Victor: A Play

There's a play in English I'm working in. I believe it's worth seeing so this is an invitation for everyone! Come watch the play!
It's written by Alain Knapp, a contemporary playwright and acting coach who's very respected by the theatre scene in France.
Just so you know what to expect, it's not experimental and it's not commercial...it's a food-for-thought play.
It's going to be performed in April 15th, 16th and 17th at 8PM in the American University in Cairo Howard Theatre which is inside the gate right in front of McDonald's.
I will update this post with the poster of the play when I get a copy of it.

Theatrical Discontents.

There's some serious brain-damage in my head. There're so many ideas and very few of them I am able to express and present.

I have this feeling that theatre has been misunderstood. It's misunderstood. I see all those performances in which one actor tries very hard to stand out and ends up almost killing the play and I blame it on capitalism. I know it's a strange take on it but, bare with me.

How many faces and bodies can you fit on a screen each with a personality and not just general by-passers with blank faces? Very few.
How many faces and bodies can you fit on a stage each with a personality and not just general by-passers with blank faces? Few but more than on a screen.

When we go to the movie theatre we look at these portraits, usually there are close-ups of a couple or of one person. For a moment, according to so many theorists whose names I forget, we lose our sense of self and we unite with the character.
Can we unite with a bumch of characters? Can we unite with a whole play?

When I was younger I used to like being alone, I thought it gave more meaning to my thought and was more productive in terms of finding "answers" to all those hypothetical questions and depressed teenager thrives to find answers for. Back then, I liked novel and poetry. I especially liked novels told in the first person, from one point of view.
I liked them because they were about me and my room and my imagination. Poetry was also about me and my room and my imagination. Even if I read a novel on the beach, the beach never takes part in the novel. A place is situated in space that is inside my imagination and all that is written is mine.

A play gets out of hand. There're many characters. It's much more enjoyable to read it with someone. I read The Comedy of Errors when I was 11 in Arabic. It was in my mothers collection. She said it was funny. I didn't find it that funny.
I tried reading it again with a friend. Then, it was funny. I was not a loner anymore when I started liking theatre because for the imagination to be alive in a world with too many voices, my imagination will definitely be short on a couple of even a few of them and then they melt together and it's not funny anymore.

Looking back at it, the more I enjoyed company the more I liked theatre. I can read play when I'm alone, but it still doesn't feel like I'm completely alone because it seems as though there's no dominant point of view from which it's told. (there's an opinion of course but I will not get into that right now). Different characters speak differently, act differently and are always kept company by one another.

To make a play that has no design and no sound and no nothing, you still need a lot of people. One person can't carry a play that has more than one actor. (maybe if they have multi-personality disorder but that's not what I'm talking about right now!) and it seems that there has to be a lot of people involved with this type of thing and they have to work together.

If a character didn't like company, wanted to be alone, how would the play unfold then?
And if an actor wants to be alone and shine in the limelight where did the characters around him go? And how will they help him go through with his action if he doesn't let them speak?
There's a sense of community in this. The way everyone has a certain job and not the other, the way every person completes something that has a beginning, a middle and an end. Also, in the way that only if you stop talking over me will I be heard, you have to stop talking so I can be heard.

And you will stop talking or else you will stop making sense if I don't talk back.
It's a limited space in which we step over one another, nothing is just but most things are needed. If one actor doesn't care about the other person at all, a play might end up being completey dysfuntional. There is a general worry about the play as a living thing and actors as parts of it that move like mobile puzzles, completing one another, and in the way, completing a whole picture, overlapping and contradicting.

How would a puzzle be if one person wanted to be a leader? to compete with the others? to be best at something? or to want to outcast others that he doesn't like? Aren't these the concepts and basics on which a self-interest based system is built and fed? And aren't those principles that are growing in different societies every day?
How will theatre survive if each person thinks that their sadness only belongs to them and is not to share? How will it survive if each person thinks that their happiness only belong to them and is not for sharing?
It would be a play where each character talks at the other, does not listen, and therefore, goes nowhere.

It would be this word-vomit'y blob of speech on a stage that no one would like to see.
Self that exists alone just might kill theatre.

Mnehh

A friend of mine finally understood my fears and concerns of how the world seems to be coming to an end. I told her that I'm not too worried about global warming, I just hope that humanity survives until the day that we are all in boats screaming over coral under the sea we once called home.
She understands now my concerns about art, and feeling of responsibility towards something so vague as to be called humanity.

The truth is, it makes me laugh just thinking about it; how things that are so important to me might not even matter. Feelings like theatre, and/or any other form of art can make people feel more or less of one thing or a bunch of things at the same time.

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I have a biology exam tomorrow. The thing about biology is that it's too much information. I don't want to know how every cell works and how everything makes sense and completes my body- it makes me less of a piece of magic and it's ugly and boring. It seems much more interesting to think about things like "soul" than to think about "cell-structure" because "soul" can never be so set in stone and proven. Cell-structure almost seems redundant.

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My face is getting pimply.
My mother read me a quote yesterday from Eric Fromm how he thinks in the world now it seems to important to be sexy to even have friends. I understand it as a theory but I never thought that's how it worked in my head. But then again, I hardly have a definition of what's sexy. If sexy is pertaining to something I'd like to have in bed, then maybe I don't even have a definition at all. I don't think I ever had or will have those feelings. They seem to surreal and cliche to the point where they become funny.

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It's conceded of me to say but, I feel like I'm getting it much faster than people around me and it pisses me off for the reason that I like to think that there's more learning involved when I feel under-read. When I'm under-read I feel that I can learn, there's something to learn but when I'm over-read for people around me I feel so bored.
I refute to a certain friend for intelligent conversations, he makes me feel more alive this way.
And I refute for all my other friends for warmth, they all make me feel alive in a completely different way.

I understand why it is a kind of freedom to have nothing at all. Not to have nothing to lose, but to have nothing that you'd mind losing! It's like travelling light.

I haven't been using my laptop as much lately and the distance between me and my laptop is making me do all sorts of other things that are just as important and sometimes even more interesting.

The reason why I used to blog more often than I do now is because there were more things I didn't understand. In writing there's a search for meaning and/or reason and/or theory! Right now, my life seems to be more boring maybe, or maybe I just take things more lightly and I lose my desire to share so very easily. Not to share with readers, to share with the blog, to utter, to express, to write.

A friend of mine told me I should try to publish my writing--the poetry or the prose in arabic or whatever.
I just don't think I am ready to be a persona just yet.
When I read other people's books the writer is a persona, a ghost that's always there lingering and it's especially funny or emotional when I know the author of that book or have heard about him a lot because the persona seems to be fed by reality, or a certain shade of reality.
So yah, I'm not ready for that.
One day, though, I will look for publishing options.

Maybe what I'm gonna do is print this blog and hand it to a publishing house and see their reactions-- whether they think it's worth anything at all.

We have become quite distant: me and this blog.

Time passes by so quickly I can't catch more than a minute with myself even if I try and everything seems to mushed up together.

Today I learned that one of my professors is zionist. She believes that Egypt is a more racist state than Israel and that only Israeli army is to be blamed for everything that has been and is dysfunctional in this part of the world. She doesn't see an agenda; I'm not sure she is seeing facts either.

I'm behind in some of my classes, I need a long stressful weekend to finish what I have to do.

I miss reading for fun!