The plot of this play was try to keep up. With things jumping from, incest, to best friends dying, to ex-girlfriends that aren't fat! The only key term was what we all consider a good word to use when you have no clear way to explain something in a way that would satisfy the person you are trying to convey the message.. Vera; uses the term from page one till the end. The playwright has made the choice of characters fit her play to convey the message of the points they would like to bring to the audience. Each thought does not really get resolved though and we feel we are left as readers to look for the next word to take us to a clear end.
Why did the playwright choose to write an ending about an avocado?
The motif changes slightly with the way it is brought up by Vera. She is often looking for a word to clear up a moment of text that we may have not understood, or maybe even wanted to stress by saying it again and louder. She is 91, surrounded by 20 year olds. I understand her pain. We can analyze the moments surrounding this term and see that at each moment the term is introduced there seems to be a slight change in the dynamic of the scene. First when Vera wants to talk about Rebecca and her "weight problem" though it brings on a new character that we had not previously seen. We see it later in the text when Vera brings up plot points like the sensitive subjects of Leo's mother and his incest with his sister Lily. Vera seems to be showing her age to Leo, but we as readers might be able to look at this in a different pattern. In fact Vera is clearly driving the action and placing her age and two sense in just when we may need some clarification to what is really going on in the play.
First of all, I love your title for this post. I too was fixated on this word. I'm still trying to work through it's significance(and I'm also unsure of the avocado significance). But I do want to pose a question: Is it incest if the two people involved aren't actually biologically related? Although they were raised together, Lily is adopted. And in that respect, should they feel guilty/shame about what they did? Not that I'm condoning or demonizing, but I thought it was an interesting question.
ReplyDeleteI liked when you said, "Vera is clearly driving the action..." because I hadn't really thought about that, but now it seems very true. She's always making the other characters confront things that wouldn't have otherwise been mentioned.
ReplyDelete