Trifles

With Susan Glaspell's Trifles, we are examining women in modern drama with the following twist: the play was written by a woman (see the picture of the playwright above).

Here is a brief biography of Ms. Glaspell:

http://www.csustan.edu/english/reuben/pal/chap8/glaspell.html#bio

For more information about her early 20th c. milieu, see this web site:

http://www.provincetownplayhouse.com/history.html

Minneapolis' Theater Unbound staged Trifles in 2005.  A scene from that production is pictured below:

LSU has staged this play as well.  Note that this video is of a rehearsal and that the sound quality may not be great:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QFUaCXvIjY4

John G. Bilotta and John F. McGrew have created an opera based on Glaspell's play:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mTIZ5TL1vaQ

Here are excerpts from film versions.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KpNuw0vFU5E
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9EPnf1WXSE&feature=related

This picture is from a version staged at NYC's Ontological-Hysterical Theater:

Woo-hoo...here are some videos!

http://www.twoheadedcalf.org/shows/trifles/trifles.html

Let's look for a few reviews.  Unfortunately, many of the videos available are school projects.

Ah, here is Matthew A. Everett's review of Theater Unbound's production:

http://www.matthewaeverett.com/columns/detail.php?articleID=483

Alexis Soloski of The Village Voice reviews The Ontological-Hysteric Theater production:

http://www.villagevoice.com/2010-02-09/theater/on-the-creepy-feminist-drama-trifles/

Ken Jaworowski of the NY Times weighs in here:

http://theater.nytimes.com/2010/02/02/theater/reviews/02trifles.html?emc=e

A student-directed performance at Illinois' North Central College is discussed here:

http://northcentralcollege.edu/x46996.xml

For more reviews of other plays by Glaspell, see this site from Seton Hall:

http://academic.shu.edu/glaspell/Performances/performances.htm


The Santa Barbara Theater of the Air has created a podcast of Trifles:

http://theatre-of-the-air.com/WordPress/archives/4256

Right now a community college in Ohio is working on a version of Trifles.  Curiously enough, this school has just finished staging Pygmalion!

We'll conclude with a picture of the original 1916 production in NYC:

 

Links for 4/14 -- Streetcar

These are a few scenes from the 1951 movie version with Marlon Brando and Vivien Leigh.

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_lToyPAUyE

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S1A0p0F_iH8
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BsVxmk9pq2Y
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CxGN29njs3Q&feature=related

Let's look at a more recent version.  In 1995, Alec Baldwin and Jessica Lange played Stanley and Blanche for a TV movie of Streetcar:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uyxPgXyat1Y

Last summer the Guthrie Theater staged Streetcar:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dljehZJhvbc

In 2005, Natasha Richardson played Blanche:

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8-cLKFynWwg

Cate Blanchett has also played Blanche, but this clip is of her interview with Charlie Rose:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gztnc_60h4k

Her picture is below.  Her production was a traveling one, and this was taken at the Kennedy Center production.

Understanding "The Yellow Wallpaper"

Link

Thank you, Danielle, for writing this up and letting me link to it!

Eileen Chang & "Stale Mates"

 

I am going to have track down this book and/or movie, but in the meantime here is an entry on Chinese-American author Eileen Chang's work...which includes both "Stale Mates" and the novella "Lust, Caution."

To begin with, here is Ms. Chang's biography:

 http://www.hellomandarin.com/blog/2009/04/30/chinese-culture-eileen-changs-life-in-brief/

The author's literary executor has also written this essay that provides another perspective:

http://www.zonaeuropa.com/20050215_1.htm

This 2005 review of Ms. Chang's collected essays (in an English translation) provides more of a literary and cultural context for her work:

http://www.raintaxi.com/online/2005fall/chang.shtml

Irish writer John Self reviews the collection of fiction that contains "Lust, Caution."

http://theasylum.wordpress.com/2007/11/11/eileen-chang-lust-caution/

But about the film...

http://www.filminfocus.com/focus-movies/lust-caution/movie-splash.php


http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2008/01/02/btchina102.xml

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2008/03/10/wlee110.xml

Another collection was Love in a Fallen City, which Haiyan Lee, a professor of Chinese literature at the University of Colorado, reviews here:

http://mclc.osu.edu/rc/pubs/reviews/lee.htm

Ms. Chang's first novel in English was The Rice-Sprout Song.  Charlie Dickinson reviews it here:

http://charlied.freeshell.org/RiceSproutSong

She also translated Chinese literature into English.  One novel was The Sing-Song Girls of Shanghai, which tells the story of nineteenth-century courtesans in that Chinese city.

http://cup.columbia.edu/book/978-0-231-12268-9/the-singsong-girls-of-shanghai

In addition, she wrote screenplays.  Australia's Queensland Art Gallery recently screened both the films that she had written screenplays for and those that others have made from her novels, novellas, and short stories:

http://apt5.asiapacifictriennial.com/cinema/hong_kong,_shanghai_cinema_cities/eileen_chang

At least one of these films may not have aged well (or have been that good to begin with):

http://www.brns.com/pages4/drama263.html

However, Eileen Chang's work in different media is very much worth exploring.