Show and Tell Post #2 Botticelli by Terrence McNally

For my show and tell post, I chose the play Botticelli.  It was written by Terrence McNally in 1968, and was first produced by Channel 13 in New York City in 1968.  I found this play in "Terrance McNally: 15 Short Plays".

The entire plot revolves around two soldiers: Wayne and Stu.  They are soldiers holding up in the jungle.  Throughout the entire play, they are playing the guessing game "Botticelli."  The premise of the game is that you think of a famous person and reveal the first letter of his/her name.  The other plays then attempt to guess the person's identity through asking a series of yes/no questions.  As a reference point, the individual should be at least as famous as Sandro Botticelli, Italian Renaissance painter.  Wayne and Stu are casually playing a game of Botticelli while staking out a man hiding in a tunnel.  Eventually, the man exits the tunnel and is shot to death by Wayne and Stu.  However, before and after killing this man, Wayne and Stu barely bat an eye at anything unrelated to their game.  Even as they leave the man dead in the middle of jungle at the end of the play, they exit in a debate over Wayne's victory.

Two dramaturgical choices in this play that I've found worthy of discussion are its duration and ambiguity.

While design elements would most likely make it very clear very early on that these men are soldiers in the jungle, the tension is not very high. Initially, there is nothing happening for a considerably large amount of time. The part in which the man comes out of the tunnel and is shot to death nearly happens in a flash, taking up almost no stage time.  This shows how desensitized we've become to the sheer brutality of war.

There are several instances throughout the play in which you aren't exactly sure whether or not the characters are asking each other questions pertaining to the game or pertaining to real life.  I think this was left intentionally ambiguous.  It shows how these men are trivializing the gravity of war, murder, loss.

My Comments (Checkpoint 2)

http://haileysonnier.blogspot.com/2013/10/love-valour-compassion.html#comment-form

http://jstaff6.blogspot.com/2013/11/eurydice.html?showComment=1383764789694#c274604835089498241

http://morgansthtr2130blog.blogspot.com/2013/10/the-childrens-hour-response.html?showComment=1383765449794#c2157012188317828801

http://scriptanalysisbymadalyn.blogspot.com/2013/11/the-childrens-hour.html?showComment=1383766580038#c586424286592529927

http://icesk8prosue2130.blogspot.com/2013/11/eurydice.html?showComment=1383766938230#c8718017864640010704

Eurydice

"Dead people can't sing!"

This quote has the ability to encapsulate the play into one sentence.  The stones actually yell it at Eurydice and her Father when they are singing "I Got Rhythm" together.  I chose this quote because it deals with loss. It deals with holding on to what brings you love and joy in your life.  I think that a production based on this quote would be about just that: clinging to whatever it is that brings you happiness in your life before it's all gone.


"How does a person remember to forget."

This quote is from Father after Eurydice leaves with Orpheus.  He wants to forget her so as to not spend eternity missing her.  I chose this quote because it's about letting go.  A production based off of this quote would be about learning when you need to let go of the things that you love the most.  It's interesting to me that this play is about both holding on and letting go at the same time.

Love! Valour! Compassion!

After reading Love! Valour! Compassion!, a historian would certainly draw some inferences on the worldview of the play's culture that would contrast with those surrounding The Glass of Water and The Children's Hour.

Firstly, this play is nowhere near as tightly structured as the Well Made Plays.  It dos not have a linear plot, there is no cause-effect sequence, and there is no logical resolution.  I believe that our historian would infer that this world's culture has grown speculative of the capital-T Truth and humanity's ability to discover it.  It puts a much larger emphasis on the journey towards discovery as opposed to the discovery itself.  This play is also very theatrical as opposed to the very illusionistic Well Made Plays.  Love! Valour! Compassion! blurs the lines between reality and fantasy, suggesting that we cannot simply take everything we see exactly for what it is.

The Children's Hour

While Lillian Hellman's The Children's Hour shares several attributes of the Well Made Play, it has a few key differences.  It does have three acts, the plot depends on a secret, there is a long opening exposition, and the plot fits nicely into a Freytag graph.  These are all attributes of Well Made Plays.

While the plot does depends on a secret, it's a secret that is kept from the audience until near the end of the play.  Mrs. Mortar accuses Martha towards the beginning of the play of having "unnatural" feelings towards Karen.  The entire plot surrounds this secret, but we the audience don't actually know that it's actually true until the last scene of the play.  Additionally, the story does not have a "happy, logical resolution."  I'd hardly say that Martha committing suicide as opposed to living life as a lesbian women ties everything up in a neat little bow.