Week #18 Life and Death

Last week I did a review (to put it that way) of the production of the one act play; this week I want to go a little bit deeper into the whole story and try to take out as much as I can from the play. The main reason I am doing this is because the form IV students had to do their reviews for last week and I think it was monday or tuesday when I got spammed by them with questions like "what was the concept" or "what was the theme" and even though I did know the concept was "Death is at the center and Life is on top" I really did not have much to say about our theme, was it Death or Life and Death or What happens after death.
I dont want to make this entry emotional and what follows may not be very relevant to the course but I really want to write about what I think about death at least a little bit. I dont know if I am afraid to die or not, I am an atheist so I dont believe there will be much after death, as a matter of fact I dont believe there will be a thing after I die, that does scare me a little bit because if you think about it after you die there is nothing, but how can there be nothing if there is so much here. There is never a moment ever where nothing is going on, right now you could stop reading, close your eyes and try to think about nothing...you cant, nothing is something and there is nothing you can do to make nothing nothing. We think about something every second of our life so how can that be turned into nothing when you die, where do all those thoughts go, what do you do, does everything go black and thats it? do you know when you die or is it just something that you never notice. I would really like to write more about this but this blog is not for me to write about my thoughts its for me to write about what I learn in the course so I will probably write about this somewhere else.
Death is something that I believe is seen differently by everyone because everyone lives a different life, because of this people might have gotten different ideas from our plays theme. In poems there is always what the author wanted to say and what the reader thought the author wanted to say, I believe that no interpretation of anything is ever wrong because if there is one thing I think that no one can be wrong about is an opinion, there may be opinions that are stronger or better or more coherent than others but that does not make lesser opinions wrong. Where I am trying to get is that if we were to thoroughly analise everything to do with death in our play we can get many different opinions and different interpretations of it.
Lets just focus on death in each of the characters for the moment, because one of the ways that you can interpret the characters in the play is that none of the characters was really alive ever. Starting with the boy, this character is dead because it is always connected to his technology and never takes part in what goes around him, he is socially dead. We have the farmer and his wife, he is dead because all he thinks about is his farm, another character that may be considered socially dead. His wife the mother in law appears twice and then dies just like the grandmother that only appears once and dies, but even though these two characters were very energetic they can be considered dead because they were never developed as a part of the play, no one really cared about them when they were there because the only one who cares about the mother in law is the father in law and her daughter and they are never there with her, the same with the grandmother, the only one that would have cared about her was McRobbie but he is dead; these characters are not really "dead" but they alone and when you die you die alone and going back to what I believe about death, they were alone with nothing around them so maybe they were very alive but their surroundings made them in a way "dead" because they were alone. The doctor does not care if they all die because he is already dead inside he also looks dead and does not know what is right and what is wrong, he is morally dead. Then we have the lawyer and the administrator, they both seem to hate their jobs and cant stand anyone but themselves at the end they can be considered the ones that are alive out of all the characters because they leave together but that was something that was done in a rush at the end of the production process. The administrator can also be considered morally dead because she does not care about the dead in the same way as the doctor, and that can be seen when she bangs the corpse with a hammer. Both nurses are dead because of the same reasons as the grandmother and the mother in law, because they can never be together, they are dead because of separation  and they may only be considered alive if they are together which they never are. The Ex-wife is the one that feels the loss of the husband so she is dead when he dies because she really loved him and his death "killed" her, she cant be with him so she is emotionally dead. The priest and the new wife are both dead because of greed, their greed cant make them live a normal life because they just think about money, the new wife just wants to open un her husband and get whatever is inside so she can get the money from the insurance company. The lawyer also wants this and the priest too so the three of them can be considered blinded by greed and in a way also dead.
The character that is really dead is McRobbie and because he is dead he has been freed from everything that makes the others dead, separation, greed, emotions etc. so in a way apart from the fact that he is already dead he can be considered the only one that is really alive.

Week# 17 One Act Play

Its finally over, we are done with the one act play and even though there were some mistakes and some things that could have been better it all went better than expected. The things that needed to be changed were not part of the final product, our play was good and the audience liked it so I feel that in the end it was more than what we were expecting. As far as the production goes, there are many things that I learned:

1) Dont do tomorrow what you could have done 2 days ago: never leave anything for the last day because then it will screw you up. There was one mistake in the play and that was that one of Stefano's breasts fell and that was because the decision to deflate one of the balls was made just when we were leaving for Hiram Bingham so we never got to actually rehearse with the new "Implants" so even though Stefano did a good job fixing it on stage when the breast fell, it is something that didn't need to happen. Also I think I should have gone to gamarra to buy everything before because we had many rehearsals where the costumes were not 100% ready so we couldn't know how it would all look like and in my case I didnt know how uncomfortable the doctors clothes really were until I actually tried them on 2 days before the play.

2)Don't be lazy: I admit that because of our laziness the designs for the costumes had to be done 4 or 5 times because we presented things that were either not done correctly or done very badly and because of that the process was stalled a bit.

3) Work Fast: if you dont work fast you loose time and with a thing like this time is very important because we actually had very little time to do everything and we did not realize that until it was too late and then we had to stay in school rehearsing until 7 pm

4) Learn your lines: that one is self explanatory

5) Work as a team: Many things happened throughout the whole process of doing the play that made us loose time, starting with the designs for the costumes, because of the costume team (Nicolas and I) we lost a couple of classes redoing everything and we could not go on with the makeup, sound, props and scenery. Also without mentioning names some people (including myself) did things or didn't do things that  made everything go slower and made all of us loose time.

Apart from all these things I believe that our play came out very good, with people saying that "It was the best one act play of the bunch" "It was the best one act play ever" and "Mejor Obra que he visto a lo que EVER! Felicitaciones!" so yeah it went better than expected.

P.S. I went to watch the other plays the next day and they were not all very good. The one from Markham was about 7 jewish kids, it was slow and boring, its game consisted mainly of projecting an image on a piece of scenery but it did not work. Maruf the Cobbler from St. Georges was a kids play so it was fine, it was cute and the little kids did a good job, a little bit too long though. The Gilded Bat from San Silvestre was good time but not necessarily good, aesthetically I really liked its gloomy look because it had a Tim Burton-ish feel and I believe they were going for something like that also because of the way they moved and the makeup helped the look very much. The only problem with this one is that it was fun at first but after the first few minutes it died down very quick and did not pick up so after 7 or 8 minutes I already wanted it to finish, it was the best out of the 4 though. The last one was from Hiram Bingham, it was simple and some of the acting was fun but apart from that it was dull and repetitive, I was really looking forward to this one and maybe that is why I disliked it so much; it had funny lines but it was an already scripted play so no props can be given to the school for that :/.

P.P.S. Hiram Binghams head master congratulated us for our play the second day saying that it was "the only play written and produced by the students" but we all know he meant "It was the only play worth paying for"