I was in a school musical once. "High School Musical" to be exact. YES, the same High School Musical with Troy Bolton and Sharpay Evans. Disney is cool, don't judge.
I figured after being in a play on stage I could consider myself as a thespian. That is up until as an assignment for CreComm we were told to go watch a play at Theatre Projects Manitoba.
Dionysus in Stony Mountain.
That was the name of the play. So we went. And on the way there I thought to myself, "well I know Stony Mountain is a jail, so I guess this is about like, Greek Gods in jail. Weird." Well I wasn't quite on the right track with that thought. Oh well, it's ok to be wrong. Sometimes.
Dionysus in Stony Mountain is about an inmate that is mentally ill and has recently refused to take his treatment of lithium. His name is James and he killed his wife- by accident. The first half of the play is James recanting long paragraphs from the works of Friedrich Nietzsche, a crazy 19th century philosopher/poet. He paces back and forth reciting these long sentences never missing a beat, all the while his case worker, Heidi sits patiently at her table barely asking any questions, just simply watching James pace back and forth. She occasionally writes down a word or two. I felt the first half of the play was pretty slow and terribly difficult to pay attention to if you aren't a Nietzsche know-it-all. It was kind of like watching a boring version of Shawshank the way James talked and acted the way he did.
The second half got a little better. There was more movement between the two characters except this time the actor that played James was now playing Heidi's uncle- because we find out in the second act that James has killed himself. Apparently Heidi and James have switched mental states and we learn that she too takes lithium regularly because she is bipolar (or manic depressive as she likes to call it.) Heidi and her uncle argue back and forth a bit until he reveals to her that her mother tried committing suicide when she was younger. It brings them together and they end the play off on a good note.
The play was sort of boring for me, just because it was based on a topic I wasn't very interested in. But I was still amazed at how much the actors could memorize and recite back to the audience at such a pace. That was remarkable.
