Their Turn

Theatre is definitely very different this year, considering the addition of fifteen IB juniors to our class of two. While they trudge through the syllabus as we had last year, Kim and I have been given time to finalize our script for The House of the Spirits. At this point, our script is currently being looked over by our teacher.

Theorists presentations have already began, but they are nothing like what I remembered from last year. Since there were only five of us in the class at any given time, we never learned beyond ten theorists within the whole year. Now, with the advantage of a much larger class, I have been able to be refreshed by reports on theorists I had previously heard as well as learn a lot of new information from others. Anton Chekhov was one of the more interesting theorists. What struck me about him were his plays and how they are often portrayed as humorous although he never intended them to be that way. Upon doing some more research about Chekhov, I learned that he was one of the firsts to employ the stream of consciousness technique in his writing. This a style that I have encountered in English class already through the writings of Naguib Mahfouz in his novel The Thief and the Dogs. Chekhov, supposedly the second most popular playwright in the English-speaking world, is often times associated with the Stanislavsky method. Stanislavsky wrote that "Chekhov often expressed his thought not in speeches but in pauses or between lines or in replies consisting of a single word." The style of Chekhov's works seem to underscore the entire idea of the subtext in a script.