In his play Time Stands Still, Donald Margulies focuses on the complex relationship between Sarah, a photojournalist, and her boyfriend James, a former war reporter. Both of them have witnessed first hand the tragedy and devastation faced in war zones overseas, which is a factor in the growing tension in their relationship. The tension continues to develop once Sarah’s editor Richard enters the scene with his new young wife Mandy. Time Stands Still explores numerous aspects of communication through the interactions between these four characters. A major aspect of the play is the controversial discussion on the moral dilemma involved in documenting war tragedies instead of intervening. This play also showcases an interesting dynamic between …show more content…
Throughout the play, Sarah has stated how invested she is in her job, seeing it as her duty to photograph the devastation overseas. She is adamant about going back once her injuries are healed, regardless of what the other characters tell her. This drive to go back to her job not only stems from her passion, but her insistence that documenting gruesome events is a necessary and important job. Sarah sees what she is doing as helpful. This is seen when she states that she helps “by gathering evidence. To show the world. If it weren’t for people like me… Who would know? Who would care?” (p.39). When discussing the actual gruesome elements with Mandy, Sarah does not show any emotion, citing that the distressful violence is exactly why she believes her work must be done. Mandy, on the other hand, has an argument centered around emotion. She immediately gets emotional when looking at the pictures, and shows anger for the first time in the play when she yells at Sarah for not intervening and assisting those she photographed. She states that Sarah “could have been helping them” (p.39), and saw Sarah taking photos as the same as doing
Sarah is a very selfless person because in the short story she put each of her family
Innocence first proclaims itself when Sarah discovers that she is not returning home. Sarah’s behaviour and lack of understanding towards pressing information is a portrayal of how she has been raised to be quite naïve. These preceding traits are revealed when Sarah explains to her brother, “I’ll come back for you later. I promise.” (9). Here, Sarah proves her innocent nature as a result of being raised by her parents in an exceedingly structured way. Guilt emanates into Sarah’s moral conscience when her father confesses that “we are not going back. They won’t let us back.” (23). Furthermore, Sarah’s sheltered upbringing is proved to be true when she smiles at a boy during the roundup and he looks back at her like she’s crazy. She then thinks to herself, “Maybe [I] had got it all wrong. / … Maybe things were not going to
One morning, when I shook Sarah’s hand, she didn’t wake up. Her hand felt cold, so I pulled her yellow blanket up around her shoulders. I crawled back into my own bed and waited. Every few minutes I called, “Where’s Sarah?”, but she just kept on sleeping.
The play is episodic. Tension builds throughout each scene so that the audience can see the deeper mystery and bigger
What I feel is one of the most important aspects of the play is the
A short play is usually filled with a theatrical energy of diverse anthologies. The time allotted may be only ten or fifteen minutes, so it must be able to capture and engage the audience with some dramatic tension, exciting action, or witty humor. Just as in a short story, a great deal of the explanation and background is left for the reader or viewer to discover on their own. Because all the details are not explicitly stated, each viewer interprets the action in their own way and each experience is unique from someone else viewing the same play. Conflict is the main aspect that drives any work of literature, and plays usually consist of some form of conflict. In “Playwriting 101:
This echos Angelou's quote as Sarah cannot handle the events she goes through, therefore she lets these events affect her negatively. To begin, her experience in the concentration camp makes her lose faith in staying alive. She sees so many horrific situations, as Rosnay states, “she could see the dislocated body of the woman, the bloody skull of the child, sliced open like a ripe tomato” (33). Witnessing this traumatic event cause her to believe that she will die too, that there is no point of trying, as she she will die anyways. She also loses her longing to live when she visits her house after escaping the concentration camp. When she arrives in her house she notices “the new wallpaper, the new bed, the book, the belongings that had nothing to do with her” (160), as another family takes her home. She comes to realization that she no longer has a home to live in, that everything is taken away from her, which causes her to think that she has no one to live for anymore. Furthermore, she keeps having flashbacks of all members of her family's death, which drives her to commit suicide. Sarah further explains this event in her letter to her brother, Michel, when she writes, “ I carry the burden of your death like I would a child. I will carry it till the day I die. Sometimes, I want to die. I cannot bear the weight
The play makes you think, whether for a split moment or a long time, about the idea of being aware while going about even the most menial of tasks.
The overall dramatic meaning of this play has been successfully shown by the elements of drama. The
Sarah experiences another event where all she can do is helplessly witness
Furthermore, Sarah expressed significant self-esteem issues related to her abilities to achieve vocational goals. Furthermore, she described herself as “pervasively self-critical.” She stated she became aware of a very strong negative view of herself during therapy her last psychologist. She reported she attributes positive characteristics to others instead of
Sarah's Key contains some of the most powerful, heart-wrenching scenes ever filmed -- and this is not sensationalism, but truth. This film is important for making everyone aware of a particularly horrific episode in France during World War II and -- if you didn’t know -- what human beings are capable of, for ill as well as for good.
Throughout the first act of the film, just by being introduced to Sarah 's family the audience can see that Sarah is a stubborn and selfish character. However, as Sarah is first implied as being elaborate and mean we also see Sarah 's considerate side come out as she begs the Goblin King to give Toby back to her.
To begin with, in this play the author unfolds family conflicts that involve its characters into a series of events that affected their lives and pushed them to unexpected ways.
shall firstly do a summery of the play and give a basic image of what