Prompt #3

Several years ago, a show was done at LSU titled The Smoking Lesson. To this day, it’s one of my favorite shows. It’s a coming of age story, with themes of adolescence, wanderlust, and mental illness. It’s an extremely raw original story and all of the characters are so complex. I identified with the coming of age struggle, and the challenges that the main characters were constantly facing in terms of friendship and romantic feelings. Although I loved the show, there wasn’t one specific message that stayed with me or changed me. I didn’t have an “ah-ha” moment of sorts. So although I was extremely entertained by the production and connected to it on a personal level, it didn’t necessarily “inform” me of a specific idea.

A production that convinced me of something True, I would have to say is Dog Sees God. I loved this play from the first time I read the script to when Daniel Matthews direct it here at LSU. This show as a whole really made me reflect on the way I treat people on a day-to-day basis. You never know what has happened in someone’s day or even in his or her lifetime. Dog Sees God highlights the importance of human interaction, and how much we affect one another. I left really embracing the Truth of human relationships, and thinking about how much we can affect each other in both negative and positive ways.

I believe that documentary or “verbatim” theatre can offer new or clarified truth, whereas non-documentary theatre doesn’t necessarily offer the element of truth that nonfictional theatre retains. Although Dog Sees God really stirs the idea of the importance of human reacting, this exact story doesn’t reign true the way the events of Spill do. I do think there is some overlap, and both elements of truth are important, however there is a difference between thematic truth and physical truth of events that occur in a script.