Stephen Mallatratt’s adaption to play of “The Woman in Black” portrays the story of a man named Mister Kipps, who is a solicitor who has been sent to an abandoned home in the East of the country in order to collect the legal papers of a recently deceased woman. However, the audience learns that the woman living in Ell Marsh House was haunted by a spirit known as The Woman in Black. Being based in the turn of the previous century, the play tackles the themes of how the fear of the unknown can transform a man of science into a man fearful of the dark and every single creek; and how the concept of revenge can cause an embittered woman to seek vengeance and claim the thing she lost: Children. The play is set during the time where superstition was surpassed by science and where a rational explanation was being required for how everything occurs but how science can be destroyed by the unexplainable…
The structure of Mallatratt’s adaptation takes the form of a “play-within-a-play”, where the Actor (played by Matt Connor) is running a performance of the story of the Older Kipps’ (played by Malcolm James) story, where the Actor plays Young Mister Kipps and the Older Mister Kipps plays all of the other characters, other than the Woman in Black herself, and they are running through rehearsals, cross-cutting to various times in the inner narrative with a simple click of his fingers and lights up (Lighting design by Kevin Sleep). This cutting between times in the inner narrative and
At the beginning of the short drama, “Trifles,” Mrs. Peters, the sheriff’s wife, is painted as timid and submissive wife. She willingly submits herself to the responsibilities she has as a wife. As the play unfolds, Mrs. Peter’s submissiveness begins to diminish. Mrs. Peters and Mrs. Hale work together to uncover the murder of Minnie Wright’s husband. When the women find the evidence, they refuse to share it with the men. Mrs. Peter’s character transforms into a more confident individual over the course of the play.
Kelly Brown Douglas begins by posing a series of questions, including, “Who is the Black Christ?” and “Is the Black Christ Enough?” (6-7) For Douglas, the Black Christ, “…represents God’s urgent movement in human history to set Black captives free from the demons of White racism” (3). The question of “Who is the Black Christ?” is addressed in Chapter 3. The question of “Is the Black Christ enough?” is addressed in Chapters 4 and 5, as Douglas critically examines the relationship of the Black Christ to the Black community and ends with addressing what womanist theology is and why there is a need for it in understanding the Black Christ.
Writing is really important to make our voices heard and it also can be use as a source to express ourselves, especially if we do not have much freedom to do it orally. Readings such as daily newspapers have really large audiences and it also can be use as the ‘vehicle’ to deliver our thoughts and make sure people hear our opinions or things that we want to deliver. Based on a reading with a title “Broadening Representational Boundaries”, written by Rooks, we can see that the first black women millionaire in America, Madam CJ Walker, also authored numerous articles about her life and her business empire to be issued in various news sources around the country (76-95). Madam CJ Walker is not the only person who wrote her own stories to make her voices heard. There are many other public figures that also writing stories about themselves, such as Booker T. Washington who wrote “Up from slavery” and Du Bois’s who wrote “The Souls of Black Folk.”
Nathaniel Hawthorne and Arthur Miller both used their writings to comment on the state of the world at their current times. Miller’s Play The Crucible and Hawthorne’s novel The Scarlet Letter both share several similar concepts, despite the fact that they were written just over one hundred years apart. The Scarlet Letter is about a Puritan woman by the name of Hester Prynne, who has an illegitimate child (called Pearl) with the religious leader of the town, Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale. The Crucible is a play featuring the Puritan town of Salem, which is suffering through a hysterical, supernatural paranoia started by a vengeful adulteress named Abigail Williams. The similarities between these two texts have been compared and explored by many before, and three such explorations are investigated over the course of this paper.
This week’s reading of Roderick A. Ferguson’s Aberrations in Black: Towards a Queer of Color Critique offers a queer of color analysis that poses itself against Marxism, revolutionary nationalism, liberal pluralism and historical materialism, and opts instead for an “understanding of nation and capital as the outcome of manifold intersections that contradict the idea of liberal nation-state and capital as sites of resolution, perfection, progress and confirmation (3). By challenging some of the main complacent thinking that characterized canonical sociology, Ferguson pushes for an engagement with racial knowledge about African American culture as it was produced by American sociology if one is to fully understand the gender and sexual variations within the African American culture. One of the principle assumptions of canonical sociology is represented by its use of cultural, racial and sexual differences in the process of pathologizing African American culture. By juxtaposing canonical sociological texts from the Chicago School of Sociology with that of African American literature, Ferguson provides a genealogy of this foundational issue of imagining African American culture as sites of polymorphous gender and sexual perversions and how these perversions are in turn associated with societal and moral failings.
Susan Glaspell’s one-act play covers issues regarding female oppression and patriarchal domination. The play still exists as a fascinating hybrid of murder mystery and social commentary on the oppression of women. When Margaret Hossack was charged with the murder of her sixty year old husband John, the man she had been married to for thirty three years. Killed by two blows to his head with an ax, John Hossack was thought to be a cold mannered and difficult man to be married to, but he didn’t deserve his
Susan Glaspell’s one-act play, Trifles, weaves a tale of an intriguing murder investigation to determine who did it. Mrs. Wright is suspected of strangling her husband to death. During the investigation the sheriff and squad of detectives are clueless and unable to find any evidence or motive to directly tie Mrs. Wright to the murder. They are baffled as to how he was strangled by a rope while they were supposedly asleep side by side. Glaspell artfully explores gender differences between men and women and the roles they each fulfill in society by focusing on their physicality, their methods of communication and vital to the plot of the play, their powers of observation. In simple terms, the play suggests that men tend to be assertive,
Crying over spilled milk is silly, right? Worrying about the little, mundane things is pointless and a waste of time. In Susan Glaspell’s one-act play Trifles, she demonstrates how being sensitive to the subtle details can be vital to solving a mystery. Throughout the one-act play, Glaspell highlights the theme of gender roles through the women’s worries, irony, and symbolism.
Arthur Kipps (Brian Miller), a junior solicitor, is summoned to attend the funeral of Mrs Alice Drablow, the house's sole inhabitant, unaware of the tragic secrets that lie hidden behind the shuttered windows. It is not until he glimpses a wasted young woman, dressed all in black, at the
When we watch movies, we watch them for entertainment. Some people don’t sit back and compare the things happening in the movie to real life situations that are happening amongst society today. It’s a movie. It’s make believe. That’s what I always think when I sit down to watch a movie. Tyler Perry started out producing plays and later released his first feature film in 2005 called “The Diary of a Mad Black Woman.” The Diary of a Mad Black Woman has its twist of emotions throughout the movie. Whether it’s humorous or gloomy, shameful or happy, repulsion or infatuation. The movie shows them all. Tyler Perry has targeted many women and men in different circumstances showing just how painfully exhausting it is to overcome the intolerable.
In Susan Glaspell’s play Trifles a man has been murdered by his wife, but the men of the town who are in charge of investigating the crime are unable solve the murder mystery through logic and standard criminal procedures. Instead, two women (Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters) who visit the home are able to read a series of clues that the men cannot see because all of the clues are embedded in domestic items that are specific to women. The play at first it seems to be about mystery, but it abruptly grows into a feminist perspective. The play Trifles written by Susan Glaspell can be considered a revolutionary writing in it its advocacy of the feminist movement.
In the society of the 1920s when the play was written, the confinement of women was at an all-time high, however the breakout of women’s rights was just starting. The tone of this play helps show just this view, by promoting a character such as Mrs. Peters, who is stuck on whose side be on in the mystery of the murder. As they uncover the motive of Mrs. Wright, Mrs. Peters character begins to understand her, although the deceased husband was murdered in such a gruesome way, and know there should be a punishment for the crime for the crime because of her background with her husband as sheriff, who said she is “married to the law”, she comprehends the “stillness” that Mrs. Wright must have felt, with the house being as gloomy as it was on a bright character such as she before she was married. Such as
An evil spirit is an essential element in gothic horror as they help to create a story. ‘The Woman in Black’ uses the element of an evil spirit to add a supernatural theme to the events throughout
The central themes of this play are ambition, the supernatural, fate/destiny, revenge, appearance vs reality, and gender. The abstract concept of the supernatural was portrayed through the Witch’s constant presence, symbolising the perpetual works of the supernatural.