Avenue Q was by far one of my favorite trips in this seminar. I was introduced to Avenue Q in 7^th grade by a friend so I’ve seen most of the play before, but never live, so this was pretty exciting for me. What I liked about the play was not so much the fact that it was something I was familiar with, but its ability to draw me in and make me feel like I was part of the experience, something which I expressed in my previous blog, that Stepz was not able to do.

What I liked most about Avenue Q was how everything was so in your face, every scenario, every dilemma and even things that are considered taboo to speak about in public. I believe all of these things forced people to look deep within and try to come to terms with issues they normally tend to evade. An example is the issue of homosexuality. For the most part Avenue Q did an incredible job presenting such a sensitive issue in such a whimsical way, but we all know that is not the case in the real world, even now in the 21^st century. We have spoken about homosexuality quite frequently in the seminar and we have learned about some massive figures in the humanities that were gay, including Robert Mapplethorpe and Walt Whitman.             In my report on Walt Whitman, I mentioned that he changed one of his poems for its publication because it was about a male lover but he knew it would not sit well with the public so he changed the gender of the lover. Meanwhile in the play we saw that Rod went to his therapist (can’t remember her name) and told her that he thought his “friend” was gay, when he was indeed talking about himself. We see this happen time and time again where people are afraid of the world’s reaction to something so they hide it. But if I were to connect this in broader terms to art and its history we see a similar trend happening. Throughout the history of art we’ve seen movements that took the world by storm but also those that were seen as blasphemous and offensive. At the end of the day people got over the provoking nature of the art and started to appreciate it. I believe that this was the aim of Avenue Q. Avenue Q attempted to depict these delicate matters in a comical way for precisely the same reason, to show us how ridiculous we are sometimes, and I found that brilliant. In my opinion Avenue Q represented a type of utopia that was perfect in representing all the issues of life but in the most strangely tragic yet fulfilling way.