4-13

Today class was short. We discussed the play my classmate Jillian picked out "A Behanding in Spokane". It's about a guy whose hand is cut off, and he cuts other people's hands off, but then it turns out in the end he probably cut his own hand off in the first place. It wasn't bad. Martin McDonagh has written better and while there were some interesting ideas (the idea of self-inflicted trauma) they seemed second to the physical actions in the play. There wasn;t a whole lot that the reader walks away with. We looked for character and thematic significance and the structure of the dialogue. The playwright is Irish and this is the only play he's written where characters are specifically American. He did a good job with dialect, but there were sections, especially in the monologues, where the sentence structure wasn't quite right for where the characters were supposed to be from. It still sounded Irish. Killian led a good class discussion. She came prepared and had discussion questions that looked at Behanding as an individual work, and also discussion topics that related the script to the craft of writing as a whole and specific sections of scripts that are being written in class. I present my section next Wednesday. Jillian gave me good ideas for what I want my presentation to accomplish.