Maggie Hess ENG 382N February 25, 2012 Thoughts Evolving on Silas House’s Play Before I read “This is my Heart for you” I was a bit regretful that we have to read a play instead of just nonfiction. After all, when I wrote poetry, which IS nonfiction, I was told that is not the subject matter of our class. I should learn to overcome such grudges. After reading the play but before attending it, I wrote this: Silas interwove the metaphor of nature (from as early as the Tennessee Williams quote) with the human nature. He presented a clear argument against homophobic actions and made a clear case for men and women loving whomever they pleased. I still am not clear on why reading this play is supposed to help the creative nonfiction writing process. Then on the class day of discussing the play, my fickle mind changed again. I understood our reason for reading it in a class on Nonfiction because the play walks the tender line that is walked when art reports on an issue of real tragedy.
On Friday I attended the play in a volatile state myself. My mood had dropped with the temperature like a snap. At the play, my mind was a slow acting sponge and my heart was pensive and uptight. I feel the moods of things. Friday night, the mood in the theatre was a mixture of things, but I felt so tense from when I walked in and up to the scene of the beating. In the text of the play, Silas House mentioned that the cast in the background sit tight and stiff in the beginning and I think I absorbed their emotional tension. Aaaaaaaaaaaa! I am not being clear. Ideologically, I am open-minded and support fairness, rights for all couples to love whomever they want. I want societal change, which almost always takes people being pushed to the extreme before they change. I am in favor of GLBTQ relationships. But I don’t want people to nearly get beat to death as part of the process. I don’t know why. I really am clueless about why I am so weak on this subject. I would commit civil disobedience for a number of issues. I am trying to wrap my mind around my bashfulness on this issue.
Maybe this is not what you asked for me to write about. But I think that the EMOTION was the element that was occurring in the physical production much more than in my imagination of what the play would be like when I read the script. Thoughts and feeling are things we evolve through. I guess the written play was more thoughty and the living play was more feelingish. Right now, having went to Quaker Meeting, I am feeling the impact of the daughter of the Oberst couple who went to the play and spoke extensively about how influenced her.
I am seeing in myself a hypocrisy that bothers me deeply. I have only attended two gay rights events in my life. Other than those, which made me feel uncomfortable, I have stayed away. I hear people say that holding signs and being public about their political beliefs can be extremely uncomfortable in general. I am aware that nothing is JUST political. In fact political issues generally are being talked about because people are deeply touched by them. Wars kill people and wars give people jobs; MTR causes cancer and ugliness and MTR gives neighbors reasons to turn on each other. I have been an activist in so many areas. But I stay publically quiet about sexuality to a large degree.
On the set of This is My Heart for You, there were these clear heart shaped plastic leaves of plants, props integral to the narrative of the play. Some people stepped on them coming in. They were crushed, making horrible sounds. Seemed pretty to me symbolic. But I think that’s a poem.