A little bit frightened and at a loss for words

Hey gang, so I wasn’t able to attend the Greek play Hecuba tonight because it conflicted with another class, so as an alternative assignment I watched the Greek Play “Trojan Woman” by Euripedes. I was very surprised at the performance. The play was entirely in Greek, Latin, and Indian, thus making it impossible for me to understand any of the words spoken, but surprisingly enough I was able to understand what was going on and interpret the interaction between different characters. 

The Greeks certainly know how to portray emotions. Frankly, there were some parts of the play I wish I didn’t understand…

I was completely unprepared for the style of the play, lots of chanting, screaming, and dying. That being said the play pushed some very powerful emotions. As I watched I experienced something similar to an adrenalin rush. I unexplainably felt this surge of energy building up inside of me. I thought this was really interesting, but it was almost as if I were feeding off the energy that the actors were pushing.

The actors:

I think that the emotion of the actors, the rhyming, and the singing itself have powerful rhetorical effects on us as viewers. They seem to work together to not only persuade the audience to believe something but to create an experience for those watching. I love to quote movies. I think that if school were a movie I would be a stellar student. For some reason seeing with my eyes and hearing with my ears make connections that last a lot longer than words. I can remember and apply the things that I’ve experienced easily.

The plot:

I think acting can be a powerful form of persuasion because people remember what they see, hear, and feel. One of my favorite authors, C.S. Lewis, wrote “Try to exclude the possibility of suffering and you find that you have excluded life itself.” With this in mind I think that Greek dramas have a lot of powerful reasoning behind them. We recognize that, though extreme, these tragedies reflect parts of our lives. We build an emotional connection, which is what the playwright was trying to do all along. It’s almost as if he creates his own reality with the play and then projects it on us, and for the time that we are watching the play we are in his world.