EngLit

dana.tabacariu · Plunger Data inscrierii: 10/Iun/2011 Mesaje: 25

This play is like a hell full of pain, a pandemonium that amazes me and makes me blame someone… or something, because I have doubts if to blame the characters or to blame fate and feel sorry for them. If I blame fate then I absolve the characters and their ugly deeds… fussiness, desire, fail, fervor make this play to be a tragedy, a “strange” tragedy. O’Neill reveals us the human being with his sins and his fulfillments, with his ages and his dreams, in relationship with his family and with God.
Strange Interlude reveals the troubled lives of those people who live without think about the consequences of their deeds, who enjoy the present and don’t expect the worst from the future. Virginity, pseudo-madness, adultery, death and failure-those are the coordinates of this play.
Nina Leeds is the character who defines herself only in relation with the men around her. She can’t have Gordon, and his death is the click that makes her to become an easy woman. She’s sleeping with a lot of men not for money but for happiness. In spite of giving herself to everyman she is the woman of one single man because in everything that she does she’s thinking at Gordon. She takes care of wounded war men trying to heal them and… to cure herself. Being tired of so many “sacrifices” she comes home and get married to Sam Evans because she needs somebody to love and she needs a baby to be happy. She needs a perfect child (like Gordon was) and for having one she sleeps with Ned Darell. The much wanted child comes in a family with a lover, a wife with a beautiful dream and a lover, a husband and the old Charlie. A baby with one mother and 3 fathers.
This play is a colored tragedy. The characters don’t fight with fate, but accomplish it. All that they want is their personal happiness. What is wrong with wanting to be happy, what is wrong with wanting to love or with finding happiness? So… what’s wrong with Nina? This is a play with chastity and with debauchery. The characters wallow in sin. Even in their mind they hate, covet and kill. There is a continuous burdesome fussiness between characters’ thoughts and words, between normality and abnormality, between dreams and fulfillments, between love and hate. Love and hate define them, define the human beings. There is a paradox- to reach for love, for happiness they are doing awful things, destroying humans and relations, making others unhappy, protecting heaven with hell. “The road to hell is paved with good intentions”. Nina Leeds is a paradox. Her deeds are done with a precise aim: happiness, her happiness, Gordon’s happiness, Gordon junior’s happiness.

dana.tabacariu · Plunger Data inscrierii: 10/Iun/2011 Mesaje: 25

The play is ending like it’s never started, with Nina in Charlie’s arms. There is no climax. The end doesn’t bring something new, nothing more shattering than the whole play. So much fuss for nothing? No. So much fuss for an interlude, to mark a way for experience, to know what suffering, love, hate, selfishness, selflessness, lack of respect, worship and obsession is.
Is Nina a monster or just a woman who bites a file to reach an ideal? A woman who transforms a man into a myth and whom she cherish like a saint. She acts instinctual, bad and amoral. She is not immoral because she doesn’t have the consciousness of breaking a moral law, she doesn’t think at what is happening around her, she’s only preoccupied to be happy, to revenge her unconsumed relationship with Gordon. She transforms everyman in pieces from that love. She lies everybody, including herself, she sees motivation of love where is nothing else than madness and despair.

dana.tabacariu · Plunger Data inscrierii: 10/Iun/2011 Mesaje: 25

No one is thinking about God here. We can say that Nina is like a terrestrial god, because she is playing everybody, she influences and also changes their lives.
The whole play is under the sign of selfishness. Every character is thinking only at their personal life, their personal happiness, so they couldn’t be happy, like Buddha says to the man who asked him: “I want happiness!” “remove “I”-that’s ego, then remove “want”-that’s desire and you are left with only HAPPINESS. The only characters which are not selfish in the play are Gordon- an example of morality, and Amos Evans-she wants her son’s and Nina’s happiness. Nina and Sam are the same in intentions, he wants to become someone and she wants to become something: happy. People are important for them only if they can get something from them or with their help.
O’Neill makes a play about imperfect people… like us. We also think something and do another thing. We all have a dual character. In this play we can see the human being with all the negative parts. The happiness of one is the unhappiness of another. In this play the time is not healing wounds, but makes them worst.
It’s a strange interlude between saying and silence, between justice and sin, between a character and another, between normality and abnormality.
I see this play like a story that tells: “look what happens if…”

What do you think? Is Nina a immoral or an amoral woman?

Simona Timis · Plunger Data inscrierii: 27/Mai/2011 Mesaje: 39

If we say she is amoral then we forgive her and blame the fate for all that ugly deeds that she did.
It’ s easy to make a play in which nobody is guilty, but the destiny. It’s easy to say: not her/ not us, but the fate.

All that I can say is that she is not a moral person/character. She hates and hurts everybody around her. She lies and deceives them, she is a monster, a very selfish woman and reminds me of Katy from East of Eden. She turns everybody’s lives into nightmares.
In this play we can see all the negative parts of the characters. Somebody said that ”they are like America between the Wars”. The mirrors between reality and the souls of the characters reveal us how ugly are they. They don’t even have regrets or desire to change something bad that they have done.
But I think that the author wanted the readers/spectators to be witnesses and not the judge.

izabellstrimb · Plunger Data inscrierii: 17/Mar/2011 Mesaje: 35

We a difficulty from one shifting attitude from another, as well as a usage of mask: partea interioară and exterior reaction. For example Nina in relation to her father, the duality is always there, the interior discourse is different from the exterior discourse. With the use of masks , we can distinguish the their spoken dialogue from their monologue.

Razvan517 · Trimis: 27/05/2012 17:44 Titlul subiectului:

This play is kind of 'strange'. We have a woman who lost her soon-to-be husband in a war and who is acting very 'strange' for this loss. Instead of mourning and getting on with her life, she complicates her life with a bunch of other men.

My colleagues were blaming destiny for what had happened. Well I blame people for what they choose to make happen to them. We always hear that we make our own destiny, so I guess this should also apply here. Instead of doing what she did, Nina could have changed her life for the better.
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Gaalateea · Trimis: 15/06/2012 14:11 Titlul subiectului:

Well, we keep talking about Nina and what a bed person she is. I see her as a wounded animal who bites even the hand that tries to help. Her soul is heart from loosing Gordon. She does everything she can trying to heal her soul, but instead of accepting (we were talking about acceptance in slaughterhouse Five) and moving on she only makes it worse. She exerts her will upon everyone. And about that: I don't think she is the only one to blame. You know that saying: "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me." All 3 men around her knew very well what they got themselves into. And they accept it.
I liked this play. It has a tragic realism in it. Tragic because it is so close to what we see every day. Selfish, shallow people who want this or that to be happy. Never actually being happy about anything they get. But still they never stop to think "why?" Maybe if they would stop thinking about what they want and start thinking about who they are and what they have good in their lives, they could discover happiness in themselves. Buddha was right. So is O'Neill.
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Un roman bun iti reda adevarul despre eroii sai; dar un roman prost iti spune adevarul despre autor..." (G.K. Chesterton)