To reiterate one of Isabelle's discussion questions from Monday: is this play a tragedy, a comedy, or some hybrid genre, like a tragicomedy?
On the "sinking badges" thread there's an interesting discussion going about how the final scene throws the status of "reality" into question. Obviously this is one of Valdez's favorite strategies, one we saw in Bandido!: to use the physical space of the stage, and specifically the double set, to force us to question whether what is occurring and being said onstage is "real" or not.
Theatre can do this in a way that film generally doesn't. As we've discussed before, film tends to envelop the viewer in its particular point of view--even if there are multiple cameras rolling and the shots are done from multiple points of view, editing makes the film look seamless. Even fantasy films have a strong "reality-effect," which is why when we see a film we use language like, "I got completely caught up in it" or "it really pulled me into its world." The powerful reality-effect is one of the things that critics both love and hate about film as a medium.
The double set suggests something like a metacommentary or metafiction, i.e. a fiction about fiction; that's a favorite postmodern ploy. More recently there have been a spate of "metafilms," where the camera pulls back and you learn that this is just a film about a film. But in Valdez's world of 1985, this wasn't yet a familiar device.
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While film is extremely smart at times, and the big screen can certainly draw us in and effectively "take us away" from reality. But the stage has something that film will never have: real people and real time. I've always noticed a huge difference in plays, and the experiences I have at them are usually more memorable than that of a film that can be seen again and again without the slightest alteration. A play can never happen again and you know the people are real. You can feel them, hear them, see them, and touch them if you want. You can't leave a play to go to the fridge and you can't push pause. Each play is different in its realest sense. Writers like Valdez, when they know the power that plays hold, use those immediate and sensory possibilites through words, staging, props, and costumes to make us feel life, I think, that no other media can produce no matter how fancy its special effects.
The key to the tragicomedy lexicon is the development of a likeable protagonist through comedy. Valdez does this with Bandido and again with Stinking Badges, building up theh story before the play's tragic end. In the general sense of tragicomedies, I've noticed directors and screen/playwrites killing off comic characters like Kurosawa's Kikuchiyo in "Seven Samurai", swinging the audience from one emotion to its antithesis.
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