Danny and the Deep Blue Sea by John Patrick Shanley

John Patrick Shanley provides the reader with a good indication of the play’s energy when he subtitles it An Apache Dance.  The definition he provides is “a violent dance for two people, originated by the Parisian apaches.  Parisian apaches are gangsters or ruffians.”  The two characters of the play, Danny and Roberta, have mangled, ripped, jagged souls.  Their lives have been extremely difficult and have torn at the very base of these peoples’ beings.  They meet each other one night at a bar.  Immediately their personal dysfunctions are on display.  Shanley writes them very naked.  The imperfections and ugliness  that lie inside of them are not hidden.  After some initial tense small talk Roberta reveals her darkest secret.  She has been sexually exploited by her own father.  This fact has become a major basis of Roberta’s self loathing.  Danny responds coolly, which puts Roberta more at ease.  This makes her think that she can needle her new drinking in an attempt to get him to open up.  Roberta pokes at Danny until he violently lashes out and begins to choke her.  Instead of flinching she asks him to do it harder.  Danny is confused and continues to hide behind his machismo and violent nature.  As the night nears an end Roberta asks Danny to come home with her.  This adds a new layer of their relationship.  After having sex Roberta and Danny begin to play a game.  The two of them try and be nice to each other.  The game dips from success to failure, but at the end of it the two of them have found a safe place where they can have dreams and hope.  They agree to get married.  For the first time in a long time, Roberta sleeps soundly.  In the morning Roberta becomes scared of the goodness that she experienced and begins to push Danny away.  Our experience of Danny before would lead us to believe he will lash out and bury his emotion into anger, but instead the pain he is experiencing manifests into sadness.  He is genuinely hurt that the dream they had created the night before is being taken away.  Roberta eventually comes around and the two of them agree to walk away from the bleakness that has enveloped their lives so far.

Danny:  29 years old.  A rough violent man with a deeply pained soul.  His violent nature has earned him the nickname Beast.  He is unable to keep a steady job because of his inability to temper anger.  Seemingly immune to feeling and love.  Mangled.
Roberta:  31 years old.  A single mother who is psychologically damaged.  Unable to care for herself or her child.  Broken.  Self-loathing.  Bleak outlook on herself and future.

Great Falls

Great Falls

By

Lee Blessing

Characters: 

(F)  Bitch

(M) Monkey Man 

A play that exposes dramatic tragedies as well as moral issues, such as abortion, infidelity, domestic violence, and sexual abuse. The victim and main female character,“Bitch,” is a 17 year old girl who experienced a difficult and monstrous life with her biological father. When the father leaves, a new man comes into Bitch’s life, “Monkey Man”, her stepfather in who she sees hope and a new opportunity to have a paternal figure in her life. Tragedy and deception are two of the main themes portrayed in the play when “Monkey Man” confesses his affairs to Bitch’s mother breaking the heart of his young stepdaughter. The play follows Monkey Man seeking for Bitch’s forgiveness trying to please her in whatever way he can. His surprises are when he realizes that Bitch is now a young adult woman who has lived in hell ever since he left.  

"Tender Offer" - Wendy Wasserstein

Characters:

PAUL (35) - a businessman and a dad, whose does a poor job of balancing the two.

LISA (9) - a young dancer who wants appreciation and attention from her father

Summary: 

A father arrives late to his daughter’s dance recital. She panders for attention, but then suddenly becomes apathetic, spurring him to want to build their relationship.

27 Wagons Full of Cotton Play Summary

Characters: (2M, 1F)

"27 Wagons Full of Cotton" by Tennessee Williams
Jake Meighan: A Cotton-Gin Owner
Flora: His Wife
Silva Vicarro: Superintendent of the Syndicate Plantation


Summary:

Taking place in Blue Mountain, Mississippi, Flora leaves her house when a fire breaks out on the Syndicate Plantation near her house hold. Her husband Jake, who owns a cotton gin, returns home. She questions him on where he was, prompting him to physically abuse her until she lies about him being at the house the entire day. He rewards her with sexual advances. The next afternoon, the superintendent of the Syndicate plantations, Silva, visits the house of a very happy Jake as he has been recently been commissioned to transport 27 wagons of cotton in light of the recent fire. He brags about this as he leaves. Vicarro attempts to wrestle the truth out of Flora in regards to Jake's real location during and after the fire as he believes Jake may have committed arsony on the plantation. He begins to advance on her sexually. Flora tries to escape by going inside the house but Vicarro's follows her into the house where he rapes her. Later that evening Jake returns to a physically and emotionally ravaged Flora. She tells him that Vicarro may pay more visits to the house in the future much to Jake's complete oblivious attitude of her recent rape. He goes inside, leaving her in her emotionally crippled state as she sings.

 

 

~Michael Canas~

Blog #1-One Act Summary and Photo: A Memory of Two Mondays

A Memory of Two Mondays by Arthur Miller

11 M, 2 F, 1 (could be played either M/F)

Bert-18; outsider to the group; young with aspirations to go to college
Raymond "Ray" Ryan-40; the manager who is overworked but genuinely cares about his employees
Gus-68; bald, flirty, with a large and loud personality. He has been with the company the longest and speaks with a Slavic accent.
Jim -mid-70s; best friends with Gus, quiet and unassuming
Kenneth "Kenny"-26; recent Irish immigrant who is attractive, modest, kind, and friendly except when you make him mad
Tom Kelly-late 40s; well-liked, respectable, amiable man with a tendency to be an alcoholic but with the capacity to change
Larry-39; good-looking, cool, and quietly burdened with the talents and skills that are not appreciated and an accumulating financial debt

Agnes (Female)-late 40s; spinster who has a big heart and a tendency to laugh and/or cry with little provocation

Patricia "Pat"-23; pretty but doesn't know who she is
Frank-30s; truckdriver delivery guy who is impassive, burly, and looking for tail of the female variety
Jerry Maxwell-early 20s; friends with Willy; 1930s equivalent to a bro
Willy Hogan-early 20s; friends with Jerry; 1930s equivalent to a bro
Mechanic (M or F)-speaks to Larry with snarky attitude (no given physical description)
Mr. Eagle-40s; the good-looking terse absentee boss


This play is set in the 1930s in a car parts store/warehouse in New York. It follows the days of the employees in two different seasons, Summer and Winter.  It features a colorful cast of characters that reminds me of the cast of Cheers transposed in the car part business during the Great Depression. They form a highly untraditional and slightly dysfunctional family that both captures the woes of the time period and the hope for a future to come. The only character that does not belong in the story is the youthful and naive Bert who longs for a better life and leaves the business to go to college.



This play is neither happy or sad; it has it's serious and fun moments. Miller balances the relationships of the characters with the backdrop of the Great Depression. However, the fact that it is set in the U.S. during the 1930s is never forgotten. These hard times really color and haunt the characters.

I think this photograph captures this relationship. First of all, the image is associated with vehicles which are representative of the objects that facilitate the contact between the characters of the play. However, Miller uses both the technology and mechanization associated with car parts to also represent many things such as the passage of time accelerating to a mechanical future, materialism, capitalism, and the impending war on the horizon. The tangled wires in the foreground symbolize the comforting yet convoluted relationships between the employees that is on the surface of the play. The junkyard and other vehicles out of focus in the background represent the time period that the show is set in, which is a prevalent although not dominant aspect of the play. These two element bidirectionally inform each other.

Post #1 (Play Summaries) - The Boundary

The Boundary 

by Tom Stoppard & Clive Exton

Cast: 3 men, 1 female, & 1 shim (operator can be a man or woman)

Characters:

Johnson: Male, an old lexicographer

Operator: A male or female voice (unseen role)

Bunyans: Male, another old lexicographer with an unfortunate name

Brenda: Female, Johnson's wife

Cricketeer: Male, a cricket player (silent role)

Summary: 

In this made-for-BBC collaboration between Tom Stoppard and Clive Exton, The Boundary begins with Johnson entering a library that has been completely torn up to pieces. There are papers upon papers covering the entire office floor, furniture, etc. He peers into a telescope through the window to see a cricketeer, and then snaps back to his reality.  He tries to call the operator to report that he has been burglarized, when in comes Bunyans. Bunyans is Johnson's co-lexicographer, and throughout the one-act, we discover the men have been hard at work on compiling a dictionary, yet also have some bad blood boiling between the two. They argue, but become tangled in their own words as well as trying to place their dictionary's words back in order. Under all of the mess of papers, they both spot Brenda's feet, thinking she is dead, but do not voice this to one another. Eventually Brenda awakens and confronts the two, with the two men thinking Brenda committed the crime out of spite, as she is a bad lexicographer. They then hear glass breaking, and all turn towards the same window Johnson earlier peered through where he saw the cricketeer. The window is broken, and Brenda is now lying on the floor, unconscious, with a ball rolling on the floor. Johnson and Bunyan look at the window (which is a French window), to see it open and in enters the same cricketeer. Wind blows through and the papers are all rifled up again. The cricketeer collects his ball from the floor and exits through the window. Moral of the story: dictionaries are lost causes and cricketeers are assholes. 

#1: "Finding the Sun"

"Finding the Sun" by Edward Albee

Character list:
Abigail (23); Mousy brown/blond hair, pinched features; not tall; thinnish, not pretty, but not plain. Benjamin's wife.
Benjamin (30); Thirty; blond, willowy-handsome; medium height.
Cordelia (28); Attractive in a cold way; dark or raven hair; tallish; good figure. Daniel's wife.
Daniel (37); Dark; tall; good-looking.
Edmee (45); Smallish; together; a stylish matron. Fergus's mother.
Fergus (16); Blond, handsome, healthy kid; swimmer's body.
Gertrude (60); Small, gray hair, deeply tanned, thinnish, elegant outdoors woman. Henden's wife.
Henden (70); Big, sprawly man; white hair; looks like a retired diplomat.

8 characters: 4 men, 4 women.

Eight beach chairs imply the setting. Each group of two walks in, when Daniel and Benjamin recognize each other, proclaiming their love for one another. Meanwhile, Fergus is going around meeting everyone while Abigail and Cordelia are arguing about the sexual orientation of their husbands. Edmee has an opposite Oedipus complex towards Fergus. Fergus contemplates suicide. Henden is Daniel's father, and you discover the trouble in their relationship. Eventually, Abigail threatens to leave Ben for the umpteenth time, and Ben tries to convince Cordelia and Daniel to let him live with them. Then, Henden dies in the last scene, and Fergus is nowhere to be found.