Everyman?

Upon ending our unit on Greek Theater, class today mainly focused going back to the generic timeline following the progression of theater. We touched once again upon the Romans and their interpretation of theater after conquering the Greeks. For the most part everything sounded pretty familiar considering that we had discussed the subject before. The only truly new information I absorbed was the entire spiel regarding mythology, not just any mythology but Roman mythology. The entire Roman concept of the Pantheon was truly interesting in that religion was centered around practically a group of gods. This notion contributed to the later persecution of Christians in Rome due to their admonishment of the Pantheon because obviously their God was alone in his power.

From there we progressed to the Dark Ages during which the Church possessed power, eventually out of which the period of Medieval theater was born. As theater of that time was largely divided into the morality and the mystery/miracle play, our teacher thought it would be a timely opportunity to practice our devising skills, as green as they were. In preparation for creating our own morality play, today our class began reading through Everyman. The components of a miracle play are especially unique in the sense that the protagonist represents the greater majority of society while supporting characters take on personfications of abstract notions. In Everyman specifically, Everyman literally portrays "every man" in their inevitable journey towards death. Though we've only started a cold reading of the script I can't wait until we get the chance to modernize our own version of a morality play. The only thing that's irking me is the recreation of the language style typical of the morality play. Although it's not particularly rhyme-y, a certain grasp of sound and meter are required. As if devising wasn't already hard enough as it is...