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I've spent the last couple hours doing travel arrangements, the most recent of which are to Toronto. And now I cannot get the song "Blame Canada" out of my head. "It seems that everything has gone wrong since Canada came along..." Actually, nothing's wrong, I just can't get rid of the song...
In an unrelated topic, I thought I'd blather about this play we're in, "Night of January 16th". For starters, is that not one of the blandest, stupidest names for a play you've heard in a long time? It's about...the events of the night of January 16th. (Also, the early morning of January 17th.) Who'da thunk?
So it's Ayn Rand, whom I strongly dislike, and it turns out that she's a worse playwrite than she is a novelist. This is actually an interactive play - the jury is chosen from the audience, and they get to choose whether she's guilty or not and change the ending. Thing is, the ending after the verdict is only one line, so there's going to be a heck of an anti-climax. I guess at the time, the idea of interactive theater would have been so novel (this is from something like 1936), that they wouldn't have realized it was lame and gimmicky, and executed poorly.
Plus, it's supposed to be this riveting drama with conflicting testimony where the jury could go either way easily. But...it isn't. Spoilers follow, if you really care.
There's two possible interpretations of events, one in which everything fits together very neatly and one in which the defendent came up with the most hopelessly convoluted plot ever and left lots of loose ends. Really, it's fairly obvious that the defendent is guilty of many things - adultury, fraud, conspiracy, desecration of a body, larceny, forgery - but not the actual murder she was charged with. Her surviving accomplice is also guilty of these things, and is a gangster to boot - but also did not murder the guy in question.
My theory is that Ayn Rand wrote the victim and the defendent to be shocking to 1930s sensibilitiesvery deliberately. She sets it up so that the main character isn't actually guilty, but a bourgeoise audience would convict her anyway, so that the author can then feel superior to her audience and scorn them for choosing social conventions over trueness to character.
Tttthhhppt.
Anyway, I'm playing a handwriting expert. My character is really unnecessary and should probably have been cut. I exist so it looks like the police did something, but my testimony is inconclusive in a boring way, and my dialogue is really stiff and wooden. Oh well. Chuckro, on the other hand, is playing the worst bailiff ever. People are constantly getting into melodramatic fights, and yet he does nothing (because the author does not seem to realize what bailiffs are there for). At one point, someone rushes over from the audience, grabs the Bible, and swears himself in. Bailiff does nothing. Chuckro has decided his character's name is Les. Short for "Useless."
In an unrelated topic, I thought I'd blather about this play we're in, "Night of January 16th". For starters, is that not one of the blandest, stupidest names for a play you've heard in a long time? It's about...the events of the night of January 16th. (Also, the early morning of January 17th.) Who'da thunk?
So it's Ayn Rand, whom I strongly dislike, and it turns out that she's a worse playwrite than she is a novelist. This is actually an interactive play - the jury is chosen from the audience, and they get to choose whether she's guilty or not and change the ending. Thing is, the ending after the verdict is only one line, so there's going to be a heck of an anti-climax. I guess at the time, the idea of interactive theater would have been so novel (this is from something like 1936), that they wouldn't have realized it was lame and gimmicky, and executed poorly.
Plus, it's supposed to be this riveting drama with conflicting testimony where the jury could go either way easily. But...it isn't. Spoilers follow, if you really care.
There's two possible interpretations of events, one in which everything fits together very neatly and one in which the defendent came up with the most hopelessly convoluted plot ever and left lots of loose ends. Really, it's fairly obvious that the defendent is guilty of many things - adultury, fraud, conspiracy, desecration of a body, larceny, forgery - but not the actual murder she was charged with. Her surviving accomplice is also guilty of these things, and is a gangster to boot - but also did not murder the guy in question.
My theory is that Ayn Rand wrote the victim and the defendent to be shocking to 1930s sensibilitiesvery deliberately. She sets it up so that the main character isn't actually guilty, but a bourgeoise audience would convict her anyway, so that the author can then feel superior to her audience and scorn them for choosing social conventions over trueness to character.
Tttthhhppt.
Anyway, I'm playing a handwriting expert. My character is really unnecessary and should probably have been cut. I exist so it looks like the police did something, but my testimony is inconclusive in a boring way, and my dialogue is really stiff and wooden. Oh well. Chuckro, on the other hand, is playing the worst bailiff ever. People are constantly getting into melodramatic fights, and yet he does nothing (because the author does not seem to realize what bailiffs are there for). At one point, someone rushes over from the audience, grabs the Bible, and swears himself in. Bailiff does nothing. Chuckro has decided his character's name is Les. Short for "Useless."
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Date: 2008-02-14 05:46 pm (UTC)From:Oh dear god. Gag me with a copy of Atlas Shrugged.
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Date: 2008-02-15 12:04 am (UTC)From: