Sept 12

The lecture today by Prof Tanglao-Aguas was pretty intense...I guess this class has more surprises in it than I would have thought. What better way to really learn and understand a play than to talk to the playwright himself?? Although I was thinking about this earlier today and connecting it with this Worlds of Music class that I am taking. In the Worlds of Music class we were talking a lot about how the composer of the piece can only put so much input and meaning into the piece when you talk directly to the composer - he/she can only explain to you the extent to which the piece affected them in its creation and what the intent of the piece was. The rest of the meaning of the piece has to come from the audience and the listeners...the meaning comes from how the piece of music (and now I am saying that the play...not necessarily the script bc a play is not written with the sole purpose of being read, but the production itself) or how the play affects the audience. The audience gives the work meaning by how it affects them and what they take away from it. I just thought this was an interesting tangent - that we are learning from the playwright himself which gives us a greater understanding of the meaning behind the play, but that this does not give us the whole meaning that the play has to the world - that it also must come from the audience itself and how they are affected by it.

On another note...the main thing that I took away from today's lecture in relation to playwriting and my own life is that you really need to write about issues that affect you personally so that you can put your true emotions into it...whether they are painful issues or not they need to be something that you are passionate about in order to get your ideas across to the audience. I mean I guess this is pretty obvious...who would want to see a show that someone wrote and didn't really care about the issues in it but what I really saw with Prof Tanglao-Aguas was that even after having spent ten years on writing this play and however many years now teaching about it...he still has that same passion and goal of wanting to share this story with the world. So even though I really wasn't into this play when I first read it, after hearing Prof lecture on it today and seeing how alive with emotions and impassioned he still is talking about this play I realize there is so much more significance in it than I originally thought. I also did not know much about the political and social issues of the Philippines and their interaction with the US. Seeing Prof's passion about this really inspired me to do some research into the history of the Philippines and really figure out who all the figures were (ie Marcos) to have a greater understanding of the play...at this point I still see it on such a surfacey level and I want to be able to really appreciate it. I will look into some research in the near future