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    Play Time
    Play Time
    Play Time
    Ebook54 pages48 minutes

    Play Time

    By Francis Bass

    ()

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    About this ebook

    This past spring semester I needed to fulfill my university honors requirements, so I “contracted” a creative writing class focused on time, by designing an additional curriculum of nine plays that I would read and respond to—all of them dealing with time in some way. Thus, Play Time—nine essays analyzing specific plays, pulling apart the ways the playwrights are using the medium of theatre to manipulate or comment on or distort or theorize about time. The idea wasn’t so much to definitively state What X Play is About, but more to point out what I find interesting in each play, and figure out how the artist—or how theatre as a medium—achieved it.

    These are the plays analyzed within this collection:
    We Are Proud to Present a Presentation about the Herero of Namibia, Formerly Known as South West Africa, from the German Südwestafrika, between the Years 1884-1915 by Jackie Sibblies Drury
    Not I, Footfalls, and Rockaby by Samuel Beckett
    Strange Interlude by Eugene O’Neill
    Top Girls by Caryl Churchill
    Dangerous Corner by J.B. Priestley
    Time and the Conways by J.B. Priestley
    I Have Been Here Before by J.B. Priestley
    An Inspector Calls by J.B. Priestley
    Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead by Tom Stoppard

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherFrancis Bass
    Release dateJun 23, 2017
    ISBN9781370281497
    Play Time
    Author

    Francis Bass

    Francis Bass is a writer of science fiction and fantasy. His work has appeared in RECKONING, ELECTRIC LITERATURE, and others. He lives in Philadelphia.

    Read more from Francis Bass

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      Book preview

      Play Time - Francis Bass

      Play Time

      Copyright © 2017 by Francis Bass

      All rights reserved.

      Cover font Built Tilting by Raymond Larabie.

      Cover photo theater 5 courtesy of Freeimages.com / weatherbox.

      Distributed by Smashwords.

      Table of Contents

      Introduction

      1. We Are Proud to Present a Presentation about the Herero of Namibia, Formerly Known as South West Africa, from the German Südwestafrika, between the Years 1884-1915 by Jackie Sibblies Drury

      2. Not I, Footfalls, and Rockaby by Samuel Beckett

      3. Strange Interlude by Eugene O’Neill

      4. Top Girls by Caryl Churchill

      5. Dangerous Corner by J.B. Priestley

      6. Time and the Conways by J.B. Priestley

      7. I Have Been Here Before by J.B. Priestley

      8. An Inspector Calls by J.B. Priestley

      9. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead by Tom Stoppard

      Bibliography

      Introduction

      This past spring semester (of 2017) I needed to fulfill my university honors requirements by completing three semester hours of honors credit. I wasn’t in any honors classes, so I did this by contracting a creative writing class focused on time, by designing an additional curriculum of nine plays that I would read and respond to—all of them dealing with time in some way. Thus, Play Time—nine essays analyzing specific plays, pulling apart the ways the playwrights are using the medium of theatre to manipulate or comment on or distort or theorize about time. The idea wasn’t so much to definitively state What X Play is About, but more to point out what I find interesting in each play, and figure out how the artist—or how theatre as a medium—achieved it.

      The reason I decided to write about plays, and not any other form of literature, is that plays usually get snubbed in these type of survey courses, and when there are plays on the syllabus they’re typically older plays (Faustus, Othello, etc.) I love theatre—reading, writing, watching, acting—however I can engage with it, I find it greatly enriching, so I wanted to right this imbalance in reading material (and knock out a few plays that’d been on my to-read list for awhile.)

      I also think theatre has a fascinating relationship with time. Live performance is possibly the most immediate medium there is. You can’t just pick it up and put it down like a book, and you’re sitting in the same room as the action, as the living breathing characters of the story, unlike a movie. In some ways, this is constricting—the real-time inclinations of theater make it difficult to portray a grand historical time scale the way a novel can, or multiple short moments happening simultaneously the way a film can. But in other ways, the immediacy of theatre, the absolute uncontrollability of it for the audience, is a boon.

      In this book, I’ll discuss all of this and more in further detail, and give you a short taste of how playwrights can bend, exploit, and break theatre, in dealing with time.

      1.

      We Are Proud to Present a Presentation about the Herero of Namibia, Formerly Known as South West Africa, from the German Südwestafrika, between the Years 1884-1915

      by Jackie Sibblies Drury

      We Are Proud to Present … by Jackie Sibblies Drury is a play about six actors putting together a theatrical presentation, detailing the history of Namibia as a German colony, and the genocide of the Herero people. The play is as much focused on the conquest, exploitation, and extermination of the peoples of Namibia as it is on how the actors are portraying it, how they are trying to relate to it, how theatre operates as a medium, and how to tell the history of a people who were almost completely wiped out.

      Processtation.

      The play (that is, the theatrical work written by Drury) portrays this presentation (that is, the theatrical work performed by the characters in the play) from start to finish in chronological order, though it switches back and forth between The Presentation and The Process (7). Each scene is

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