Daniela Barrera

1. What is the theme for your play and how will your group explore it on stage?
Consider plot, symbolism, style, devices. Don’t forget to mention HOW and
WHY you will do this?
Our main theme for our play is authority. We will explore it by showing family conflicts, war,
relationships. We choose this because we thought that it could expose different messages to
the audience and we were able to identify many powerful scenes by using this theme. The plot
is we want to use symbolizes war and how poor people were forced to leave everything
behind (family, job, house) to fight for their country even though they don’t want to. Also, we
want to explore the plot by showing the different opinion about war. For example, the
innocent kid who wants to be a soldier just because he thinks they are brave and strong,
another character’s opinion is that they don’t agree with war but their patriotism is stronger
than his own ideas. The style we are going to use is both naturalistic and non-naturalistic. We
decided this because we want this play to be serious and have an impact on the audience but
at the same time have some non-naturalistic scenes to show metaphors and give the audience
a better idea of what’s going on and why this scene is being plotted. For example, one of our
most important scenes is going to be unnaturalistic showing the government as a human being
and controlling the characters as puppets. The setting is going to be on a very poor house
probably located in Germany at the start of a war. This will take place in the early 20th century
(around 1940). I think we will establish this play by using props that represent that time. Also,
the lighting is going to be a big factor for our play, to create strong fighting scenes.

2. What do you want your audience to get out of the performance? Think about
questions you as actors want to explore, what you want the audience to feel
and think about and WHY.

In our performance, we want our audience to capture the idea of how the mentality and
relationship of a family can change in a situation of fear and disorder. We want this play to
be strong so that it can emit different feelings to the audience but if we keep it serious for
the whole play its going to be boring so we can add some comedy throughout the
performance. Along the play, we want the audience to think about what’s going to happen
next, basically causing fascination. Another question we want to transmit is why does each
character have this different mentality. We will definitely explain this question throughout
the play but not verbally or at least not directly, we will probably show this by using
powerful scene or unnaturalistic scenes. In my opinion, making the audience feel this will
make the audience intrigued and follow along the play. Although all this questions are
important, we also want to add a cliffhanger in any moment of the play.