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Machinal And Expressionism

Decent Essays

Djordje Janicijevic Sophie Treadwell’s play,
Machinal is an expressionistic play written in 1928, depicting a life of young woman who can not adapt with people and environment around her.
Expressionism, is an artistic style that originated in Germany at the end of the 19th century in which the artist aims to depict subjective perspective of the character through distortion and exaggeration of reality. Expressionist plays often amplify the inner awakening and suffering of the main character. The expressionist dramas have specificity in: mood atmosphere, setting, plot, structure, characters, dialogue, movement, acting style. In this reading response paper, I will define few specific elements of expressionistic drama that I …show more content…

Interactions among the characters in the first scene seem to be rhythmical, energetic and robotic. With a rapid dialogue and robotic movements of characters, scene gains a dream like state. Regarding plot and structure of the play we can see that the play is disjointed and broken into episodes. We have 9 episodes in machinal. Episodes such as
To Business, At Home or
Honeymoon and etc
.
Each of these episodes makes point of it’s own and they are not causally

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