On May 5, 2008, at 11:12 AM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
We're different then. Recall: I claim a novel, play, film, opera is
not a
SINGLE creative act, but many, many creative acts. Start with an
opera. I find
most operas have lots of down time. But then a great moment comes --
most often
with an outstanding aria -- and with it, often, an a.e. Then later
in the
opera comes another aria. . .
Same with many plays. In Brian Friel's TRANSLATIONS, there is, for
me, one
great moment, and it's worth sitting through the whole play. It's
the scene
between the Irish girl speaking Gaelic (it's in English for us the
audience, but
the playwright has eased us into the convention -- we know that
whenever an
Irish speaker utters something it's "in Gaelic"), and the British
officer is
speaking English. We know they cannot translate a single word of the
other's
speech, but we also can see they undersand each other perfectly. The
moment is, as
the phrase goes, "Magic". Big a.e..
Yabbut: Would you get the impact of the big "magic" a.e. duet if it
were not in the opera, but just on the Top 40 station? Your claim that
such performances are a series of many creative acts seems better
fitted to some of the old Broadway or some of the old MGM musicals (at
least, regarding the songs). But what about, say, the "Make 'im stop,
George!" scene from "Of Mice and Men," which always moves me greatly
with sympathy for Lenny and its all-encompassing connection in the
rest of the story?
Friel's DANCING AT LUGHNASA provies a similarly effective moment
when the
kitche-bound women
In a bucolic Kinkade house? <g>
silently begin to dance. Terrific stuff, but only a moment in
a long play.
Again, would this affect you without the whole apparatus of the whole
story? (With apologies to Paul Harvey:) can you dispense with the rest
of the story that easily?
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Michael Brady
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
