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• Title: Pain and Mourning in Vogel's Baltimore Waltz and Lavery's Last Easter (Critical Essay)
• Author : CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
• Release Date : January 01, 2010
• Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
• Pages : * pages
• Size : 93 KB

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When dramatists approach the motif of the body in pain, it is challenging for them to offer a believable production that respects equally the character's pain while connecting it meaningfully to the audience. According to David Haradine, "In performance, the body, or traces of the body, or echoes of the body in its absence ... are the foundations upon which the very notion of performance is predicated" (69). Contemporary dramas written on the subject of pain face an even greater problem. The cathartic moment, as a former sine qua non element for tragedies' denouement and climax, seems to have been removed altogether. In so doing, neither the character who is in pain, nor his audience, could achieve that sense of temporary release from suffering. In Paula Vogel's Baltimore Waltz (1996) and Bryony Lavery's Last Easter (2004), the dramatists propose a radical version of the theme of waiting. Unlike Samuel Beckett's theatrical masterpiece, Waiting for Godot, where the characters might be seen as expecting for Godot/God, in Vogel's and Lavery's plays people are exhausted by their (passive) waiting to find a cure for AIDS or cancer. Both playwrights approach this theme contrapuntally, in a bitter-sweet kind of way. More specifically, after the shock of the diagnosis, and especially after many treatments have not given results, patients have the option to accept their fate by smiling at its cruelty, or, as David Morris contends, "As medicine will attest, the possession of a body absolutely guarantees the comic prerequisite that sooner or later something will go wrong, often painfully wrong" (81). Traditionally employed in music, the contrapuntal technique comes from the Latin expression punctus contra punctum, which literally means "point/note against point/note." In a polyphonic melody, sounds that have distinct melodic saturations are combined. There is something of a contrapuntal, contradictory, yet enchanting, nature when one lives with or visits someone who spends most of his days in bed. Sitting next to a patient, his attendee faces the burdensome ticking of clocks, the ache of waiting, and the dagger-piercing questions of one's meaning. In other words, it is not only the pain of the other that intrigues and baffles us; it is also experiencing, internalizing and then performing our reactions to that pain. Further, according to Jane Bennett, "The word enchant is linked to the French verb to sing: chanter. To "en-chant": to surround with song or incantation; hence, to cast a spell with sounds, to make full under the sway of a magical refrain, to carry away on a sonorous stream" (6; emphasis in the original). She argues that any refrain has a catalytic force, meaning that, through the repetition of the same syllables, we may belittle the sense of the repeated word to reach new meanings and interpretations. Therefore, when hopes at recovery have failed, smiles, touches, light jokes, and recollections become the enchanting "refrain" of these plays. With a remarkable sincerity, in the preface of her play, Vogel confesses about a trip to Europe she was supposed to take with her sick brother. She postponed it, and, unfortunately, her brother died soon afterwards. Baltimore Waltz is a memory play that allows her to commemorate her brother's death and, at the same time, travel imaginatively to Europe. Thus, whenever Carl (her brother) appears on stage, he is sketched out from memory and, hence, slippery. As motto for her play, she quotes a character in David Savran's Breaking the Rules: "I always saw myself as a surrogate who, in the absence of anyone else, would stand in for him" (6). This explains why Vogel does not have a partner to waltz with, except in her vivid imagination and recollection.

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