Keeps Things From Getting To Friendly…), what labels would you choose?

 

11. What is the significance of George as a History professor and Nick as a Biology professor?

 

12. What significance did the titles of the Acts hold? Or, in what way did they shape your understanding of the play?

13. What did Martha and George's final scene mean?

14. And finally... the son? How do you describe that?  A creative project gone bad? A necessary delusion created by two lonely drunks? Feel free to voice your thoughts. And what were your feelings on Martha and George's dilemma compared to Honey and Nick's decision not to have children?

That’s all. I’ll see you later today!

Metal Children

Bent

Martin Sherman is a gay, Jewish playwright from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He attended Boston University College of Fine Arts and got a BFA in dramatic arts in 1960. He has written to collections of gay themed plays. His other play Rose was nominated for a Laurence Olivier Award for Best New Play in 2000.

The first production was in 1979 at the West-End in London staring Sir Ian McKellen, and the Broadway version was in 1980 staring Richard Gere (Billy Flint, Chicago), which was nominated for a Tony Award. In 1990 Sean Mathias directed a revival of Bent, with Sir Ian McKellen, Paul Rhys and Christopher Eccleston (the 9^th Doctor) and won a City Limits Award for Revival of the Year Sherman adapted the play for film in 1997 which was also directed by Mathias.

Sherman is currently in London and is 73 (give or take).

Before Bent not much was known about the treatment of homosexuals during the Holocaust, but the play helped to increase research between the 1980’s and 90’s.

Bent’s title refers to a European slang word that refers to homosexuals, and the play set during and after theNight of Long Knives. This was a period between June 30 and July 2, 1934, where Hitler had at least 85 people killed and over 1,000 arrested. Though most people killed were members of the SA, because one of the main targets was Ernst Röhm, a leader of the SA who openly flaunted his homosexuality, it meant that the gays were no longer safe from persecution.

1.Before the play, when you thought about the concentration camps in the Holocaust, did you think about any other groups of people besides the Jews? If not how does having read this play make you feel?

2. At first Max says he wasn’t in love with Rudy, he acted as if love wasn’t real. By the end of the play he has a change of heart, and said he did even though he can’t remember Rudy’s name. What are your opinons on this?

3.Do you think that Max and Horst actually care for each other or do they fill a void?

4. Compare and contrast the relationship Max shared with Rudy and Horst.

5. List examples of how the guards dehumanized the minority groups.

6. What is the significance of Greta being a man dressed as a woman?

7.Sherman uses destruction as a reoccurring theme throughout the play. Parallel the difference of what is destroyed of Rudy and Horst to what is destroyed of Max.

8. Max chooses to wear a gold star instead of a pink triangle. Do you think he wishes to erase his identity completely or just in this horrific setting?

9. When a Moslim dies in the camp it’s ok, but when a person kills themselves it’s an act of defiance. Do these different acts of suicide really have a difference in meaning? Why?

10. Why does Max count to ten?

11. Click on the picture below and look on the lower left side to read a review of Bent. Do you view Max as a "hero as every man"? Why or why not?

Death of a Salesman

Ello classmates! Please read the following in a British accent so it is more interesting and sounds smarter.

Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman was first staged in New York City at the Morosco Theatre Feb.10, 1949. The tragedy, which Miller wrote in six weeks, was published during the literary period called Social Realism. Historically, the play premiered on the tails of the postwar boom. At the same time big corporations were taking over mom and pop businesses. The play was an immediate success, winning numerous awards, including the Tony for best play and the 1940 Pulitzer for drama. Death of a Salesman has been performed around 742 times.

Arthur Miller was born in October of 1915 to a Jewish middle-class family in New York City. When he was 14, the family was forced to move from Manhattan to Brooklyn after his father’s business failed. After attending the University of Michigan for journalism, he worked for the government’s Federal Theater Project until it closed because of fears of Communist infiltration. Miller’s first successful play was in 1947 with All My Sons. Miller also wrote The Crucible, which everyone is forced to read and perform in high school. Miller was married three times, once to Marilyn Monroe and died in 2005.

Questions:

1. From age to sexuality, this play hits on many of life’s issues. What would you consider the theme of the play?

2. Throughout the play Hap mentions that he has lost weight and that he is getting married several times. Why do you think this is?

3. Do you feel sorry for Willy? Why or why not?

4. Do you think Willy is suicidal or just senile?

5. Why do you think Biff never reveals Willy’s affair to the family?

6. Do you think it is Willy’s fault that Biff grew up to be a self-proclaimed bum? Why or why not?

7. Discuss some of the major ironies in the play (i.e. Bernard becoming a success)

See you in class!