Mariam Kirvalidze
I really enjoyed the Shakespearean talk by Professor Rodney, especially because I love Shakespeare and admire theater. The speaker was rather radical in his thoughts about scholar editors who try to fix Shakespeare’s lines but end up skewing the lines because they themselves don’t really know what the play is trying to say. I agreed greatly with the speaker in that the act is intolerable and it is as if one were to draw over a great painter’s work to make it more viewer- friendly. Besides that, the speaker was also hilarious and I suspect it is because I am unfamiliar with blunt, British humor. The scenarios he made for the class to act out were very clever as well. Two of my talented classmates went up and said the same lines over but as if they were in different situations. I believe the real situation was that a man was trying to seduce a woman and she was running away from him. I wish I had enough guts to volunteer and act but I didn’t and I was definitely thankful he didn’t volunteer me.
More Recently, our class saw the production of “Penelope”. Before I saw it, I thought the play would involve Greek Mythology, as I knew Odysseus was involved in the play. However, the play was based in a modern setting, in a backyard with a pool and a grill and a Television in the background as well. Personally, I dislike when stories are put in different time settings but this is just a matter of taste. I think that the idea of so many men dying for one woman would have been better based in a more romantic time period. Besides this, I really liked the play because it was so unlike anything I had ever seen. The beginning was very humorous with the clever conversation between Dunne and Fitz and Quinn in the hotdog scene also added to the humor. I think scenes like this and the one where Quinn kept changing into jovial costumes acted as comic relief, which I think was necessary for the number of monologues that really put me in a more somber mood. I especially liked Fitz’s speech. He spoke of finding love in each other (between him and Penelope), but this was a love that I hardly hear of- simply a love between humanity that serves to comfort and console. Fitz referred to this love as faceless love and this makes sense to me because I saw Fitz as too old to be a physical match for Penelope. The play ended very abruptly after the youngest boy also gave a speech. I had hoped that because he seemed to fascinate Penelope in what he was saying, she would save them all after all by marrying him. But, this reality was too unrealistic and Odysseus was back. Thus, I was a little disappointed by the ending but this may be simply because I’m a sucker for happy endings.
