play structure

Description:

This week we discuss about how doing a play review and went over La falsa Criada. When we talked about how to analyze the structure of the play and that this was important to see how the play works this really caught my attention.

Analysis:

In la falsa criada the scenes seem to be short, because of the entries but it also have some long scenes like the first one, or at least it feels long as the actions are slow and without a clear intention. In general La falsa criada short scenes help to give dynamism to the play and this works, because although it doesn’t follow a direction and design concept it at least have rhythm.

In A matter of dissection we divided the play in beats, this made the “scenes” even shorter. The beats were also marked by the exits and enter of a character as each character will change the situation in a way. This really helped to made the play fast and “digestible” because as the situation was always changing and the change of characters was fun we could catch the audience attention. Also it didn’t get boring as short scenes and fast changes help.

Another play would be shadow queendom. This play had longer scenes, this had another effect than the plays above. The long scenes gave the possibility to play with the audience perspective because they needed longer time to realize what character was the audience representing and how they are. Because just knowing the name of the character wasn’t enough but a longer time was needed to show how does this character relate with the other characters and how much information they know. This wouldn’t be able with short scenes as they would not found the “connection” with the character the audience was representing.

Connections:

How long and short scenes are relate to our daily life, we can see that sometimes and hour passes as minutes, or sometimes minutes passes as hours. When there are many changes it would feel as time has passed quickly but if we are doing the same thing without variations it would feel as it is very long. This is how audience sometimes perceives time in plays. A scene may be short, but if things don’t change may seem long. In the other hand a scene may be long, as in shadow queendom, but as new information is given, the space is used in different ways, characters enter and leave, etc., it may seem short.

Conclusion:
How a play is structure sometimes seems not relevant, and we don’t give much focus onto this so later is difficult to analyze as we need to play close attention to decide when a scene starts and ends. Although it seems no relevant how long or short a scene is and what makes it fast or slow may be one of the main reasons of why a play work as this influence if the audience will keep interested or not in the play. So until what extend does the play does the connection with the audience rather than the structure?