Caryl Churchill's Far Away

I'm writing this, as we speak, with no idea what I'm going to perform on Monday.  I imagine this is what's going through everyone else's minds as well who is performing, and to that I say:  I'm sure you'll be fine.  It won't be worse than mine.

With that, I'll give my impressions of Caryl Churchill's work that we studied in class this week.  It was fun to be able to perform it in class on Wednesday, and being able to hear it out loud, being read, I felt was beneficial.  I personally liked the play, and its ability to be so indirect in its explanations of the setting with which the play was taking place.  I especially enjoyed the idea of the 2nd Act.  In order to explain this massive, seemingly planet-wide conflict that has become the way of life within this play,  Churchill doesn't directly state to the audience the problems that are taking place.  In order to do that, she uses hat making.  An absurd profession, made even more absurd when we understand that the hats that are being made are being made for prisoners being sent to be executed.

This scene makes us ask some absurd questions that lead us to imagine a world that has totally been led astray, versus simply telling us that it has been.  How could a person have a business solely based on making hats for prisoners?  What economy would even support this?  There must be a great deal of prisoners then...there's a college for making these hats?  There is an educational program, even an institution, dedicated to this profession??? Well there must be quite a demand for this.  What kind of world is this that can not only support a profession like this, but an entire educational program devoted to it?  This example of a world going completely astray, I believe, is very clever.

Overall, I think the three acts serve as the stages of a conflict of this magnitude:  the first act provides the ideal, the motivations for a war that is so large and without guidance or definition.  Morality is subjective, questionable at best, and any crime acted within the confines of the war will find someone to argue its validity.  The second act provides a window into the war at its full absurdity.  The third and final act shows the strain of a war that has no end.  Alliances are being made with anyone and anything, in the vain hope that it will bring about the end of this war.  Victory or defeat.  I believe the characters representing the hearts and minds of everyone in this world are stretched so thinly, they believe in any alliance they have heard of.  The absurdity of the alliances noted in this act aren't truthful, they're just evidence of a people so thoroughly consumed by something so large, irreversible, and endless, that they will believe animals are against them.  They will believe animals have rallied to their cause, whatever that may be.  They believe rocks are with them/against them.  Water, air...same thing.  They don't know anything other than this war anymore, and it is making them doubt and believe everything.


Oh, and:  sorry in advance for Monday.