#American play

[geraldcrich]

A Streetcar Named Desire (1947)

[potatotalksculture]

About yesterday…

“The Inheritance” at Berliner Theatertreffen

[Spoilers for the drama „The Inheritance” ahead] + [I am going to edit this post as I keep remembering different things that were important to me.]

Yesterday I’ve spent over seven hours in a theatre to watch the German interpretation of “The Inheritance” by Matthew Lopez. And I might write a long and exhausting essay about it one day, but first some takes to take them off my mind:

This book is a masterpiece. Everyone! Go read it.

The interpretation was good because it left the text a lot of space to speak for itself. The actors embodies the characters well (I could die for M. Goldberg as Morgan) and let the words carry the emotions through them.

The German audience still can’t deal with emotional outburst. Especially if those are emotional outbursts of gay men. They read it as being played for laughs. (Some slightly older lady got a giggles attack she couldn’t control after Henry proposed to Eric. As Henry went down on his knee to make the proposal look even more serious, she bursted with laughter.) (A lot of voices in the foyer was complaining about this play not telling any story. W? T? F?)

On the other hand it was a wonderful evening, spent with a group of friends. None of them giggled during the performance.

What has rubbed me the wrong one and what at least one of the critics of the Munich performance points out is the lack of women on the stage. Because, you know, representation. BUT the story was written by a man for other men about their inheritance, also about love and friendship among them. I assume it’s not unusual for a gay friend group to have close to none female friends that would belong to the core group. This is for the realists among the critics. For the dramaturges among them: This play is about the male gay community. This is not about the lesbians caring for men suffering from an HIV infection. Their mothers and grandmothers are mentioned throughout the story. And maybe we should accept that this is it? This is the world of the characters of the play. They don’t have any relationship with women that would be relevant to this story or are relevant enough to be showed instead of told.

The German reviewers often compare the play to a “sitcom” and a “soap opera”. I do not agree.

[cookinguptales]

I MEAN but wouldn't that be an incredible isekai series??

a modern princess whose job is basically just being a beautiful figurehead

grows bored with her vapid role in life and withdraws from society, riddled with ennui

only to fall into a fantasy realm where princesses have real political power

as well as important responsibilities that her subjects depend upon

and at first it's a comedy of errors as she realizes that none of her training prepared her for this

but then she grows as a person and applies herself to learning how to guide and guard this kingdom

and becomes the powerful and just princess she was always meant to be

...so I guess apparently my new favorite conspiracy theory is that kate's shoujo manga just underwent a MASSIVE genre switch.

[pumpkins-and-penguins]

best part of fantasy high has to be that brennan lee mulligan famously

a. did not attend high school

b. is not from a suburb

[bivampir]

it's SO funny that when asked what he had to do to prepare for his role in IWTV Sam Reid says he had to learn how to play the piano, learn to speak French, Italian, and English with a French accent. Bailey read IWTV religiously and added her own comments, and kept an actual fucking journal she wrote entirely as Claudia. meanwhile Jacob Anderson, when asked the same question, just responds with “oh nothing, i was already emo”. icons and legends only

[misstitched-doll]

Look at them!

They ✨️match✨️

Also!

They like cats!🐱🐈‍⬛

[drinkinggblood]

And I saw, and behold a white horse: and he that sat on him had a bow; and a crown was given unto him; and he went forth conquering and to conquer.

[stil-lindigo]

it’s 10pm. do you know who you are?

[toiletpotato]

The 2023 American Girl Doll of the Year is Kavi Sharma, a South Asian American theatre kid who loves Wicked SO SHE HAS A REPLICA ELPHABA COSTUME. I am absolutely ecstatic that kids get this.

edit: SHE ALSO HAS A GLINDA COSTUME

SHE ALSO HAS THIS!! BECAUSE SHE PERFORMS A TRADITIONAL DANCE ROUTINE WITH HER FRIENDS AT SCHOOL AND SHE LOVES BOLLYWOOD

[citrussmootee]

i finaallly got to play one of my dream games WEEEEEEHEEEEEEEEE

[centaurianthropology]

One thing that I think a lot of Disco Elysium meta misses (likely because a lot of it is very clearly written by young Americans writing from an intensely American-centric cultural perspective without even really realizing it) is that one of the singular and central themes of the game is massive-scale generational trauma in a home that is economically collapsing as its resources and people are being drained by an occupation.  People have noted that no one tries to help Harry, despite the fact his mental illness is incredibly obvious to everyone around him.  He tells Kim that he completely lost his memory, and Kim politely asks him to focus on the work.  He tells Gottlieb that he had a heart attack, and Gottlieb tells him that if he’s still alive it couldn’t have been that bad.  That he’ll drop dead sooner or later, but then so does everyone.

And that’s the most important thing: so does everyone.  Look at Martinaise.  Look at the world in which Harry lives.  It is not our own, but it is adjacent to ours.  More specifically, it is clearly adjacent to the states of the Eastern Bloc: overtaken and occupied by a faraway government that clearly doesn’t care about Revachol or its people.  And that is obvious in every tired face, every defeated citizen, everyone trying to eke out a little happiness or meaning in spite of the overwhelming trauma and damage around them.  The buildings are still half-destroyed.  The bullet holes are still in the walls.  The revolution was decades before, but it still feels to the people there like a fresh wound.  The number of men of Harry’s generation who are not alcoholic or otherwise deeply fucked up are very few.  Some, like Kim, hide it better, but the deeper you dig into his history, the more you realize how damaged Kim is.  He’s more than a little trigger happy, and hates that about himself, but he is a product of his environment: Kim’s entire life is seeing people he cared about shot and killed, so his instinct now is to shoot first himself, to protect those few people left who still matter to him.

Harry is not unique in his trauma.  He is a distillation of an entire culture of people who tried to rise up and make something beautiful, and were instead routed and occupied.  He is trapped between the occupation and the people on the ground, along with all the rest of the RCM.  Their authority comes from the occupying government, but it is implied that they were formed out of the remnants of the citizens militia which sprung up from Revachol itself as a way to try to mitigate some of the horrors being committed on its streets.  The Moralintern sure as hell wasn’t going to get their hands dirty, so they happily conscripted (and therefore could better control) this group, who are only recognized in certain places, and whose authority mostly amounts to giving out fines.  The RCM is corrupt, but it is corrupt in the same way its culture is.  Bribes are considered standard with them, not a moral failing, but a necessity, so long as those bribes are correctly logged as ‘donations’.  It’s how the RCM stays afloat, and the rest of Revachol completely understands that.  Everyone would take a bribe if it meant they kept eating.  Everyone would take a little under-the-table money if it meant keeping a roof over their heads.  The officersof the RCM certainly don’t make enough to see a doctor.  They have an in-house lazarus, and if he can’t fix them they just die.  Mental health care?  What mental health care?  Harry doesn’t get it for the same reason no one else does: it doesn’t really seem to exist.  There are no counselors, no psychologists, no psychiatrists.  How would they even start?  If the world is what is broken, if everyone is suffering a similar catastrophic amount, it makes sense that Harry’s trauma would simply get rolled up with all the rest.  Kim asks him to get on with the job because Harry’s suffering is not remarkable in Revachol.  He is one of an entire generation who have an astronomical number of orphans from the revolution, and so many younger people are left more or less orphans as their parents drink themselves into oblivion like Cuno’s father.  So Harry’s truly unique attribute is embodying all that trauma, having it all inside of him, filling him to bursting.

To really engage with the themes of the game, engaging first and foremost with the reality of Revachol is imperative.  Imposing our own reality onto Revachol, particularly if coming from an American perspective (which tend to have the habit of both viewing the world through an American lens and not realizing they’re doing it because they’ve never experienced a different lens), will always feel shallow to me because of this.

All that is to say, I would love to hear some more explicitly European meta about this game, and especially Eastern European meta.  If anyone can point me to some good, juicy essays from that perspective, I would be grateful!

[serenado-exe]

So anyway -

The point is that Pizza Tower still has a racist, outdated stereotype of Indigenous people in the Oregano Desert level.

It even has a achievement for rain dancing around a totem pole (totem poles are a Pacific Northwest thing, not a Plains Tribe thing). They war cry at you and they throw tomahawks (because it's always tomahawks or spears).

Bellyache about the screencaps being 5 years old if you want, but the stereotype made it into the game, so he hasn't changed that much. He didn't change enough to have a shred of awareness about using a racist stereotype. And before anyone tries: that trope isn't a hallmark of Wario games or 90s animation, it's a hallmark of racism.

Even if he "doesn't" make bigoted jokes anymore (though I would consider the Tribe Cheese one such joke), he made an entire level based around that trope.

And like every other time there's an anti-Indigenous caricature in videogames or popular media, it doesn't get mentioned, or it gets glossed over because the creator went "Oopsie! That was cringe."

The exclusion of the Tribe Cheese from that salvo of screenshots undermines the entirety of it, because it's a solid example of him not having changed enough to be conscious beyond "that was unfunny," and everyone just focuses on what he said and when - without the connection to how that mindset still lingers in the final product of the game.

[st-hedge]

I’m smitten with these idiots right now so *shoves this onto the table and runs away*

[eirene]

Lady in the Sunlight, 1928

Andrew Loomis

[nobody-2116]

Trevor Hills from American Arcadia

[k-i-l-l-e-r-b-e-e-6-9]

𝔍𝔞𝔭𝔞𝔫𝔢𝔰𝔢 𝔥𝔬𝔯𝔯𝔬𝔯 𝔪𝔬𝔳𝔦𝔢 𝔭𝔬𝔰𝔱𝔢𝔯𝔰