44 Plays for 44 Presidents
TA: Vicki Hoskins Wed 12:00 GROUPB Student: Shenghui Xu netID xu70
I had always thought that I would get bored watching 44 Plays for 44 Presidents since it was a historical play. But it turned out that I was wrong. It is one of the most interesting plays I have ever seen. I was amazed by the playwright’s compression skill of putting the history of forty-four American candidates into a two hour play and adding intensity to the play at the same time.
The play is obviously presentational because actors act from the outside, living a life of a president can’t be acted from one’s own experience (which is representational by definition). For example, Sidney Germaine, acting as President Kennedy didn’t have the experience of delivering a moon speech and having all those grand expectation about sending American astronauts to the moon. But he could still portray the president’s strong love and determination of his moon dream by stretching the purple ball to make it bigger and bigger.
The key of drama is the essence of conflict. People may have different interpretations regarding the main conflict of the play. As I see it, the key conflict might be that presidents are ultimately “human” and they are tasked with such monumental responsibility, and sometimes our inability to understand that could also be what the conflict that the play tries to explore. I remember one scene when Preston Brant, acting as Barack Obama managed to jump over two ropes which rotate at different speed to symbolize the fact that President Obama is faced with a bunch of shackles, pressure, and difficulties. The audiences were all astonished by the fact that the actor didn’t trip over the ropes. But what they might not realize was that a lot of the “ropes” were made by the people. People are sometimes being too judgmental, especially to the presidents. Presidents are all