Saw a play? And rate it.

[Taliesin]

Or something like that. A thread similar to the movie or book thread, only it considers plays.


Ay, Carmela! by Sinisterra


The play speaks about two travelling actors, husband and wife, during the Spanish Civil war. They accidentally crossed the battle line and got to the side of Franco.
Since the husband(Paulino) boasted that how good actors they were during the interrogation and they were made to perform with a play honoring Hitler and Mussolini and Franco.
The play's flow of time isn't constant - it has occasional leaps between two times - before the play, and after the play when Carmela's (the wife) ghost who apparently has been shot during the play comes to visit his husband.
As the play progresses, the watcher gets more information about what happened and what is happening to the wife in the land of the dead.

It was interesting and thought-provoking, but We have seen some plays that are better so:

7/10 KitKats

[Shea]

I already said this in the Shakespeare section, so I copied it and pasted it here. I saw Pericles, Prince of Tyre at the Globe last August.

It was the only chance during my trip to go to the Globe. I would rather have seen The Tempest. I knew Pericles would be a modern production, but I had seen other plays in modern styles that I didn't disagree with. It was definately worth buying a ticket to see a play produced on the Globe stage, but the play itself was AWFUL!

I tried to read it before going, but was pressed for time and only got halfway through. But I was able to understand the need for the additions I saw because the script we have today is incomplete. However, during this production I felt like I had gone to the circus. There were so many rope tricks and acrobatics in unnecessary places, that it severely overshadowed the story. At one point Gower tried to explain that Shakespeare would've enjoyed such a production. I doubt it! Shakespeare liked spectacle but I always felt that the purpose of it was to move the plot along, which this wasn't. Shakespeare always seems to be more concerned with the psychology of his characters.

In addition to this, there were just stupid mistakes by the director. They added an older Pericles looking on his younger self during the scenes, an aspect that I didn't disaggree with. However, the younger one spoke with a Mediterranean accent while the older one's was very British! That killed any verisimilitude. Also, when the play got past the part where I stopped reading, it was at the part where Marina is captive of a brothel. Everyone spoke Shakespearean English with thick Italian accents! I think the whole audience was lost at that point and only stuck around because of the amount of skin on stage that the "modernized" scene evidently required. I only understood anything that was going on because of Marina's lines.

I missed the ending, I had to leave early to catch a train back to Cambridge, but I was glad for the excuse!

1/10

[starrwriter]

Many years ago I saw a play at a dinner theater in Florida. (It's a restaurant where you eat dinner and watch a stage play -- something I had never heard of until then.)

The title of the play sort of tells the story: "Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mamma's Hung You In The Closet And I'm Feeling So Sad." A very weird black comedy that I thoroughly enjoyed. Think Alfred Hitchcock meets the existentialist Theater of the Absurd, if you can wrap your mind around that.