Chicago

      Chicago is set in the early 1920s.  It is based on a play of the same name that was based on a couple of real cases from the time.  Kander, Ebb, and Fosse wrote it in the early 1970s.  Music was Kander, lyrics were Ebb, book was Ebb and Fosse, and choreography was Fosse.  All of the musical numbers were done in a vaudeville style and stood out from the rest of the show.  The main theme of the play is a commentary of the justice system at the time.  It was very much about scandal and not very just, at least in the world of female criminals.  It is set during prohibition, but there is clearly alcohol in the play, as well as jazz and other “scandalous” things of the time.  There were a few women around this time who murdered men and inspired the characters of Roxie and Velma.  In fact, the woman who wrote the original play was the reporter who covered these women’s stories.  Since the original 1975 staging, there have been several revivals and a movie.  The most successful revival was the one in 1996.  It did very well at the Tonys whereas the original production did not.  The original production was up against A Chorus Line, but the revival had competition as well, such as Annie and Once Upon a Mattress.  The movie came out in 2002 and stared Renee Zellweger, Catherine Zeta-Jones, and Richard Gere.  It also did very well, winning the Academy award for best picture that year, as well as several others. 

       John Kander and Fred Ebb were a songwriting team with many successful ventures in both stage and film.  They started working together in the mid-60s, writing things such as Flora, the Red Menace and Cabaret.  Chicago came later on in 1975.  Of their many works, Cabaret and Chicago are probably the best known.  They are also responsible for such works as Kiss of the Spider Woman; New York, New York; Curtains; and The Scottsboro Boys, with the last two being at the end of their carrier.  Ebb passed away in 2004, but Kander is still alive, though old. 

     Bob Fosse (Robert Louis Fosse by birth) was an actor, dancer, director, choreographer, and more.  He is most celebrated for his choreography, having won eight Tony awards for it.  His style was recognizably different than others at the time.  He choreographed shows such as The Pajama Game, Damn Yankees, as well as Chicago.  In the case of Chicago, he also helped write the book, something that he only did one other time, for Pippen, though his work there is unaccredited.  He died in 1987 of a heart attack.  He was known to have both heart problems and epilepsy. 

1.)  In “The Cell Block Tango,” the girls all detail what they did to get sent to prison.  Do you think they are justified in what they did?  Do they deserve to get off?  Feel free to discuss as a group or as individuals.

2.)  In “The Cell Block Tango,” Hunyak states that she is innocent, but it is clear, that because of her language barrier, she is unlikely to get off.  This is confirmed later on when she is convicted and hung, all while still proclaiming “not guilty.”  What are your thoughts on this?  Do you believe her?  What does this say about the justice system and lawyers of the time?

3.)  All throughout the play, Velma and Roxie, and Kitty later on, fight for the press spotlight.  What do you think of their tricks?  Do you think this is still the way things work today?

4.)  What do you think of Amos?  He is a very weak-willed person, as he himself admits in “Mister Cellophane.”  Do you have sympathy for him?  Does he deserve your sympathy?

5.)  What are your opinions on the circus/vaudeville styles of the musical numbers?  It is different from typical musicals in that it clearly isn’t meant to be “realistic.”  They are meant to stand out, but why do you think that is?

6.)  Compare Chicago to other musicals of this time period, including other Kander and Ebb works.  Keep in mind that A Chorus Line premiered in the same year.

7.)  This is set in the early 1920s, during prohibition.  Do you feel the musical accurately reflects the time period?  Keep in mind that it was based on a play about actual murderesses of the time. 

8.)  The original production was nominated for many Tony awards but didn’t win any.  The 1996 revival, on the other hand, swept the Tonys.  Why do you think this is?  Is it just a matter of competition, or is it a reflection of the staging, or is it a reflection of the times. 

9.)  Frank’s death occurs during the song “All That Jazz,” which is sung by Velma.  Why do you think they decided to stage it this way rather than give it its own song?

10.)  The original show opened in 1975.  How do you see reflections of that time period in the musical?

Harold Pinter's Betrayal

English playwright Harold Pinter (b. 1930, d. 2008), is acclaimed for his work for both stage and screen. His plays are famous for their subtext and the internal life of the characters' psyches, rather than their ability to simply tell a story. Pinter was a son of a Jewish tailor and grew up in a middle class neighborhood in London. During his youth, Pinter experienced some of the harsh tolls of World War II. He witnessed buildings being bombed; this led to his refusal to enlist in the military as his national service.

Pinter found his beginning in theatre as an actor. He worked in regional theatres for a short time before becoming a playwright. In 1958 Pinter released his first full length play, The Birthday Party, for which he received savage reviews that caused the play to close within a week. Pinter's second play, The Caretaker, written two years later, received significantly better reviews. The play revolves around two brothers and the struggles they face after bringing home a homeless man. In 1965, five years later, Pinter would write The Homecoming, a play about a wife leaving her husband to stay with his family. This play would be performed on Broadway and result in Pinter winning a Tony award as well as lead to his first marriage with Vivien Merchant. Pinter also began screenwriting around this time; one of his most renowned adaptations is The French Lieutenant’s Woman in 1981 starring Jeremy Irons and Meryl Streep.

In 1978 Pinter released Betrayal, one of his most well-known works due to its creativity and relevance to his actual life. Betrayal circles around the extramarital affair of Jerry and Emma; Emma was married to Jerry's best friend, Robert, and was acquainted with Jerry's wife Judith. During the course o the play it is revealed that Robert, too, was unfaithful. The piece touches on multiple concepts such as the difference in perspective regarding a married couple and his best friend. The play relates to Pinter’s life in regards to his affair with Lady Antonia Frasier who was married to a member of Parliament. After her divorce with her husband and Pinter’s divorce with his wife, Pinter and Frasier would marry in 1980.

In 2005 Pinter was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature but was physically unable to accept it due to being diagnosed with cancer in 2001. Pinter would succumb to the disease on December 24, 2008.

1) Throughout the play each scene is given a season. Do these seasons relate to the plot itself or is it just a random insert by Pinter? How so?

2) Why is Jerry throwing up and catching Charlotte so important to the plot?

3) Obviously, the play centers on the affair of Jerry and Emma. However, what other themes has Pinter factored into the piece?

4) William Butler Yeats was a very influential Irish poet and playwright during the 20th century. During his life, he was suspected of having multiple affairs while married to his wife, Georgie Hyde-Lees. She once wrote him a letter stating this: "When you are dead, people will talk about your love affairs, but I shall say nothing, for I will remember how proud you were." In one of his poems entitled A Deep Sworn Vow, Yeats says:

OTHERS because you did not keep
That deep-sworn vow have been friends of mine;
Yet always when I look death in the face,
When I clamber to the heights of sleep,
Or when I grow excited with wine,
Suddenly I meet your face.

How does this relate to Betrayal?

5) The game of squash is brought up several times throughout the play. Why is it so important to Robert, Jerry, and Emma?

6) Do you think that Emma and Jerry ended the affair simply because of their inability to meet each other in afternoons or is there more too it?

7) Casey is mentioned a few times in the play. Why is Casey important to the plot?

8) Why didn’t Robert tell Emma about his infidelities when she told him about the affair?

9) The Pinter pause is an essential element to the rhythm and depth of this piece. However, by creating such a focus on the subtext had Pinter created an environment where the characters can’t actually speak a simple factual sentence? For example on page 53

Emma: I have a family too.
Jerry: I know that perfectly well. I might remind you that your husband is my oldest friend.
Emma: What do you mean by that?
Jerry: I don’t mean anything by it.
Emma: But what are you trying to say by saying that?
Jerry: Jesus. I’m not trying to say anything. I’ve said precisely what I wanted to say.

10) Emma lies to Jerry about the speed boat and Torcella. However, it is revealed that Robert took the speed boat. Why lie to Jerry about it being broken? In fact, how many lies are told throughout the play?

David Rabe's "Streamers" and Tim O'Brien's "The Things They Carried"

David Rabe (March 10, 1940) is an American military veteran, playwright and screenwriter who first came to national prominence with the performance of his 1969 play "The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel," the first of his four plays thematically linked together as the Vietnam Plays. "Pavlor Hummel" focuses on the violence and barbarity of both the Viet Cong and the American troops forced to go to war. The second, "Sticks and Bones," is the story of a blinded veteran who returns to America from the war and commits suicide. "Streamers," the subject of this post, was the third. The final Vietnam play is "The Orphan," an adaptation of the Oresteia that combines elements of the Greek trilogy, the Manson family murders, and anti-Vietnam protests of the 1970s. "The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel" was awarded the Tony Award for its Broadway premiere.

Tim O'Brien is a American military veteran, acclaimed author of novels (his work Going After Cacciato was awarded the National Book Award in 1979) and short stories (his 1990 collection The Things They Carried, from which today's short story "How To Tell A True War Story" is pulled), and professor. O'Brien, like Rabe, chooses the military as the backdrop for his fictions. In The Things They Carried, O'Brien treads the line between fiction and non-fiction; the stories rely upon metanarrative techniques (the author and the narrator share the same name), temporal shifts to points of time before, after, and during Vietnam,  and the like to create a multivalent and polyvocal account of soldiers who fought and died for their country.

Discussion Questions: The Things They Carried 

1. For O'Brien, what are the characteristics of a "true" war story?

2. In the second section of O'Brien's story, he notes that

A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things they have always done. If a story seems moral, do not believe it. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie. There is no rectitude whatsoever. There is no virtue. 

This is not a new critique; one can see something similar in the poetry of Wilfred Owen (in particular, his poem "Dulce et decorum est"), the short stories of Ambrose Bierce, and numerous other writers. Owen, like O'Brien, adopts a critical tone when he notes:

If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est
Pro patria mori.

Do you agree with these writers that a true war story cannot be moral? That the idea of a just war is simply a fantasy that obscures or masks the graves of those who died for their countries, and that nothing justifies the deaths of young men?

3. Much is made by O'Brien between appearance and reality; in fact, he says, it's in the space or lacunae of memory that actual truth can be found. He claims the following:

In any war story, but especially a true one, it’s difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to happen. What seems to happen becomes its own happening and has to be told that way. The angles of vision are skewed. [...] The pictures get jumbled; you tend to miss a lot. And then afterward, when you go to tell about it, there is always that surreal seemingness, which makes the story seem untrue, but which in fact represents the hard and exact truth as it seemed.

Is it fair to say that, for O'Brien, fiction is more true than documentary? If truth does not lie in empirical fact or the exact happening of an event, then where can we find it in war literature?

4. What is the point of the murder of the baby water buffalo? What does it add to O'Brien's story.

5. Speaking personally, I am the son of a Vietnam veteran. My father lost his leg in combat during Vietnam. He was a marksman; when I was little, I asked him if he ever killed anyone, and he paused for a second before saying "Yeah" in a way that made me convinced that he killed a lot of people while over there. I can speak from experience that something about that war broke him, or changed something inside of him. He doesn't talk about his feelings, or share them. And he never talks about Vietnam, ever.

Often in a true war story there is not even a point, or else the point doesn’t hit you until twenty years later, in your sleep, and you wake up and shake your wife and start telling the story to her, except when you get to the end you’ve forgotten the point again. And then for a long time you lie there watching the story happen in your head. You listen to your wife’s breathing. The war’s over. You close your eyes. You smile and think, Christ, what’s the point?

Do you think this might account for the reason why a veteran might not speak about Vietnam?

Discussion Questions: Streamers

1. Why is Richie's sexuality so important at the beginning of the play?

2. Every monologue in a play, if the play is a good one, can be seen to be a microcosm of the play as a whole -- the plot writ small, so to speak. If that's true of Streamers, how do you think Cokes' monologue from pp. 32-4 relates to the rest of the play?

3. Streamers strikes me as a play written in the style of realism; Rabe's subsequent play, The Orphan, is decidedly anti-realist. Suppose that you were part of the production team for Streamers and the play's director wanted to embrace avant-garde stagings (including, but not limited to: minimalist set; non-Stanislavsky-based acting; specific design techniques taken from early-to-mid Twentieth Century avant-garde movements such as symbolism, surrealism, expressionism, and so on). What sorts of techniques could you use while retaining Rabe's argument/theme?

4. What would you say is Rabe's argument in Streamers? Is it any good?

5. Do you think that this play would work outside the context of Vietnam literature? Could this play be staged successfully today? Why or why not?

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