i'll need a slower reading

i think if i had read this play slower than i did i would be able to appreciate all of the subtle things about it such as the language and the poetry of the choruses. i got the main jist of it but i read it as i would read a book. i didn't really take the neccessary pauses or read with the line alignment like i could have and i think if i go back and do that i would better grasp the poeticness of the text and see a more vivid picture. i might go back and do that when i have time, but then again what ib student has time?

what kind of stage would this be on?

there seems to be a lot of movement and set changes during this play so i'm wondering what kind and how big of a stage this would be played on. with the choruses and the main actors and other extras in all the scences it seems like a rather large stage would be needed for this to all work like it should without anyone being crowded or the audience feeling as though they can't get the full picture of what is going on. i would like to be able to see this acted out on a stage just to see how they overcame that obstable of space.

you've reached the answering machine of...

make love, not war, please leave a message after the beep. beeeeeep. that's what i hear whenever i call my friend natalie and she doesn't answer. she's very anti war and pro peace. that whole theme of make love, not war fits with lysistrata very well because the men wanted to make love but first they had to end the war. so once the war was done they were allowed to be with their women again. confirming that they would much rather make love than war. this as an overall theme of the play would be good because it sticks very closely to the story. sometimes themes don't fit as well as this one does.

this is SPARTA!!!

so why were the spartans part southern? i mean what was with that dialect and why was it chosen? Lampito and the other spartans sounded plumb crazy when they wasa talkin' and gettin' on and stuff. it was just hard for me to imagine these characters as spartans or athenians when they talked like that. it was a funny scence in my head. it would be all these women in greek wear and then there would be a woman in a ten gallon hat and a cowboy shirt with chaps and a lasoo hanging out with them. that's just what i imagined when any spartan was around. the spartans dialect was very different from any of the other characters and i think it would be interesting to know if this is how they really talked way back when. i mean i doubt aristophanes knew that some where years in the future people in the rural southern united states would speak like this. where did this dialect come from?

hmmm...

i thought all of the characters in this play were dynamic but static. almost all of them very dynamic in some way, lysistrata was the strong willed woman who didn't take anything from anyone and got what she wanted how she wanted it. lampito was the also the strong woman who was loyal to her friend and the cause they were fighting for. but at the end of the play lysistrata was still the strong willed woman who didn't take anything from anyone and got what she wanted how she wanted it. and lampito, well she wasn't at the end but we'll assume for the sake of my argument that she too didn't change at all. this didn't really detract from the story as a whole or anything though so it wasn't that big of a deal. i don't know how any of the characters would change in the end though, the only way they could would be for the men to have won and the women realized they were wrong in what they were doing but that didn't happen so no one changed.

those uwm speakers

they were pretty cool people. i didn't feel like i learned a lot about what would go on in a college english course but i did get a lot of background info on their classes specifically. i liked the idea of doing more compositon stuff and less text anaylsis. i like commentaries just as much as the next kid but after doing that for two years straight it gets old, i haven't gotten to write a poem or short story or anything creative since 10th grade it seems like. theres the every now and then creative thing like the pun dealy but besides that not much. i liked how they focused on, what's that word uhhhhh, oh, academic writings rather than the kind of literature we study in class, that was good. i think i would like to get away from that kind of thing and focus on things that were written by students or just average joes.

how would they go about this?

what i'd like to know is how they would go about performing this play on stage. i mean did they actually have all of these guys walking around with stark erections? that seems it would be a tad bit awkward. i mean if that was a smaller part of the play they could get away with not doing it but most of the play takes place with these guys all dealing with the same erectile "condition". And then the other part where the choruses were going back and forth with eachother and clothes were being shed during this, would they perform that all in the nude? i'm sure things were different back then because in this day and age that would probably never happen unless it was a porno or something.

abstiance can end a war?

since when? since before christ apparently. these women come together and decide that abstaining from sex will end this war and i think that's poppycock. in the play it works but in real life this would never happen. one main reason for this not working would be that men fight over seas and so they are already abstaning from sex. in lysistrata the men seem to come home at night or whenever it is and sleep with the women so this would make it harder for them to go without it. there seems to be a very stong bond between the sexualness of the relationship and how the men and women interact with eachother. on the womens side it is a more loving and caring thing and on the mens side it is purely for the sexual satisfaction as you can see from the scene with kinesias and myrrhine, myrrhine wants to go out and see him because she feels bad for him but kinesias is just thinking about how he wants his "condition" fixed and not about her or their child. gosh, he's such a male. jk. he just needed to be like that because it would work well in the play.

those crazy women...

or should i say womyn, they are very feminst type women, strong willed in their desires and wants. but that's not what this is about. let's talk plot. so these men, the spartans and the athenians are at war with eachother. and the women don't like this so they decide to abstain from sex and force the men to give up the fighting. sounds logical, right? at the start of the book, i thought that probably wouldn't work but as the book went on i noticed how the men were faultering in their ways and really needing the women to handle their handles. haha. the plot comes to a head at the top of the main conflict when the men finally decide to give in. the rising action would best be seen through the koryphaois and the men/women chorus. they decpicted what was going on with the men and the women and in a interesting way. i liked the choruses and the koryphaois a lot. they said in song form what all the rest of the men and women were thinking. the falling action would be after they all agree on "peace" and go off and party and be merry and have sex with their women.

oh what a punny play

there were so many puns in this poem its ridiculous. i would have to say that my favorite pun was when kinesis was talking to myrrine and he says "i've been up for hours. i was up before i was up." hahahahaha, he was talking about his erection and it makes me laugh, that part just killed me. i think the puns make this play a lot more interesting than it would be if they had just stated what they meant. i mean saying "i've been up for hours, because of this raging erection." wouldn't be as funny as how it was stated through the pun. the play on words makes you look deeper in the text than you normally would, it's like doing a commentary and analyzling the text as you go along. some puns are harder to catch than others but that just makes you look that much deeper into the text and makes you understand what you're reading better. it's good.