okay, i shall reply to the tags in this post because there's quite a lot to say and i don't want to clog up my tagboard.

well, for the collection of poems i have by E.E Cummings/e.e cummings, his name was spelt 'E.E Cummings' on the bookspine ... so that's why i spelt it that way. had no idea over the controversy over the capitalization of his name. but if he prefers it e e cummings, i shall spell it that way. i can understand how he feels about the whole capital letter thing. i myself find it weird when people call me 'Mel' instead of 'mel' and i write my 'm' this way on all my assignments, letters, etc. some people, like sherman [person who types with proper capitalization most of the time but makes an exception for my name], know i feel weird when people spell it 'Mel' though not all of my friends know that. why do i feel weird? i really don't know why. it's just one of my many quirks.

okay, about betrayal. SPOILERS AHEAD.

carol, i haven't read the script for it, and didn't want to before the play because i wanted to be 'surprised' [does that sound weird?] when i watched it. pinter is really stylistic, so i assumed the characteristics i knew about him from The Caretaker would apply to Betrayal. i don't view him as a subtle playwright at all, but rather someone who can be quite violent in stage direction. however, maybe what you meant was that he's someone who writes simply but beneath there is a fierce undercurrent of issues about human nature and man. in a way he can be rather repressed, but at times i see him as quite a violent playwright. so i suppose i interpreted Betrayal differently when i watched it. i understand that there are a lot anticlimactic moments, where the emotions get so pent up only to get deflated by absurd statements. is this what you mean? i'm not sure. and well, a lot of the time, they say you shouldn't try coming up with meaning to certain statements in pinter's work because there isn't meaning at all and that's his point. the meaning is that there's no meaning. weird man, but very very interesting.

i actually liked the last part very much, though on hindsight i agree with you that the green light and eerie music was slightly over the top. but i very much liked the jumble of furniture and i thought it also amazing that the crew put it together in the dark with such precision [the crew, the crew!]. i don't know what questions your audience asked Mei Yin, but someone in our audience asked her about that. and it was interesting because he said he had seen a similar sequence in patrick marber's play Closer [have you watched the movie? i would like to watch the play should i ever get the chance] where at the end of each scene the characters would take a bit of the set and throw it into a pile so that by the end of the play there was a whole pile of mess, much like the mess we saw on the set of Betrayal yesterday. in Closer, the mess at the end of the play [don't think it's like that for all versions, but the director envisioned it that way for the particular one he watched] was supposed to show the crystallization of all their deceit, lies, betrayal, etc. Mei Yin didn't answer this question much, but from what i gathered, the jumble was supposed to signify what the state of affairs was like after all those years - and in a way i think she was trying to tie up the front of the play with the end of the play. i liked that concept. though in a sense it would lose the ambiguity that you say the original script has [which i haven't read]. i think she also mentioned she didn't do it in the order pinter originally wrote it - but then she also mentioned that this was a revision pinter himself wanted performed [i thought that was so cool, that pinter, like, sanctioned this run of his play in SRT].

um, okay, that's my sort of reply to you about my views on the direction in Betrayal [because in my previous post about it i didn't go into detail so as to not spoil it for whoever wants to watch]. which night did you go for, and what questions did your audience ask? it would be interesting to patch up the info.

about my interest in directing: i am really REALLY glad that you are really REALLY glad. ha:> i only actually developed an interest in theatre and drama nearing the end of last year when i got involved in NJ Drama Ex-co. i took part as crew in SYF, but i didn't really feel much for it then. only after i got into Exco and had to try my hand at helping produce short plays we showed during lunchtime did i warm up to it. and after trying out some acting during the camp which i had to organize in order to try and reconstruct the cca did i really begin to feel like i had discovered something new. and finally, this year when i had to produce dramafest [almost by myself, many a time] did i really, really realize that i may very well want to get involved in theatre for life. it was total self-discovery. when i produced dramafest, no matter how stressful it got, or how mediocre it was in comparison to established drama societies in other jcs, i just felt so in my element [though my teacher may not have viewed it that way!]. i don't know how else to say it, but i felt very very good and natural and REAL doing it and realized that maybe that's what i want to do in the future. theatre magic! i didn't get to direct though, that was left to teachers, and i would really like to try that out because it's like.. well, art, writing, directing .. it's just all expression! it's so very linked. creation. beauty. all that good stuff in life. i mean i've always thought of myself as solely someone who wanted to do English, but i've discovered a whole lot of stuff about myself these two years. not just theatre, but cooking and baking too. so ... yeah. and i've always liked films [maybe you know that], i just never ever thought about studying it or even DOING it till this year. some people think its natural people who like films like theatre - but it's different, right? so very very different, yet the same. i could go on forever but i'm going to stop now. and maybe in a few years i'll have different ideas for my life again but right now i feel like this is what i want to pursue. WHAT it is exactly i can't describe to you because there are just SO many things!

that was long, thank you for being patient with my unreasonably verbose replies to your tags :)

+ posted by M @ 4:39 PM