| What the THIS | |
| Last Edit: Singapore/Fling 01:53 am EDT 07/19/20 | |
| Posted by: Singapore/Fling 01:51 am EDT 07/19/20 | |
| In reply to: What what WHAT? - Genealley 12:22 am EDT 07/19/20 | |
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| Aside from point number four, you're supposed to be asking those questions and living in the unknowing of it all. Arberry is very intentional about presenting you a group of complicated, genuine people with a worldview that may be utterly alien to you, expressed in all of its contradictions, for you to hear and acknowledge that it exists. And then what do you do with that? He's not going to do the work of digesting it for you. As Robert O'Hara wrote in another Fall PH play, you should choke a little bit as a you digest the play. It shouldn't be easy for you. Aa for me: whose side do I take? No one's, because they're all living in world that makes no sense to me, its rules and structures built upon a belief in God as the center of all moral decision making. I don't even know how to talk to people like that, much less understand what they are thinking, which is why it is so important that they be given ample space to share their thoughts so that I fully get their arguments. And it's important for us as Americans to hear their arguments. Watching this play made me realize that there is a whole swathe of this country who might as well live on Mars for how much I have in common with them, and that is frightening to me. Not only do I have more in common with secular or mildly religious people in countries on the other side of the world than I do with Evangelicals who live in Wyoming, I share my values with those people rather than with my fellow Red-State Americans. I align my sense of right, wrong, and collective responsibility on a completely different axis than these Americans, who are acting from their sense of rightness and decency while supporting an authoritarian, far-right political agenda opposed to providing the bare minimum of public good, such as education or healthcare, to people who don't share their belief system. That, I think, is one way of understanding the terrible sound we keep hearing that disrupts these otherwise perfectly civil people having a deep discussion of how they make sense of our world. Call that sound the playwright, call that sound the President, call that sound the culmination of ten thousand violin strings dying as all of the cherry orchards in the world succumb to climate change, global pandemic, and economic collapse. Call that sound what happens when half the country is in violent struggle with other half, or at least what happens when one woman is trying to resolve that division within herself. I think at its most literal, that sound is the broken psyche of the daughter, who has love and compassion for people who live in these two different Americas, and I don't think it's a stretch to read her illness as metaphorically embodying the schism and the damage of our country, not just now but in the course of its entire history of systemic oppression and state violence. Call that sound what is happening outside your window right now. |
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