Matches in SemOpenAlex for { <https://semopenalex.org/work/W765968910> ?p ?o ?g. }
Showing items 1 to 63 of
63
with 100 items per page.
- W765968910 startingPage "14" @default.
- W765968910 abstract "If anyone had suggested to Michael Elyanow that he should write the play that turned out to be The Children, he likely would have passed because the idea sounded like a journey that was impossible to compass. But when Michael mentioned that he named his son Milo, after the iconic character from Norman Juster's The Phantom Tollbooth, it all made sense to me. There are so many credos to take from that book, but perhaps most pertinent in this instance: So many things are possible just as long as you don't know they're impossible.Fortunately for us, Michael didn't have the description of the play in front of him as he set out to write The Children. It appeared to him, slowly, over time, so he didn't realize that actually it was impossible. But in fact, where did such a play come from?Michael Elyanow is a storyteller, and has from his earliest days used stories to save his life as well as make it more interesting. He is also a lover of mystery. He says that even in his childhood, when he'd leave notes to lead his parents on treasure hunts to find the last missive which contained the denouement (Need more cereal or I love you), it was always about taking an audience on a journey.In his writing he is constantly experimenting with form, with humor, with pathos disguised in hilarity, with violence, with handcuffs, and most important, with naked frailties and real human pain. These thematic explorations range in styles from mostly naturalistic to impossibly theatrical. His plays move linearly forward in living rooms, then fracture time between present and past, then track stories that are like nesting dolls which reveal new selves inside larger selves, getting more complex as the layers are revealed. Most playwrights seem to have a theme they reinvestigate in many guises over time, and Michael writes plays in which worlds collide. He takes advantage of the theatrical form to allow impossible worlds to clash and inform each other.In his play The Idiot Box, he examines the smashing of reality inside a sitcom and what ensues from that destruction. In his latest play, A Lasting Mark, he investigates the collision of the present and the past in the shifting tenses of fragmented time. In Robyn is Happy, a friendship based on shared past trauma goes seriously, hilariously awry as three fierce funny women love, fight, and claw to try to both retain their friendship and their own individually defined happiness. In all these plays Michael has been investigating form, friendship, and family, in all its guises.But parents and children make an especially fertile subject matter, as all of us have been at least one if not the other. Before the inspiration for The Children came to him, Michael had gotten married and had a child, so he was seeing things with new eyes and inclined to ask new questions as he sat in a theatre watching Fiona Shaw play Medea. He found himself asking: Why isn't anyone stopping Medea from killing her children? Why are the characters content to sit and watch the train wreck happen? Michael, infused with all the wonder and terror of new fatherhood, needed to write the play where the answers to these questions would make sense to him.The Children seems to start off as a comic clash of cultures between 431 BC and modern Maine. However, as it goes on the multiple layers of the play start revealing themselves, and it proves itself to be much more complex and painful than its very humorous beginnings. This is really a play that asks whether or not it's possible to survive a horrific childhood and go on to have a good life, and the stripping bare of the storytelling frames within frames to get to both the truth of the past and the dilemma of the present is one of the many rewards of this writing.The Children also asks who parents the children when the children's parents aren't capable of parenting them. Who are the parent figures and heroes? Michael himself mostly grew up without a dad; he often felt that he had to be his own parent, offer himself his own guidance, and often longed for someone who could be a father figure with all that that entailed. …" @default.
- W765968910 created "2016-06-24" @default.
- W765968910 creator A5076660499 @default.
- W765968910 date "2012-07-01" @default.
- W765968910 modified "2023-09-27" @default.
- W765968910 title "Introduction to Michael Elyanow's the Children" @default.
- W765968910 hasPublicationYear "2012" @default.
- W765968910 type Work @default.
- W765968910 sameAs 765968910 @default.
- W765968910 citedByCount "0" @default.
- W765968910 crossrefType "journal-article" @default.
- W765968910 hasAuthorship W765968910A5076660499 @default.
- W765968910 hasConcept C107038049 @default.
- W765968910 hasConcept C124952713 @default.
- W765968910 hasConcept C140713313 @default.
- W765968910 hasConcept C142362112 @default.
- W765968910 hasConcept C166957645 @default.
- W765968910 hasConcept C2524010 @default.
- W765968910 hasConcept C2776084483 @default.
- W765968910 hasConcept C2780861071 @default.
- W765968910 hasConcept C33923547 @default.
- W765968910 hasConcept C52119013 @default.
- W765968910 hasConcept C95457728 @default.
- W765968910 hasConceptScore W765968910C107038049 @default.
- W765968910 hasConceptScore W765968910C124952713 @default.
- W765968910 hasConceptScore W765968910C140713313 @default.
- W765968910 hasConceptScore W765968910C142362112 @default.
- W765968910 hasConceptScore W765968910C166957645 @default.
- W765968910 hasConceptScore W765968910C2524010 @default.
- W765968910 hasConceptScore W765968910C2776084483 @default.
- W765968910 hasConceptScore W765968910C2780861071 @default.
- W765968910 hasConceptScore W765968910C33923547 @default.
- W765968910 hasConceptScore W765968910C52119013 @default.
- W765968910 hasConceptScore W765968910C95457728 @default.
- W765968910 hasIssue "42" @default.
- W765968910 hasLocation W7659689101 @default.
- W765968910 hasOpenAccess W765968910 @default.
- W765968910 hasPrimaryLocation W7659689101 @default.
- W765968910 hasRelatedWork W190273768 @default.
- W765968910 hasRelatedWork W2011018474 @default.
- W765968910 hasRelatedWork W2022363267 @default.
- W765968910 hasRelatedWork W204610960 @default.
- W765968910 hasRelatedWork W2165628095 @default.
- W765968910 hasRelatedWork W2175884832 @default.
- W765968910 hasRelatedWork W2328870950 @default.
- W765968910 hasRelatedWork W233770867 @default.
- W765968910 hasRelatedWork W235706532 @default.
- W765968910 hasRelatedWork W2511843515 @default.
- W765968910 hasRelatedWork W251598126 @default.
- W765968910 hasRelatedWork W255298715 @default.
- W765968910 hasRelatedWork W2610359478 @default.
- W765968910 hasRelatedWork W313798442 @default.
- W765968910 hasRelatedWork W333980226 @default.
- W765968910 hasRelatedWork W434944148 @default.
- W765968910 hasRelatedWork W45159777 @default.
- W765968910 hasRelatedWork W21865683 @default.
- W765968910 hasRelatedWork W344828716 @default.
- W765968910 hasRelatedWork W350579162 @default.
- W765968910 isParatext "false" @default.
- W765968910 isRetracted "false" @default.
- W765968910 magId "765968910" @default.
- W765968910 workType "article" @default.