Arcadia Analysis

At the Kearsarge 2018 Regional Theatre Festival, Oyster River High School gave a performance of Peter Tarsi’s Tracks. The play, depicting multiple characters navigating the afterlife, uses its production elements effectively throughout to help convey the story. As a whole, the actors’ performances help to define their characters, who are often portrayed as modern archetypes. But despite all this, the play falls victim to the inconsistencies and often plodding nature of the script. Ultimately, the poor story structure stops the entire production in its tracks.

Arcadia is a play obsessed with many different kinds of knowledge. The characters seek three different kinds of knowledge: mathematical knowledge, historical knowledge, and sexual knowledge. By intertwining two stories of the same family both past and present, Arcadia seems to ask a particular question: what is the meaning of self and how does one know it? Though the two stories have strictly separate plots, settings, and words, there persists the same question of identity for all characters. This search for identity is related to the performance theory Schechner discusses in Performance Studies: An Introduction and the performative nature of societies around the world.

Symposium is a gathering hosted by Agaton to celebrate his first tragedy award for playwriting. Each of the guests gave a speech about love. The speech dealing with questions about what is love; interpersonal relationships through love; what types of love are worthy of praise; the purpose of love; and others. A series of speech about the love ended by the entry of Alcibiades, known as a wealthy aristocrat of Athens for his good-looking, and political career. He entered the discussion drunkenly supporting by a flute-girl, follow upon his speech about love. His unexpected entrance and speech dramatically changed the mood left from Diotima’s serious dialogue with Socrates about the ideal love. The first five speeches contradicted each other and were reconciled in Diotima’s speech, especially her speech about “Ladder if love” and “love of wisdom ”, which implies the delicate relationship between Alcibiades and Socrates.

Throughout the play there is a constant theme of love and fate, I shall analyse this theme and show how

Throughout the play, the use of allusions is borrowed from other texts, in which creates effect towards the theme by knowing each character’s flaw and how they symbolize a different theme. For example, Troy’s brother Gabriel is represented as the savior and messenger of the play by always discussing about St. Peter, and his theme encompasses as a biblical feature. Not only that, but Troy’s wife Rose is portrayed as the supporting and loving person of the play by always trying to solve problems between Troy and Cory, in which her theme perpetuates as a family feature by versing to biblical allusions. For that reason, by the text borrowing from other texts, it adds concrete details by supplying evidence from other sources, in order to designate a definite purpose. Nevertheless, the effects of an allusion creates credibility to a setting by the historical allusions given in the story plot, in which incorporates the background knowledge of what’s going on during the time set by the story

Lysistrata by Aristophanes is seen to be a comical play used to show the impact of war not only on the ones physically in the war, but the ones mentally involved also. This play was written to help express the feeling the author had about the war occurring during the time the work was written. Lysistrata, the main character, is a strong woman who decides to become as what could be said as being “rebellious”. She does this by refusing to have sexual relations with the men in the city until it was agreed that peace would be declared between the two troops. She calls a meeting with the women in the city and include them in her vindictive ideas to bring the war to an end. This play is sure to bring a smile to the readers face due to the comical events that occur. However, comedy is not the only thing that becomes apparent within the play. Throughout the work of Lysistrata there are three themes that become apparent during this play: peace and harmony, control by gender, and politics.

Sarah Ruhl’s play, Eurydice, is a devastating story battling love, grief, life, and death. Although it is set during the 1950’s, the play manages to encompass the ancient Greek myth of Eurydice and Orpheus. The three most evident themes of this play are recurring death, fleeting happiness, and the power of love. The main conflict in this play is ultimately about the painful choice that comes with death; this is often caused by the King of the Underworld. One of the most impressive parts of this play is the ability to change the way the play is perceived through design.

 In the plays female sexuality is not expressed variously through courtship, pregnancy, childbearing, and remarriage, as it is in the period.  Instead it is narrowly defined and contained by the conventions of Petrarchan love and cuckoldry.  The first idealizes women as a catalyst to male virtue, insisting on their absolute purity.  The second fears and mistrusts them for their

Many people love romantic comedies. Some of these stories are based around misunderstandings, which add humor to the plot. This, of course is similar to Rostand’s play Cyrano De Bergerac, but Ibsen’s play, A Doll’s House, is centered around a relationship full of deceit. It has a pleasant facade, but when the viewer digs deeper into it, they find out the dark reality of the relationship of the main couple. Communication is vital to any relationship. A group of friends need to communicate openly in order to remain friends. The same thing applies to spouses. For the purpose of this essay, Cyrano and Roxane from Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac, and Nora and Torvald from Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House” will be compared. The relationships of Nora and Torvald, and Roxane and Cyrano are different in many ways but they have one thing in common, a lack of communication. Thus, by this

In the Land of Ancient Greece, one of power Gods and Legendary hero’s. Two men wrote two extraordinary plays about the lives of the Greek people. The first was written by the author Sophocles, and his work Antigone is a play about a young girl who goes against the wishes of her king to abided by the will of the Gods. The second was written by Aristophanes and this piece of work was called Lysistrata. This play told the tale of the women of Greece as they try and find a way to end the Peloponnesian War. These two tales both revolve around the women of Greece however, these two tales show us that both what traditional life was like for the women of Greece and how those same beliefs were at times challenged. In this essay, I will explore how both

While Arcadia by Tom Stoppard is a play that intertwines a lot of humor with mathematical and scientific reasoning, it also conveys a message regarding the dangers and chaos of absolute knowledge. Much of what occurs in Acadia relates to the article The Dangers of Certainty: A Lesson From Auschwitz written Simon Critchley. In today’s modern society, Stoppard’s play is about why scientists proceed in researching concepts that yield nothing; it is about why people associate themselves with endearment in face of the disruption that it can cause. The characters in the play struggle, and often fail in their attempts for certainty, falling into irritation with others.

Theme – the reason behind why the playwright wrote the play. “Patterns of life”, a slice of reality.

The poetic tone of Aristophanes' Lysistrata differs greatly from the poetic tone of the Greek tragedies we have read in class. However, after analyzing this Greek comedy, it seems to share some of the main characteristics of Euripides' Medea. Within these plays, we meet shrewd, powerful masculine women who use the art of manipulation to get what they want from others and to accomplish their goals. This theme of manipulation is employed through various means and techniques. The women of these plays also seem to contradict the stereotypical woman and have characteristics similar to the Homeric Greek warrior.

As the famous Greek playwright Euripides once said: “Stronger than lover's love is lover's hate. Incurable, in each, the wounds they make.” Such ideas are portrayed in one of him most famous plays, Medea. This play is a fascinating classic centered on the Greek goddess Medea. Despite its recent fame, during his time, Euripides was unpopular since he used what would be considered a ‘modern’ view where he would focus on women, slaves and persons from the lower classes. In the play, Medea commits filicide, which initially appears extremely horrendous, but as the audience is guided through the play, they develop sympathy towards Medea. In order to achieve this empathy and enhance the understanding of Medea’s pride and ideals, Euripides

First, one of the conflicts of Desire under the Elms that stood out was the love triangle of the characters Eben, Cabot, and Abbie. Interestingly, social commentary is style that delivers commentary on matters in society. In fact, you can observe Euripides’s influence as he is famous for the social commentary style in theatre history. This love triangle is a great example of social commentary since these types of dysfunctional situations have been common since the beginning of time. Love triangles may lead to tragic events which cause foreseen consequences that change the lives of all that is involved. In addition to Greek tragedy, the murder of Abbie’s child is another great representation for the reason that it was the result of Abbie’s and Eben’s affair. Moreover, Abbie could not take the thought of losing Eben, so she decided to take her baby’s life to manipulate him to stay with her.