English 208:Modern and Contemporary Drama
...e of dominance in his life becomes so enraptured by the classic opera ‘Madam Butterfly’ that he not only takes a geisha, Song Liling, as a ‘mistress’ but has a love affair with ‘her’ lasting some twenty years, producing a son and persuading him to commit treason. His fantasy of the Asian ‘Lotus Blossom’ was so strong that reality, she being a he, never got in his way. While everyone has their own fantasies it is ludicrous to believe that they would affect our perceptions/actions in such a pervasive manner as depicted in M. Butterfly. A frightening warning that we depart with after a viewing of this play is how Gallimard required being tossed in a French Prison to shatter his fantasy world. Before that act occurred, he existed in it for twenty-years sculpting his life around it. M. Butterfly poses us with the difficult quest, if we were living in our own fantasy worlds, how would any of us be startled out of our ‘realities’ if they are in fact so pervasive? In Tennessee William’s play ‘Cat on a Hot Tin Roof’ his main character, Margaret, believes so strongly in her being ‘Maggie The Cat’ that she refuses to accept that her husband, Brick, despises her. This belief by Maggie not only sees her withstanding direct statements of disgust from her husband Brick, but induces her to tell her father in law, Big Daddy, that she is pregnant with Brick’s child. The play terminates before we see if her fantasy can withstand reality, but in the plays original form it did not. Likewise we see the role of Blanch in ‘Streetcar Named Desire’. This aged, wilting flower, sees herself as permanent debutant of the ball despite a history of abject poverty and prostitution. Following a rape by her sister’s uncouth husband she delves so deeply into her fantasy world that she assumes the doctor taking her off to a psychiatric ward to be a gentleman caller. In stark opposition to Hwang’s belief that we can live in our fantasies, the works of Tennessee Williams seems to state that at some point, one must win out. While David Henry Hwang views fantasy as existing alongside reality, each of us in our own worlds, Tennessee Williams would put forth the idea that while we each live in a shared reality, fantasies might take us off that path and its questionable if we might ever return. Regardless if one sides with Hwang and places each of us on our own trail or Williams and common path with forks, the importance of fantasy in each of their works cannot be denied. It is rather the importance of reality that one should put in question. Choice 6: Zoo vs. Salesman If one reads either Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman or Edward Albee’s Zoo Story a feeling of the authors’ dissatisfaction society cannot help but be conveyed. The elements of society they are in contention with are highly similar despite the difference in their works. In Death of a Salesman we follow the drama in the Loman household where the aged father Willy Loman is living his last days. By all accounts Willy was a man caught in the rat race of life. As a father he was certainly sub par, teaching highly questionable values to his children and inarguably living vicariously through his eldest son Biff much to the detriment of the chubby younger child Happy. Truth be known he wasn’t much of a husband to Linda, having at least one adulterous affair, and he also wasn’t much of a salesman, his family being kept afloat by the generosity of family friend Cha...