#metatheatre

[pascalgracia]

(Pascal Gracia)

[reading-plays-is-a-thing-we-do]

On This Day

22 January 1938

Our Town by Thornton Wilder premiered at the McCarter Theatre in Princeton, New Jersey.

It soon after opened at the Wilbur Theatre in Boston on January 25. It moved to the Henry Miller's Theatre in New York on February 4, then later moved to the Morosco Theatre.

Wilder won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1938 for Our Town.

[finelythreadedsky]

when odysseus says ὁρῶ γὰρ ἡμᾶς οὐδὲν ὄντας ἄλλο πλὴν | εἴδωλ᾽ ὅσοιπερ ζῶμεν ἢ κούφην σκιάν i am SO tempted to translate it as something like "i see that we who live are nothing but characters and fiction"

[docwormie]

Stella and Sadia or le Tango de l’Amour et de la Mort

In today's episode of "Parallels in Starmania that drive me insane", let's talk about Sadia and Stella ! I've always found their connection very intriguing since they never interact in canon, except during the Tango de l'Amour et de la Mort. I really love this song and I get why the 2022 production didn't want to bring it back, but it is a missed opportunity, as the 2022 ending makes it even more relevant by making both their deaths explicit.

(long rant ahead !)

In their introduction songs, Stella and Sadia are both defined by how they are perceived.

"Travesti" isn't about who Sadia is, but it is about what she appears as. The entire song is addressed to a general "vous", an imaginary audience composed of "les hommes qui murmurent". She describes herself as both an object of desire and of fear: she is only defined by other people's reactions and perception of her. 

The song basically tells us that Sadia is everything and nothing, all at once, and that we might try but we'll never truly understand what she wants and who she is... (it's been 45 years and I don't think anybody has fully figured it out yet)

The only sentences that are about who she is – not who she isn't or who she is in relation to someone else –  are "Je suis un travesti", "Je suis le sexe démystifié" and "Je suis la violence personnifiée". 

The first one is key to understanding her character through its several possible interpretations, but it is indefinite and doesn’t tell you who she is as much as it tells you she’s pretending to be something or someone. And the last two actually elevate her to the status of allegory: it's almost like she is worshiped as a symbol of transgression and a projection of people’s “secret desires” and “suppressed hatreds”... you know who that reminds me of ?

You guessed it, it's Stella, whom Zéro calls "déesse de l'amour, déesse de la guerre" ! Beyond the recurring religious lexical field and motifs that permeate Stella's storyline, she is also introduced through an external perception, since the first time we hear her name is in a magazine article. She quite literally first appears to us as "une image de magazine" !

Much like Sadia, Stella's first song is addressed to an audience of "vous" – arguably made up of the same men Sadia mentions in hers – and it's about the dichotomy between appearances and "l'envers du décor" (the main theme of Travesti is basically the relationship between "voir" and "savoir"). The only difference is that Sadia controls her image, using it to her advantage, whereas Stella's image controls her. This image keeps eluding her, no matter how hard she tries to keep up, because it is all just smoke and mirrors, and something she was never in control of: her very first line "On m'appelait Baby Doll" is in the passive form, as if the name "Baby Doll" wasn't objectifying enough <3

The reason I'm drawing a parallel between these two (and not with Cristal or Zéro who are also obsessed with their image) is not only the Tango and their reunion in the good old eros/thanatos motif, but also because I feel like their main obstacle in the show is that at some point, people stop looking at them and they can't bear it. 

They are both personas within their world: Stella Spotlight and Sadia are names they chose for themselves and they're both trying their best to hide the truth about who they are behind carefully constructed characters. That’s why when these characters can’t sustain them anymore, they annihilate themselves, in a way.

Stella can't exist without being looked at, she was born when she rose to fame and she dies alone in the dark. There is no Stella without Spotlight ! In the Adieux she wanted to make a grand show of her death and to be an object of consumption and entertainment until the very end. In Le Rêve, her death becomes the only thing that's truly hers and for no one else to see. (Also, I can't stop thinking about the fact that, since the tower exploded, no one ever knew how Stella really died :D)

Sadia is a character created for Johnny and the Etoiles Noires. So it’s fitting that she literally ceases to exist the moment Johnny sees Cristal, and Sadia (as in, whoever she was pretending to be) disappears when she loses her hold on him. The Etoiles Noires can't exist without Sadia but she can't exist without them either. 

Stella and Sadia cross paths at Naziland, just when keeping up pretences has become useless. The Tango is a mysterious song, but it is thematically relevant to the 2022 ending as it is a memento mori sung by the only two characters who know they’re going to die. 

Both Stella and Sadia are walking lies and they die when they exit the stage, leaving their respective images behind to reveal what was underneath. At their core, they’re theatre characters, which means they can not exist without an audience. 

Oh how I hate this musical <3

[difeisheng]

alright! theory time, because i've chosen to overthink.

we already know that the design of this game is sketchy. its tasks and goals are unreasonable, and with little additional incentive or instructions to succeed given to its players. and that's without the fact that the team running the game initially dropped man'er into the ending where she got burned alive, then tried to backtrack like it was nothing.

since that beginning, the flow of the narrative and the turns it's taken have fallen into what feels like a normal, slice-of-life story, not events happening in a game. we have no sense of man'er clocking in and out of the sim or how many hours she's spent there, or that she remembers or thinks much about her actual life, aside from the modern references she drops into her speech sometimes. if not for man'er still being fixated on her one thousand gold taels, it's very easy to forget that this world and most of its people aren't real, actually. and if this is an unintentional move, then that's the writers not paying enough attention to their actual story premise. but maybe this drawing of both man'er and the viewer into the world of the sim is deliberate, and is going to be a future plot point.

which brings us to this moment with shen nuo and shisan. i'm pretty sure most of us already think that shen nuo is another player in the game, and honestly given the clues and his reactions to different things now i'd be surprised if he wasn't. with this exchange, i'm thinking shisan could be a player as well. this line about forgetting identity could refer to shisan's infiltration of the theatre troupe, but it's also ambiguous— where is "here"? combined with how this world in the game is depicted, shen nuo's line becomes far more serious of a warning if he's telling shisan not to lose himself in the fiction of the game itself. as if perhaps the game wants him to.

maybe the real goal of the game is to keep all its conscious players within its universe long enough that they forget everything else. maybe everyone else was a player, once.

i've been wondering for a few episodes now if this story will eventually culminate in man'er and shen nuo having to break out of the game, and fight the ones who created it, because they tried to trap them inside. i guess we'll see what happens, and how deliberate this show has chosen to be.

[fallinginaforrest]

Something about the starlight theater being the theater that Black Friday played in (Hudson theater mainstage) is so special to me and I can't describe it

[shredsandpatches]

I always go on about how I don't think it's necessary for productions of Mefistofele to go all out to make the Prologue in Heaven scene (or the epilogue) visually spectacular because the music does all the work for you, and I stand by that, but I also have to say: I think I also think this because if I were directing it I would blow most of my effects budget on getting a hydraulic platform to do the flying effect at the end of the first act (think Wicked only with two people). And it would be 1000% worth it.

[shakespearenews]

This can resonate in summary, with characters giving repeated performances—like the hundreds of portrayals of Richard III and Hamlet in Karen Joy Fowler’s Booth, building up like tragic poison in John Wilkes Booth’s familial bloodstream; like the similarly toxic academic drilling of theatrical artifice of in M. L. Rio’s If We Were Villains, in which an overcommitment to the study of Shakespeare leads to a real-life murder—or, again, in Choi’s Trust Exercise. (Choi wins a particular genre-bending medal for having both a meta-play and a meta-novel in her work.)

[amarguerite]

“See How They Run” was a little too taken with pointing out its own cleverness but it was a real fun watch

[pascalgracia]

(Pascal Gracia)

[seraphfeathers]

One day I will write my unprompted essay on No Exit that frames Estelle as actor, Garcin as audience, and Inez as author, and examine how their power dynamics and who they’re trying to prove themselves to is fundamentally reversed, framing an inverted theatre as hell.

[whalemeansgrace]

Committed myself entirely to finishing all of my uni essays yesterday just because it was Spock’s birthday and I am both proud and ashamed to say that was indeed the motivation I needed to get them all done

[princesshollyberry]

have u listened to hadestown? if u haven't u should

hadestown? way down? way down under the ground?

TEHE OV COURSE.... not in a while though i don't often sit down still long enough to watch a full two acts. i remember the lighting and staging being amazing...... especially that part with the helmets. i've been waiting for a hot day in winter so i can say 'IIIN THE DARKEST TIME-'

[hypothetical-library]

why must i write an essay. can i not just send in a curated list of articles and expect my professor to draw the same conclusions i did. is that not enough. why must i explain the connections.

[hercorrupterofwords]

the way in which i find metatheatre and metaliterature so hot

[corpus-incorporated]

The thing is it’s all about artifice it’s all about performance and the self can only be seen when being deliberately expressed which is inherently going to be performance. Artifice is not necessarily unreal but it is necessarily deliberate and chosen for a reason no matter how subconscious. There’s something so meta about being openly transgender. I am artificial and you know I am artificial but even though a cherry lolipop doesn’t taste like cherries from a tree you’d still be foolish to call it anything but cherry flavoured. You’re constantly confronted by the tension between its reality and unreality. How something lies why they lie and what they lie about is just as much an expression of truth as the truths they do tell. There is a wall between everyone because we can only experience others with our flawed and distorted senses, and they can only transmit themselves to us with their flawed and distorted means of expression. We even have a wall between our own understanding of ourselves. There’s a reason we call it reflection.