Wednesday, October 21, 2009

Drama Appreciation: All in the Timing

All in the Timing

Last Friday, October 9th, 2009, I had the pleasure of viewing the Daytona State College’s production of All in the Timing. Though it wasn’t a completely full house, there was a decent crowd that was lively enough to show appreciation of the production. Once the play started we were all laughing at the funny parts and shocked at the surprising moments. All in the Timing is a very bright and humorous serial structured play, featuring five small stories. Though each of the five pieces have completely different characters and plots, there are hidden morals and important underlying messages in all of them.


The first act was simply structured, yet very intriguing. The spotlight was focused on a round table, occupied by a small girl apparently reading a book. Then walks by a boy who shows an interest in the girl. The entire first act is made up with parts of the scene being repeated over and over again until both the boy and girl say the “right” thing. A bell is dinged to represent the re-starting of a certain part of the dialogue. Both the boy and the girl mess up with what they say to each other, sometimes offending the other with mentions about anything from the author Faulkner, to their taste in movies. In my opinion, the biggest emphasis in this act was on timing. Depending on what both of the characters said and what time they said it, affected the result dramatically.










The second act stars three surprising characters: chimpanzees who are determined to write Shakespeare. There are two male chimps named Milton, and Swift, and a girl chimp named Kafka. There is quite a lot of literary references in this scene, besides the obvious, Shakespeare. There are some quotes of John Milton’s Paradise Lost as well as a quote from the Bible. All three of the chimps have very different personalities .One of the chimps named Swift, for example, questions their existence and why they are forced to submit to their authority, an unknown character named Dr. Rosenbaum. On the other hand, the chimp named Kafka is very content on following orders and going with the flow. This is definitely relatable to characteristics of human beings as well. The overall theme of this scene seemed to be irony. Chimps attempting Shakespeare for a man; men supposedly derived from monkeys, and Shakespeare was written by men. So essentially, Shakespeare was written by monkeys, or in this case Chimps. (Or something like that)

The third act takes place in a classroom setting. A timid, stuttering girl walks into an empty room, with hopes of learning a mysterious language called “Unamunda“. The teacher speaks in a strange but humorous language with some words sounding like English words. For example, one of the words in the language Unamunda, sounds like “Dwight Howard”. Eventually the girl begins to pick up this new language and discovers that her stuttering goes away when she speaks in Unamunda. The climax of this scene is that the man reveals that really, Unamunda is a scam. However, the girl forgives him and they fall in love. The general idea is that all it took was this silly language to unite two people together, even though the language was not “real“. And that you never know what will happen when you go into a classroom in hopes of learning an unheard of language.

The fourth act took place in a café. Essentially the scene is about two characters. One character is stuck in a “Philadelphia” which is a place in which you can only get what you want when you ask for the opposite. The other man is in a “Los Angeles”, where everything is pleasant and peaceful. Even when the man in “Los Angeles” loses his job and his girlfriend leaves him, he is unphased. However, through a turn of fate, the man who was in “Los Angeles” ends up getting sucked into the other man’s “Philadelphia”. Then the reality of his losing the job hits him and the fact that his girlfriend left him. On the other hand, the man who was always in the “Philadelphia” is learning to deal with asking for the opposite of what he wants, and even hits it off with the waitress. In my opinion, the over all theme is that we have to work with what we have. Some days we might be stuck in “Los Angeles“ and other days we might be stuck in “Philadelphia“ but all the matters is what we make of our circumstances.

The final act was about the Russian revolutionist, Trotsky. In my opinion, this act was the hardest one to follow. Similar to the first act as far as the bell dinging the signal for a restart of the scene or certain segment. For the entire story Trotsky is obsessed about how he is going to die. His wife reads to him a certain Encyclopedia from the future that apparently tells how he is going to die. His gardener is going to kill him with a mountain climber‘s axe. Throughout the story Trotsky keeps dying, then the bell rings and the plot starts where it left off, revealing more and more story. However, in the end he still dies. In my opinion, the overall moral of this story was that life is what you make of it, everyone is gong to die eventually so you might as well enjoy it.

As we can see, All in The Timing is s very fascinating and diverse play that features many comedic, periodical scenes that certainly keep a person thinking. The cast ranges all the way from chimpanzees, all the way to Russian revolutionists. The themes and tones vary in each of the different story lines and in a way they complement each other. Overall I thought it was a very unique play that kept my very amused while also causing me to think.

Images Cited:

Picture # 1: Unknown Artist. Web. http://www.mymct.org/season.jsp?season=2006

Picture # 2: Newman, Angela. 17 March 2008. Web. http://www.syracuse.com/flags/photo-of-the-day/house_unamunda.jpg


Picture #3 : Unknown Artist. Property of Midland Community Theatre. Midland, Texas. Web. http://www.mctmidland.org/images/PHOTOGALLERY/2006/large/Timing041.jpg

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