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Visual Imagery In 2 Plays


            Counter-realism is quite an absorbing style of theatre. This style, created by German playwright Brecht, proposed that audiences should not only go to productions to experience emotions but to think. Because of this, in plays utilizing this school of theater attempt to present a social dynamic and display how this dynamic can be changed throughout the course of the production. A successful method of achieving this goal is through the implementation of visual imagery. Two plays that employ visual imagery in this way are Our Country's Good, by Timberlake Wertenbaker, and Trail of Her Inner Thigh, by Erin Cressida Wilson. Despite the fact that both of these play's scripts are intensely visual, both focus on different images.
             Our Country's Good tends to focus upon negative images. The two prevailing feelings of these scenes conjure up are those of pain and hunger. During the eight plus months the convicts are on their prison ship both of these emotions are displayed continuously. Scene one of the play begins with the excessive flogging of Robert Sideway. Immediately following this heart-wrenching scene, John Arscott begins describing the mental and physical pain of hunger that culminates in his describing a roast beef sandwich "eaten long ago". This trend continues towards the end of scene eleven during the convicts" first rehearsal. Each of the inmates are told to imagine what they would want if in fact they were rich rather than in their present situation. All of those asked come up with poignant visions of unavailable delicacies such as "hearts of palm" and "four fried eggs, six fried eggs, eight fried eggs". .
             Another trend of imagery that is prevalent in Wertenbaker's play exists in the world of the Aborigine. In the beginning of the play, the Aborigine tends to speak of the intangible world of dreams and ghosts. This realm he creates in his first two "scene-asides" make the reader believe as if both dreams and ghosts have animalistic tendencies.


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