| Sorry it's taken me several days to reply, garyd | |
| Posted by: AlanScott 09:54 pm EDT 06/25/19 | |
| In reply to: re: My opinion—- Spoilers! Beware - garyd 01:42 am EDT 06/20/19 | |
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| I wrote a reply to you a few days ago, but I wanted to re-read all the Jeeter stuff in the play before posting it. And now that I have, I have revised what I almost posted a few days ago. I don't find the Jeeter of the play to be more sympathetic than Jud. If anything, I think he’s less sympathetic than Jud. He’s really a scary creep. He’s troubled, but he seems even scarier and more dangerous than Jud. Even more than in the musical, it seems like he would rape Laurey and then possibly kill her if given the chance. I've always found Jud in the musical a partly sympathetic character, but he is also a dangerous sociopath. I think the trick is to make him understandable, almost certainly the victim of some kind of severe child abuse, and not just scary and creepy, and yet to make him also scary and creepy and someone you'd never want to know and whom you would probably reject if you did know him. If we can trust what Hammerstein wrote about the song in his Notes on Lyrics, Riggs approved the song because “It will scare hell out of the audience.” So that doesn’t necessarily suggest that he viewed Jeter very sympathetically. I realize, of course, that both can be possible, and I would think that both Riggs and Hammerstein wanted us to feel some degree of sympathy for him but not too much. And, really, I think any sympathy we feel for Jeeter in the play comes only in his final lines after Laurey fires him. I think a useful comparison might be made between "Lonely Room" and the Judge's "Johanna," but I'll leave that for another day. |
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| Previous: | re: My opinion—- Spoilers! Beware - garyd 01:42 am EDT 06/20/19 |
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