If you were to take out the
beginning monologues, you would essential be creating a different play
altogether. The first monologues are there to give background information, and
insight to the different way, beliefs, and traditions within the community. What
Smith has managed to do in this script is to create a smooth transition from
topic to topic, and give the people involved and affected by the event an
identity. Take a look at the second and third monologues of the play, Static
and 101 Dalmatians. In these monologues, the two different sides of the community
have their own separate voice, their own stories to tell. For Static, you have
a woman relaying a challenge she faced on Sabbath, and what she had to do to
overcome it, even though she was viewed as stupid or ignorant by those who did
not understand her culture. In 101 Dalmatians, he talks about how special
people always told him he was, and then when he ventured past those peoples
boundaries, he was viewed as nothing and treated as nothing. The final two lines
of that monologue is:
“And then there’s a point when,
And then these two things come into contact.”
These
are very important to the script. It foreshadows the major event of this script
that about to come up, and is the main subject of this play. If you were to
just start from the middle of the script, you will have taken away the
character's identity, and turned them into just another news story yet again. These
transitions within the play allows the people to ease into the situation at
hand and not have to face it all at once, without having any idea of how to
take it. They would automatically choose a side, without knowing the way of the
two different types of people involved. With that being said, I think the
original sequence of events should be kept intact, and included with the rest
of the play.
I agree that the beginning monologues were used as an introduction and as transitions but what affect did they have on your interpretation of the script? Why contextually rather than mechanically do you think she chose to include those monologues? I like that you talked about the way they foreshadow the major event of the script and that had she not included them, the characters would become just part of another news story. (I touched on that too!! :))
ReplyDeleteThe beginning monologues allowed me to create an image of the people who were affected by this incident, and relate to their identity. With this i was able to understand how both sides felt, and also understand their different reactions to the events.
DeleteYou make a pretty good point, Morgan, in bringing up that the play would be just like a news story if it did not include the first half of the play. We would have no more reason to care for these people than if we had just seen a blurb on the bottom of a different newscast. Without the context of identity and the social circumstances before the event, the actual events of the Crown Heights Riots really don’t mean anything. It’s just another statistic, right?
ReplyDelete