Cosi Madness free essay sample

Everyone goes mad in their own particular way. Narrow thinks madness Is too generalized, and It Is based on each Individuals past and experiences etc. At the end of the play, Lewis is no longer afraid of madness. Lewis is thoroughly transformed by the patients. Narrow uses a mixture of laughter and madness, which is a volatile mixture. We usually see madness as dark and scary, so we can keep it in a corner and Ignore it. When he adds humor to it, then we begin to be able to relate to It, they share similar emotions. Fear. Lewis has to face various hurdles throughout the play. He suffers from a lack of gumption at first. His major hurdle is Henry. Lewis realizes that he has got to get Henry to stay. Through rehearsing he is connecting emotionally with the patients. Every scene Is a hurdle. Each time he learns to care about the patients as individuals. He goes on what is called a character arc (complete change). It Is a fish out of water story. Lewis Is thrust Into another world to transform him.Often, when someone doesnt have a family or friends etc, due to a dysfunctional past etc whatever (in Lewis case his relationship with Nick and Lucy is going downhill) he then makes the attends his family, he finds a new sense of reality with them. Vietnam War Is what Lewis believes in at first. But he will agree with anyone at the start, so long as it keeps the peace. Mozart may seem an Insignificant detail to the play, but thats the point. To Lewis, how you can show love for someone becomes more important than politics etc, I. E. Its the little things that count etc (Hence Mozart music, just a simple beauty).When Lewis enters the asylum it is like an island (thrust into another world). The patients dont even know there Is a war going on. Lewis is transformed by his experience. How It works Is that you suck people on this island, and watch how they change. They are forced to face their demons because they cant get off the island. Cost character quotes Memories quotes for your essay questions. Here are some to get you started. LEWIS l need the money, Lucy (p 1) Do you think we should be doing something like this? In these days, you know, the 10) Why cant I ever say no? Just leave. Theyre mad. Its madness .This is an unusual position for me I directed some plays at university and, well this is my first year out . Julie: They still scare you? Lewis: Its not so bad. My grandmother went mad. I went once to the asylum to see her. In her mind she was living in the year before I was born. She thought I was Eric, my father. And he had Just married mum and she was about to have me. Julie: Dont aver tell a psychiatrist that story, theyd have a heart attack on the symbolism of it all. Were agreed. We dont want to see Australian soldiers die in meaningless war. (page 48) Mozart. Im not going to let them down.There was no next year. This theatre mysteriously burnt down a week after the performance and Doug was the major suspect. (page 89) DOUG Doug: Women like to pretend they dont play around but theyre Just more secretive about it. (pop) Doug: You can always find loneliness in a marriage, but never solitude. Cherry: [to Doug] Go burn a cat. (she exits] Lewis: Why are they always saying that? Doug: Thats what I did. Lewis: Burned a cat? Doug: No, CATS. See mum had five cats, and me and mum wed been having some Differences. So one night I rounded me up, put me in a cage, doused me with petrol and put a match to me! Lewis chuckles, thinking its a Joke. Doug grins and laughs] Doug: He-he! Funny, eh? (He sits next to Lewis] They were running round the backyard, burin and howling. [He gives a psychotic little laugh] Doug: No such thing as grace under pressure for a burning cat, lemma tell hay. Then, me mum came outside to see what was happening? Darn near freaked out she did. See, I figured Id wait a couple of hours till the cats were dead and mum was feeling a bit sorry for herself, and Id go up to the front door and Id knock on it and Id say, Hi, Mum! Im here to talk about our unresolved conflicts. Doug: But Oh no, One of those BUCKING cats ran into the house; a couple of minutes the whole bloody house was on fire. Within half an hour there was no front door to knock on. Doug: Yeah, if it wasnt for that damn cat, I wouldnt be in here. ROY Roy: Were going to do Coos Fan Tutee, the opera. Mozart, you low life. Couldnt direct a nymphomaniac to a stag night. I know you can take criticism Jerry, because you must get a lot of it! My mother played the music to me over and over. You can count the productions of it on one finger in Australia. Well, none probably. I havent seen any. Well be making history. Australian history. Well bring culture to this place. You know what culture is for most Australians, Jerry? Its the stuff that grows on stale cheddar. Its all in my head. Introit this, the world wouldnt be the same. It would break, like a voice in despair shattering glass. There is the harmony of the spheres and that harmony is Mozart music. Coos Fan Tutee. Without this opera having been composed, there would be Just clanging, banging, a bedlam all around us. Its never happened to me before. (pop) Love is what you feel when you dont have enough emotion left to hate. (page 61) A Nor that was like my childhood: tea parties, dances in our ballroom, circus performers coming to perform Just for me. (page 64) CHERRY Cherry: Will outsiders see the show? Lewis: Dont know. Cherry: If its a real large role, Ill invite my dad. Hell be surprised to see me out of Neater. [Lewis Just looks at her] Cherry: My dad was a great duck hunter. But we were very poor and couldnt afford a dog, so He used to get me to point and fetch the ducks. [pause] Cherry: Those lakes can get pretty cold when youre swimming in me with a dead duck in your mouth. Lewis gapes] Cherry: Ha! Just pulling your leg! It was me! It was me! (pop) Cherry comments to Julie that Roy is performing a Do it yourself lobotomy (pop) AUSTIN Up to you. A pants? Excerpts from Shakespeare. Whatever you like. The important thing is to keep them interested. To bring them out of their shells. Give them something interesting to do. The experiment is over (pop) Now the position of a social worker in an asylum can be precarious. This does not look good for me or for you, does it? (pop) Sorry is such an easy word to say. (pop) Straight out of university (pop) This experiment was to bring them out of their shells, not to allow them to wreak havoc. Now the position of a social worker in an asylum can be precarious. This doesnt look good for me or for you, does it? Drugs make me feel sort of living Especially Junk Some people cant imagine life Ho hit him? Like Doorbells and Fording, its Just easy for a woman to fall in love as it is for a man. l had to go and see one of the shrinks. They dont know how to deal with drug users. He called it a crutch, I said it was a rocket to the stars.Needless to say En didnt get on. RUTH Learnt my lines. Im word perfect. Go on, test me Any place, any time. I know what Im doing and everyone else. Test me. NICK Barricades and bombs? Why not? Australians, especially young Australians of my age, are getting fed up with our society. We want changes and we want them now. (17) Youve become a right wing nut, havent you? You belong here Theyre coming to take me away, ha, ha, to the funny farm. Christ, youll never be a director until you can convince them that what you want to do is what they want to do. It means that these people, even the middle class will be radicalized by seeing how any of us are against them. Theyll know that to be against the Vietnam war is also to be against the old fossils government we now have. Thats it, Im not putting up with this right Inning crap Not only are they nuts, but theyre right wing nuts. LUCY How to understand how capitalism exploits the working class is important. How to stop the war in Vietnam is important. How to make a piece of theatre meaningful and Intelligent, like Breech does, is important. After bread, a shelter, equality, health, procreation, money comes maybe loveLove is an emotional indulgence for the privileged few. Working with these people has changed you. We used to talk about things. Important things. Now all you can talk about is reactionary drivel like Coos Fan rutted. l have sex with him and sleep with you Vive come to pick you up and take you to the Galileo rehearsals. You sound like money out of a farce. Dont quote that bucking opera at me! (pick] Idealism versus Conservatism Coos marked a turn by Louis Narrow to more personal, autobiographical material, and the turn from the social to the individual is evident in the play itself.Through the use of psychiatric patients in the play, Narrow presents a rebellion against social norms. In terms of the play, however, this entails a rebellion more against politically correct attitudes than against conservative notions. This is reinforced by their Juxtaposition against Nick and Lucy, Marxist whose concerns with social change and Justice are undermined as the play progresses, reinforcing Lexiss preference for the more universal-?read, bourgeois individualist-?concerns of the opera being presented. Socialist ideals. Coos tells the story of Lewis, a young university graduate who takes a Job working with the patients at a mental institution. They aim to put on the opera Coos fan Tutee by Mozart. Much of the plays humor lies in the eccentricities of the various inmates No, Gilbert argues, function along quite conservative lines, presenting politically incorrect attitudes without provoking any sense of guilt: Doug, for instance, can give vice to the aggressive misogyny [.. Because Doug, like the other inmates, performs the dramatic function of a licensed clown who gives audiences permission to laugh Introit demanding any corrective action (Theatre and Cultural Commerce: Louis Anoraks Cost 193). These characters reinforce by their madness acceptable guidelines of behavior: On a slightly different level, Costs comedy can also be made to function as part of the required moral instruction since the inmates uproarious antics often highlight the boundaries between what is acceptable behavior and hat is not (197).Despite this caveat, though, the mad characters in the play, while tot romanticists, are perhaps the most sympathetic characters in that, as Thomson argues The mental patients are certainly damaged, but they have at least dispensed Ninth hypocrisy (177). In contrast to the asylum patients are Lexiss university friend Nick and his girlfriend Lucy. Both of them are Marxist, and have little time for Lexiss opera: You know, Marx thought Mozart was a rea ctionary sit (Coos 14).Nick and Lucy represent desire for change: Barricades and bombs. Why not? Australians, especially pun Australians of my age are getting fed up with our society. We want changes and we want them now! (18). They place broader, societal concerns over personal stop the war in Vietnam is important. How to make a piece of theatre meaningful is important. After bread, a shelter, equality, health, procreation, money, comes maybe love. Do you think the starving masses of Africa or a Vietnamese peasant thinks about love?Love is an emotional indulgence for the privileged few. (50) In contrast, Lewis is cynical about major change, viewing it as contrary to Australian character: The French always believed their own rhetoric, Australians are suspicious of rhetoric (50). He becomes increasingly focused on the more private concerns of he opera: Its about important things like love and fidelity (50), concerns whose claims to universality are to an extent emphasized in the play by their reflections in Lexiss own life. Beyond this reflection, the argument is loaded by Nicks increasingly obvious insensitivity; he mocks Henrys fathers war medals callously and is uncaring towards the mental patients on the whole, singing Theyre coming to take me away, ha ha, to undermined by her personal infidelities (63). The result is that, as Jim Davidson rites, Left-wing language has been reduced to Williamson simplistic, while Lexiss girlfriend scarcely provides a feminist perspective (49). He Marxist are revealed to be insensitive and selfish, their postulating, as the right Mould argue, an ideological mask. The rebellion of the seventies is rewritten. In Coos t is Lewis who is the rebel, shaking off the fashionable beliefs of his companions. And it is his reality, not their ideology that is ultimately validated: The cynical and Geologically unsound opera about female infidelity, derided as reactionary and irrelevant by the political activists Nick and Lucy, actually mirrors real life with perfect accuracy (H.Th omson, 177). It could be argued that at least part of the reason for Costs popularity lies in the fact that it taps into discussions about ideology versus reality, the political versus the personal, the social versus the universal, and the cynicism towards Marxism and feminism which were increasingly part of the discourse of the right in an increasingly conservative Australian political climate. Despite some comments on the initial productions length, critical reception was overwhelmingly positive.Russell Walsh described the play as characterized by a total lack of either aesthetic or ideological pretension(43). Alison Cotes wrote that The audiences initial politically correct reaction Is it proper to laugh at mental illness? is soon shown to be small-minded, because the loonies are the ones with the real insights, and it is they who teach their director Lewis, with his half-baked, fresh-from-university idealism, the value of love(59). Kate Herbert, similarly, wrote that Lewis chose the inmates over his student friends because At least they are honest loonies(43).Amanda Ball similarly endorsed the plays priorities: They have a Near to stop he has a play to perform. It is a tribute to the success of Anoraks highly arsenal script that we feel he is the one whose priorities are in order(60). All of these comments appear to endorse the plays conservative choice of personal over social values. Helen Thomson and Rosemary Neil were more critical of the plays subplot, although the former still reviewed the play positively (42; 40).Murray renewal was the critic most savage on the plays politics, writing that Making the staging of the play in 1970 so significant that Lewis has to choose between directing the production or Joining the National Vietnam Moratorium march creates what is known in show business as a false dichotomy. I have no trouble leveling that Anoraks student chum was an unpleasant sit but to make him the identikit radical directing Breech, caddishly seducing Lexiss girlfriend, deriding the gentle humanism of the theatre project is reductionism and gratuitous.This is not a benign view of the past, it is a falsification. (Noises Off 46) Coos aptly demonstrates the growing cynicism toward social change and an outward- looking rather than inward-looking compassion. The play undercuts the arguments of the plays socialist-leaning characters by presenting them as unsympathetic in comparison to Lewis and the politically incorrect inmates, and reinforces the more ND real than ideological social concerns. From: Facing Reality: Idealism versus Conservatism in Australian Theatre and Politics at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century.PhD Dissertation Ben Payne, BAA (Hon.). Coos mid-range essay ere following student example is a mid-range response from the 2010 Assessment Report. Coos is more than an entertaining comedy. It reveals the sadness of the lives of the characters. Discuss. Rough the play Coos the audience witnesses the lives of mentally ill people unfold before them. Louis Narrow has used black comedy within Coos to allow the audience o abandon their pre-conceptions of mad people and to see the characters not for their illness but for their personality.Because of this the audience is able to relate to ;ACH character and their situation and realism the underlying sadness of the patients lives. We are confronted by their pasts as we come to realism the causes for their illnesses; like with Roy as we learn of his childhood, abandoned by his mother and growing up in orphanages. Coos also reveals the sadness within the lives of those ho society considers sane as the audience is treated to the life of the protagonist Lewis Riley and the struggles and dependence he faces. He truth of Rosy life is one of the most shocking revelations to the audience as he often puts on a outgoing happy fade. With his vibrantly outgoing personality Roy becomes one of the centr al fugues of the play. He influences Lewis into directing the Italian opera Coos Fan Tutee and captivates Lewis with tales of music and performance from his childhood. This illusion that Roy casts over Lewis, and the audience alike, is seen for what it truly is as we learn that the stories were all lies and what Roy never new his mother. l had a dream, Jerry.This quote from Roy reveals Rays sadness as audience has an epiphany that Rays tales of music and performance, along with his desire to performer Coos Fan Tutee, are his way of trying to escape the sadness of his life spent unloved within orphanages and the asylum. En witness similar sadness in the life of one of the other patients, Ruth. The audience first sees Ruth as being obsessive compulsive with a need for control over her life. Ruts behavior is very methodical and she finds trouble gasping the concept of illusion as it isnt something that she is able to control. During the scene inCoos where the power goes out Ruth tells the story of her abusive ex-love who would lock her in the cupboard for extended periods of time. This story reveals Ruts sadness and the cause for her disorder as the aroma of not being in control of her for control in her life. From this point within the play the audience feels sympathy for Ruth as they understand her sadness. Along with the patients of the asylum we also come to realize the sadness with the life of the protagonist Lewis Riley. We first encounter Lewis as a university drop-out No takes the directing Job at the asylum. Lewis lacks direction.. . Life and only takes the Job for the money. During the scene where Lewis friend Nick comes to help direct is where the audience truly comes to realism the sadness with Lewis life as the audience realizes that Lewis beliefs and values are not genuine and derive from his dependence on his girlfriend Lucy and Nick. We see his political views, views on love and fidelity and whats important in life are Just mimicking Nick and Lullys, which shows the sadness of Lewis lack of self and dependence on others. Lewis does redeem himself by the end of the play by finding happiness that he lacked before and finding his identity.Coos is more than a comedy. It draws the audience in as they become immersed in the lives of the cast. The revelation of the sadness felt by the characters helps to deepen our connection as we relate to them and see them as imperfect humans life ourselves. Assessor comments ;A competent essay which provides an accurate response to the topic, dealing in a sometimes superficial way with its main concerns. ; The piece is organized around a discussion of the sadness felt by some of the characters: an approach which is appropriate, but which also results in a somewhat narrow selection of evidence from the play. The student shows adequate knowledge of the text through some pertinent description of key events and some close referencing via quotes. ; The students expression is generally fluent, although it is marked by slips in spelling and punctuation. Coos Revision Quiz SECTION ONE: WHO SAID THAT? 1 . Love is what you feel when you dont have enough emotion left to hate. Listening. Are you listening, do you feel you are in control? 3. Barricades and bombs? Why not? Australians, especially young Australians of my age, are getting fed up with our society. We want changes and we want them now! 4.They are normal people who have done extraordinary things, thought extraordinary thoughts. 5. Yes, the more real it is, the more real it is. 5. This Coos condones the corruption of innocence. Women are told to be tramps. Free love. Women are not to be trusted. 7. Couldnt direct traffic down a one way street. 3. Eat! Get some flesh on your bones. 3. Youre not deaf are you? The last thing we want is a deaf director. So what district? Suburb? Locale? 10. Women are Gods punishment for men playing with themselves. 11. I had to go and see one of the shrinks. They dont know how to deal with drug seers.