Jenny's Final Elephant Blog

Hi Erica and George,

Great, great job this semester! It's been really fascinating to watch the two of you approach the play -- I feel like a lot of the work you were doing was on as much of a micro-level as a macro-level, which was very instructive. I think that everything you've done has helped to clarify and magnify Mary's story, which is exciting. George, I'm gonna take a page from you and give my comments in no particular order.

- I love the Hungry Townsperson at the end. Like Carrie, I think the only reason he ever needs to give for his clear memory is that he eats peanuts; while the anthropologist/Henry James lover is totally interested in his liminality/outsider status, I think that's actually a function of the degree to which the play allows me to feel like "audience" -- because if I were in the audience, this is probably what I'd talk about at the coffee shop the next day.

- I liked just about everything you did to the text during NWF. George knows this already because I was sitting next to him and kept elbowing him at every change, saying "nice."

- At the risk of repeating what has been said in class and on the blog, I'm a fan of the Strongman, and his lyricism in the final monologue is nice. Don't know whether it was how he was played or the text, but I feel like he's still the character I'd like to see clarified and/or made more vital to the motion of events.

- Speaking of motion,I think a lot of the questions I still have relate much more to the play's staging, and how to keep a strong sense of motion going. The text certainly does; it's how to bring that same sense of vitality and push forward to a fully staged play. Given that as my lingering question, I am SO excited that we'll all get to see it staged next year, and that you'll have George's favorite collaborator here to do it.

- I feel like, at your reading, each character who took the stage became my favorite character for the duration of their monologue, only to be usurped by the next player.

- Again, this is the audience member/ anthropologist talking. This idea of (misplaced) ritual cleansing in an increasingly secular, ostensibly "modernizing" society is really fertile. The contrast of a ritual killing (a primitive, primal, communal act) to the mechanizing, impersonal, anti-communal yet "connective" influence of the railroad is wild. The fact that the one is the agent of the other is a delicious, terrible irony. Not saying I'm hoping for more to punch that up, simply that it's all in there.