Some Theatrics

Image from Daily Mail Online.

The third year students in my department put on a play. There were two performances, one last night and one tonight. I went to see tonight’s showing. “Ile” by Eugene O’Neill was the 35th play performed by the university’s English Department. Other past plays included a number of Shakespeare plays, of course; as well as some other famous plays, such as Oscar Wilde’s “The Importance of Being Earnest”, Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman” and Peter Shaffer’s “Amadeus”.

“Ile”, which is colloquial for “oil”, referring to whale blubber, is a one act play about a stubborn captain that refuses to turn his ship back until he has filled his quota of “oil”. They have been out to sea for over two years and the crew is on the verge of mutiny. Also on the ship is the skipper’s wife who was adamant to come along with her husband, but is slowly going insane from the "prison" of the Arctic Ocean.

In all, the play was quite well performed and the students clearly spent a lot of time and energy preparing for it. (Many of them have been skipping my classes, to my chagrin!) While their English pronunciation wasn’t too bad, they did, however, struggle with natural intonation, stressing some words and leaving others unstressed at peculiar place, which sounded a bit odd to the native ear. Otherwise, mostly well acted.

Image from New Yorkology.

Speaking of plays, there is a play that I’ve been wanting to see, but unfortunately the rendition currently performed in Korea is not in English. “Spring Awakening” is a 2006 (rock) musical that won eight Tony Awards. It is based on the controversial 1891 play of the same title by Frank Wedekind. The play is set in the late 1800s and is about teenagers’ “awakening” to their sexuality and touches on such taboos as suicide, abortion and masturbation.

After some detective work I was able to find an on-line version of it. After watching it on my computer I’m now even keener to see it live, but I’m still not sure if I want to see it performed in Korean.

A queer little serendipitous coincidence is that the original "Spring Awakening" musical is currently playing at the Eugene O'Neill Theatre in New York. Yip, the same Eugene O'Neill that wrote "Ile", the play I watched tonight. As I mentioned elsewhere on this blog, I often experience such synchronicity in my life (or maybe I'm just good at seeing peculiar links between things -- a type of unintended lateral thinking).

The YouTube-video below is of a short performance at the 2007 Tony Awards.