discussion-WedOct5

Discussion questions for Wednesday, October 5 After reading the questions below and deciding which one(s) you want to respond to (you're expected to respond once every three classes, on average), click on the appropriate thread to write your response as a reply. If you have not yet registered an account with wikispaces and requested to join this site, you will need to do so to post a response (see the How to Wiki page for instructions).

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 * For both questions below, you'll want to consult the "Drama Genre Conventions" study guide** that I handed out and that we started to work on filling out during our discussions of //How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying//. (If you don't have a copy of this handout, you can find it -- like all handouts for this class -- under the "Content" section of the course D2L page.)


 * And both questions below concern genre.** We are treating Plautus's //The Haunted House// as an example of the genre of "Plautine comedy" (a particularly playful subgenre of the genre of Old Latin theater known as //palliata comoedia//). By "genre," we mean the particular forms of discipline (or "ludus," in Caillois's sense) that a type of play imposes on itself, balanced with the particular forms of playful license ("paidia") that a type of play allows itself. We saw, for example, how Anna Deavere Smith's style of "verbatim theater" implied a whole host of "shoulds" vs. "coulds" with respect to dialogue, costume, setting, tone, casting, actor preparation, audience preparation, and the use of non-play media such as projected slides, documentary video footage, music, etc. And we saw how //How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying// used (but also abused) many of the conventional expectations about tone, movement, sound, and character type that an audience would bring with them when going out to see a "musical comedy."


 * So...**

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 * 1) Erich Segal's introduction to //The Haunted House// lays out many of the particular conventions of the Roman stage in Plautus's time, and some of the particular hallmarks of Plautus's own particular style. Which conventions would seem **most unconventional to modern comedy audiences?** And which conventions would **still be recognizable and familiar**? Why do you think this is so? Choosing one or two of the most unfamiliar conventions, discuss in some detail how you would either use or change it if you were yourself staging a production of //The Haunted House//, and explain your reasoning.
 * 1) Erich Segal's introduction to //The Haunted House// lays out many of the particular conventions of the Roman stage in Plautus's time, and some of the particular hallmarks of Plautus's own particular style. What do you think are the most **striking differences** between the conventions of "Plautine comedy" and those of either "verbatim theater" or "musical comedy"? Are there any **surprising overlaps** in their approaches? Comparing Plautine comedy///The Haunted House// to just one of the other genres (and the play representing it), discuss what you think would happen if the content of one play was translated into the genre style of the other. Would the meaning or impact of the play change substantially? Why might it be interesting to try?