Thursday, February 13, 2014

Whaddayacallit! Oh, yeah 4000 Miles by Herzog

         In following with good terms of our statements from our professor Jenny Ballard how can you clearly locate a Major dramatic question in this play?  Throughout most of this play I was looking for some main theme, phrase, anything that would tie everything together and have meaning.  As for a motif all I could think of is; whaddayacallit!  

       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.