Friday, April 24, 2009

M Butterfly or "The Art of Spinning Amadeus, Joe Turner, all my sons, and Mother Courage into Doubt about thier buried child"

In class Professor Newby asked us how "M Butterfly" was similar to the other plays we watched. I decided to start from the beginning:

Art: The elements of theatricality in both the plays adds to their meaning. In both plays characters stop in the middle of a conversation turn to the audience and speak to them. This adds to the story because you get the first hand feelings of the characters.

Spinning into Butter: Both Spinning into Butter and M Butterfly have another story that is prevalent within the main story. In Spinning into Butter the story of the Little Samba was an older story that had a plot similar to that of what happened in Spinning into Butter. In M Butterfly the story of Madame Butterfly is brought up.

Amadeus: This one is simple, and we talked about it in class, the simple fact that both stories start with the main character talking to the audience then tell their story of how that got to where they were at the start of the play. Also both end with the main character attempting to kill themselves, the difference is that in M Butterfly Rene succeeds.

Joe Turner's Come and Gone: This one is a little more difficult to draw a relation unless you think of the idea of coming and going. In Asia there was a lot of coming and going from Europeans and Americans. One of the ideas is that Rene gets his higher up position because of the movement of people and if he fails he to will be moved back to France.

All My Sons: Both plays have the idea that during non-peace time you need to do whatever is possible to survive, whether moral or not. This is what both Joe and Song have to do, it doesn't matter who it hurts as long as they survive.

Mother Courage: This one is the same as All My Sons.

Doubt: Now I had to absolute hardest time with this one; Just like Sister Aloysius, Chin questions how Song is going about doing her job.

Did I miss any ideas? Or can you think of linking ideas that are better then the ones I came up with?

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