Which Came First Monkey or Man?
Erich de la Torre Jill Stevenson Theatre History II 5/10/13
Which Came First Monkey or Man?
There’s something to be said about a woman who can play a monkey for almost 90 minutes, props are always given to those that embody a character for an entire play, but what can be said about those whom embody a different species? That is something that cannot be done easily. But that isn’t what needs to be talked about. Yes the acting is fantastic; Kathryn Hunter does an incredible imitation of a man who was once a monkey in his past life. So not only is this actress playing a different species is a different gender as well. The play has a very good topic of beginning one way. Through the play you begin to notice that the half man half monkey is much more sophisticated that you would have ever thought, possibly even more so than you are. In my opinion I begin to sense a somewhat political agenda, but that comes from Franz Kafka not even the playwright, Colin Teevan. We are being told a story about a “non-human” turned polite human, how can we not see the irony. Humans have always tried to make themselves a better group but in doing so have messed everything up, in todays society even not just in 1917. As a present day viewer you sense that this monkey-man is better than you are, he changed everything about himself in order to survive and is now the talk of the town. We can barely put anything involving technology down. We adapt the things around us in order to not change our lives, people wanted the ability to contact people where ever they are so we created cell phones to call people. Talking to people got to difficult so text messages were used more and more. We wanted to check our emails when we weren’t near a computer, so phones are included with email capability. Are we as humans able to put down the phone to talk to anyone? That’s just cell phones though, there are so many other things that we have created and
Which Came First Monkey or Man?
There’s something to be said about a woman who can play a monkey for almost 90 minutes, props are always given to those that embody a character for an entire play, but what can be said about those whom embody a different species? That is something that cannot be done easily. But that isn’t what needs to be talked about. Yes the acting is fantastic; Kathryn Hunter does an incredible imitation of a man who was once a monkey in his past life. So not only is this actress playing a different species is a different gender as well. The play has a very good topic of beginning one way. Through the play you begin to notice that the half man half monkey is much more sophisticated that you would have ever thought, possibly even more so than you are. In my opinion I begin to sense a somewhat political agenda, but that comes from Franz Kafka not even the playwright, Colin Teevan. We are being told a story about a “non-human” turned polite human, how can we not see the irony. Humans have always tried to make themselves a better group but in doing so have messed everything up, in todays society even not just in 1917. As a present day viewer you sense that this monkey-man is better than you are, he changed everything about himself in order to survive and is now the talk of the town. We can barely put anything involving technology down. We adapt the things around us in order to not change our lives, people wanted the ability to contact people where ever they are so we created cell phones to call people. Talking to people got to difficult so text messages were used more and more. We wanted to check our emails when we weren’t near a computer, so phones are included with email capability. Are we as humans able to put down the phone to talk to anyone? That’s just cell phones though, there are so many other things that we have created and