Well to be perfectly honest, I hated the first play. It was a one man monologue about a man who had cooped himself up in his hotel room and was making a video for the owner of the agricultural company. (I had a hard time understanding some of it, and will probably botch my description of the premiss...) But this man works for some Manitoba agriculture company, and he gets an "epiphany" after a hog barn fire kills 15,000 pigs. This man spends an hour ranting and dropping the F-bomb about how inhumane the industry is. And, I agree with the message, but the play actually made me angry; it seemed like it was something that was sponsored by PETA. The impression I got was not that this writer of this play was trying to share a message, but rather that the writer was imposing his views on me (and the rest of the audience) and I had to pay $10 to hear them.
Like I said, I support the message (I saw a really good documentary on the subject that turned me vegetarian for eight months...) But in this particular play, the message was lost in translation (to me anyway.)
It bothered me a lot.
The second portion of the play was another one-man monologue about a man who had just quit his job at the Health Sciences Centre. This man is at a dinner party with his (imaginary) friends and colleagues, and as he gives his speech about his ex-wife Juanita, and their son who died at the hands after heart surgery. The man manages to drive his imaginary friends away, one by one, by offending them. The story is actually good, and I was actually enjoying the play, until it too seemed to become an agenda for him to rant about his beliefs. -- He lost me when he started bashing Justice Murray Sinclair. (I'll call my own bias out on that one, but I love Murray Sinclair!)
I assume the writer lost his son after a complex heart surgery and was trying to tell his story, but I got annoyed about his opinion on the inquest.
This is probably just my bias.
The beginning of the play (Which I didn't mention earlier because I have no idea what it was even there) was a man and a woman in a bed. The man steals the covers, and then he gets this huge hard-on under the covers. The woman starts to "take care of things" for him, and he is yelling something that I couldn't make out. Then the woman leaves, the man wakes up and a voice (that sounds like a bad imitation of Arnold Schwarzenegger) talking to him. I couldn't really understand what the voice was saying because
the audio was bad, and the voices accent was REALLY bad. But I was confused. Super-duper confused.
I didn't like the play; it was too long, used too many technical words and terms, and the message seemed to have and agenda.
I think most crecomms share your opinion? I'm with ya on the beginning- why was a man getting an erection an important part of the story? Was that when he got his epiphany?
ReplyDeleteWe were all laughing at the voice as well.. we thought it sounded like a latin Shwarzenneger.
Historically, many plays and theatre have been used to spout off the playwrite's bias and some of the more influencial plays havebeen used to promote social change at the time. Charles Dickens was actually a social commentator of his time. However, I think most plays do not have the redeeming qualities to be influencial.
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