Ronya

Churchill was born in London, England. During World War II her family emigrated to Montreal, Canada, where she attended Trafalgar School for Girls. She returned to England to attend university, and graduated from Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford in 1960 with a degree in English Literature. She also began her career there, writing three plays for performance by student drama groups: Downstairs, You’ve No Need to be Frightened and Having a Wonderful Time.
In 1961 she married David Harter, a lawyer from Oxford, and began raising three sons.
She is a patron of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign.

thanks a.g. i think i just got into my head she was american cause her new show was @ NY Theatre Workshop when I was there.

As for this whole “new stories” stuff, that’s why I bought up the whole Joseph Campbell thing in the last series of posts. Cause there is a good argument to be made that there are are only 7 stories we tell over and over. Man vs man, man vs nature, man vs himself (feminist scholars would have a field day with this, but anyhow). Matthew argues that Ionesco broke the mold by adding an 8th: Man vs Rhinocerous. In any case all that can change is HOW we tell these stories in this context…..

Yet, I think there is a good argument to be made that even if we accept this, telling these stories diferently makes them new. Mashall McLuhan’s maxim “The media is the message” is useful here. The fact that male and female roles are cast cross-gender are just as important as the text of Cloud Nine. A new way of telling stories makes them new stories.

Don’t worry matthew, as a.g. has illustrated, i am just pulling it out of my ass too.

I mean, in Rhinoceros, the antagonist is the rhinoceros. It’s sort of the main character’s apathy too (man against himself), but that doesn’t seem to have any connection to the fact that people keep turning into rhinoceroses. Heh. I haven’t read it in a bajillion years, so I’m basically pulling all this action out of my ass. I agree with Forster, though. I believe that there are a small number of stories to tell, and that’s what’s so exciting to me about Ionesco, is that he seems to have somehow circumvented that, by making the specific antagonist of a story into the “prime” antagonist (as in prime number, if you will, fnar fnar fnar). He’s somehow made the particular events of a plot indivisible into a structural or formal story. Rhinoceros is “man against rhinoceros,” and nothing else. Hm. Someone prove me wrong please. I’m going on [notoriously bad] memory here.

“We have defined a story as a narrative of events arranged in their time-sequence. A plot is also a narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality. ‘The king died and then the queen died’ is a story. ‘The king died, and then the queen died of grief’ is a plot. The time-sequence is preserved, but the sense of causality overshadows it.”

Whether or not you agree with the language of this statement, I think what Forster is doing – as other narrative theorists have done – is trying to locate the simplest building blocks of narrative. The hope is that once we’ve arrived at the bare bones of what it means to be a story (or to tell a story) we’ll find that there is only a finite number of “stories” to tell – the rest is plot – and somehow the exercise will expose the universality of storytelling.

My sense is that it has to go one of two ways: either there are an endless number of stories, or only a small few.

Not really disagreeing with your statements on this, Matthew, just inspired to continue the conversation. What is it that you see in Ionesco that makes his stories seem new?

And Christine, there are no pictures of you because visitors to the illustrious Praxis blog can view your gorgeous face at praxistheatre.blogspot.com/2007/01/10-questions-christine-horne.html, and then they get to see how witty you are too.

No. The most recent new stuff got said by Ionesco, I think. Let’s just honestly react to the subject matter the world is throwing at us, and let future generations worry about whether our work is revolutionary or not. The surest way to create boring, annoying work is to obsess about its novelty.”

good one.

i remember trying to write my first play in undergrad (Capital DAS, starring Praxis Co-AD Simon Rice) and obsessing over how it would be different from anything ever created. I wasted a lot of time that way. Eventually I relented and used a lot of my experiences from summer jobs. It turned out pretty good as far as shoestring budget undergrad productions go. So yeah i agree.

Also a big Ionesco fan having just finished directing The Lesson. But there are a lot of new stories since him (Kushner, Mamet, Churchill are just Americans off the top of my head).