Plays

[NewLeft]

Does anyone watch plays?

Any recommendations?

[Vyacheslav Brolotov]

Does anyone watch plays?

Any recommendations?

Watch TV. Go to the movies.

Why do you want to go to a play?

[NewLeft]

Watch TV. Go to the movies.

Why do you want to go to a play?
generally, I hate plays, but a couple plays weren't too bad. i saw price tag a couple months ago, it was actually kinda funny.

[A Revolutionary Tool]

Watch TV. Go to the movies.

Why do you want to go to a play?
Fuck you, plays are badass.

I've seen Rent which was pretty good. Also Oklahoma, which was meh.
I think towards the end of May a theater near me is going to put together a production of The Grapes of Wrath, which I'm going to have to see.

[Anarcho-Brocialist]

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[Sasha]

Where to start...
I can recommend anything by
Beckett
Maeterlinck
Tennessee wiliams
Shakespeare
Arthur miller
Ionesco
Dario fo
Ayslchios
Euripides
Sarah kane
Etc etc

Now offcourse not every performance of these writers is automaticly good...

[BE_]

Watch TV. Go to the movies.

Why do you want to go to a play?

Because some people like them.

[Prometeo liberado]

I got into Cliffard Odetts plays until I realized how bad they were.

[Left Leanings]

Two outstanding plays by Arthur Miller:

Death Of A Salesman

This play is a critique of harsher realities of American capitalism, and tackles head-on the myth of the American Dream. The protagonist is Willy Loman, a salesman, who just doesn't make the grade, and get's laid off.

There are references to products deliberately not being built to last, such as the refridgerator and 'God damn Studebaker'. He teaches his sons to be 'like Adonises', and the importance of 'being liked', and getting by 'on a shoeshine and a smile', in order to make it big.

The contrast between Willy and his employer are enormous. The boss has the latest technology, a casette recorder, and talks of getting his 'maid' to do this, and do that. Of cos, such things are out of Willy's reach.

Willy has been sucked in by the mythology of capital. He lies to his sons, to his wife, to himself.

In the end, Willy commits suicide by crashing his car, so his wife can claim his life insurance. What he doesn't realize, of cos, is that suicide invalidates life insurance claims.

I've both read the play, and seen it in the theatre as a kid. I gotta say, when he crashed that car, I had to choke back my tears.

If you can, go see it. Definitely.

The Crucible.

This is another of Miller's plays I can highly reccommend. It's about the Salem witch trials, and the horrendous persecutions based on false testimony and mass hysteria. Miller used it to parody the 'Red Scare' of Senator Mcarthy.

[GiantMonkeyMan]

I'm friends with a couple people studying drama and they are always constantly inviting me along to their performances. I tell them how smashingly avant garde they were even as I struggle to stay awake. I know there's far better examples but I can't help but dislike the stage. The paradoxical entrapment in a frame and freedom of setting in film is far more rewarding.

[NewLeft]

Historical plays keep me awake

[Mass Grave Aesthetics]

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead b. Tom Stoppard.

[Parvati]

Sometimes when I'm not lost in the Internet, and when I'm not on strike for now 12 weeks (damn! it's nearly the entire semester), I used to end my degree in drama. I was more the kind of litterature type before university, but I missed some "human" part in it. Reading some books on Agit-Prop drama during USSR first period (1920's) helps me realize than Drama is the best type of art for politics and for people; you don't need anything else than a bunch of people, you can talk about what's happening last hour without being fixed in time, you can change everything depends on geography, history, national question, etc., people do not need to know how to read (well), and its reinforce the community links.

This being said, I hate most of the plays that are on stages by now, it's kind of a bourgeois/petty-bourgeois deviations and "sacred art", and it cost so much money for me (and for 90% of proletariat too).
There still some good stuff (I think about Edward Bond stuff, who is maybe more an 80's guy but still active today), but generally the directing is politically weak.
Anyway, read it if you like to read some fiction, pretty cool.

And for all of those you can be interested in drama in general, Piscator (most of all during 20's and 30's ) made some genious stuff about political theater.

[Arlekino]

Does anyone watch plays?

Any recommendations?

I was watching the human voice:
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I love plays and I watching almost every week one Russian plays. Not long time ago I watched "Ana Karenina" so good.

[Sasha]

@ parvati; I assume you are familiar with dario fo's work (a political theater maker deemed so dangerous the Italian police kidnapped, tortured and raped his wife).
Augusto boal also did really interesting things in Latin America with his "theater of the oppressed".

[Parvati]

@Psycho
You're completely right, they did fabulous stuff! The influence of marxism seems to be so far from now, on these so postmodernist times.

[The Young Pioneer]

The Crucible is so amazing.
As is A Christmas Carol. Dickens is simply badassery.


I also love repeatedly seeing Annie and Rent. Two total spectrum opposites, I know, but. :D

[Os Cangaceiros]

My mother was a big proponent of the theater, and she dragged me to see Broadway plays when I lived in New York and was much younger. I've seen Phantom of the Opera, Chicago, Man of La Mancha (the play about Don Quixote), and Annie Get Your Gun.

I do not share her enthusiasm for the art form, personally.

[black magick hustla]

i like reading plays. plays are ok if they are from your friends etc. i think plays are more rewarding for those who write them and set up the performance than those who see them, because its a cheap way of making your story come alive or start acting. that is why a lot of people who watch plays today are fucking snobs/art people. its kindof like short story magazines - a lot of people who read short story magazines today are more of the writer type, because its a way to hone your skills before publishing a novel.

[Manifesto]

Yes I do have a recommendation!!!! I saw Camelot at the Stratford Theater in Canada and it was the most amazing thing that I ever saw!

[Manic Impressive]

Bingo: Scenes of Money and Death, by Edward Bond.
http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/sites/default/files/bingo_reviews_email_final1.jpgThis play, written in 1973 and put on recently at the Young Vic in London, is set in early seventeenth-century England at the end of the feudal social order and the beginnings of capitalism, a time of social unrest involving the Enclosure and Poor Law Acts and the rise of the Protestant religion. The play is loosely based on the true story of the ageing Shakespeare’s part in siding with local landlords against the peasantry.

Bond shows how the feudal open arable field system of common land was preventing the development of capitalism. His character, landowner William Combe, wants profits by enclosing land and thereby dispossessing the former serfs of their strips of land. Bond dramatises the antagonisms between the capitalist and the peasantry who tear down hedges and fill in ditches in their struggle with the bourgeois landowners. The capitalist mode of production will simplify the class antagonisms. The peasants become landless proletarians, subject to the severe Poor Laws and forced to move into the towns to seek employment in capitalist manufacturing enterprises where their surplus labour value will be robbed by the capitalist. Bond exemplifies the stringent working of the Poor Law in the treatment meted out to the vagrant young woman from another parish who, after whippings, engages in arson attacks on private property and, in the shocking opening to Scene Three, ends up hanged on a gibbet.

The new Protestantism and its hell-fire and damnation doctrines are espoused by the son of Shakespeare's servant. The son is also a peasant landholder who will lose his holding with the enclosures. We first see the son as he launches a tirade at his gardener father who has been found in libidinous embrace with the vagrant young woman, thereby demonstrating his puritanical view of the flesh. This anti-sensuality contrasts with the bawdy revelry of Shakespeare which grows out of Chaucerian merriment and the more relaxed feudal social order. Along with his Puritanism, the son is opposed to the enclosures, but he is really an aspirant small capitalist who realises the anti-enclosures rebellion will fail and dreams of a place where a man can have land. The implied reference here is to the New World of the Americas, since the Mayflower set sail at this exact moment in history.

Following the Marxian approach of the materialist interpretation of history Bond plays down the importance of the new Protestantism as an agent in the transition to capitalism. Marx pointed out that it was the “bloody legislation” of the Enclosures and Poor Law legislation that forced the landless proletariat into the centres of manufacturing. This interpretation came under attack with the petit-bourgeois ideology of Max Weber's Protestantism and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905), which asserted that the protestant belief of Calvinism caused the development of capitalism. Later, Henryk Grossman and his The Beginnings of Capitalism and the New Mass Morality (1934) refuted Weber and reaffirmed the materialist interpretation of history. He reiterated Marx’s point about “bloody legislation”, showing that the emergence of capitalism lies much further back than Calvinism and the Reformation, since merchant capitalism had existed within a feudal framework since the 12th century. Meanwhile Calvinism tended to be associated with petit-bourgeois elements rather than the emerging big capitalist owners, and Protestantism was a result of developing capitalism and was its ideological justification. The landless proletariat were physically forced into wage labour by the “bloody legislation” of enclosures and poor law.

Edward Bond's Bingo is a Marxist political drama that is set at a pivotal point in the transition from feudalism to capitalism. Feudalism had existed in England for around 700 years, from 1066 until the beginnings of industrial capitalism at about 1760. A serf in medieval England would have seen the feudal system as eternal, in much the same way as today the ruling capitalist class tell us that capitalism is eternal. But they would both be wrong.

http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/2010s/2012/no-1293-may-2012/theatre-review-out-feudalism

[Arlekino]

That made me cry sadly only for Russian speakers.
http://video.mail.ru/inbox/vip.fantastish/1296/10683.html
The play "Warsaw Melody" was written in 1966. What is it? A young man, Victor, the last war, and the Polish girl Gel occur at the Moscow Conservatory in December 1946. Both students, she dreams of becoming a singer. He's in the future - winemaker. It would seem that love has no boundaries to her nationality is not important. Is this true? How will the heroes of personal relationships, what happens to young people, you know, watching the play "Warsaw Melody."