Six Characters in Search for an Author

In both The Zoo Story and Six Characters in Search for an Author the question of reality comes into play.  In The Zoo Story, Jerry and Peter engaged to what seems to be a very normal conversation between two strangers. Jerry starts to manipulate the conversation and alters Peter’s sense of reality. Jerry changes Peter’s perception tremendously. By the end of the play, Peter is starting to take ownership of a park bench and starts defending himself against Jerry. The fight turns physical and Jerry starts to defend himself. This leads to Jerry accidently stabbing himself to death. Once Peter sees what he has done, reality hits Peter and he runs off.

In Six Characters in Search of an Author, the characters struggle to grasp reality. For people, reality is often an illusion and can be altered. For characters, they have to create a sense of reality. The lines between reality and acting often blur together in this play. For example, the conflict between the Father and Stepdaughter seems to cross the lines of just acting and enters reality. The aspect of time also plays an important role in reality in this play. Characters have an ever-lasting reality, where human’s reality is constantly changing. The Father gets into a conflict with the Manager trying to understand his identity and purpose. Characters have to create reality to an audience, but they are not actually real. This play blends the perception of reality in acting.

Back Of The Throat

In the play, Back of the Throat, the central theme is don’t judge a book by its cover.  During the time after 9/11, it was easy for people to be consumes with prejudices against Arab-Americans because people felt unsafe. People feared Arab-Americans because they assumed they would all be linked to 9/11. This play exemplifies the judgments people made against this certain group during a time of great vulnerability in the United States. It is easy for people to judge those who you cannot understand and have a very different culture from the norm. But in this play, these judgments and prejudices harm another person and went against the law. Khaled was a citizen of the United States and should be treated equally as any other person.

            The author wanted to highlight that not every Arab-American was apart of the horrible events of 9/11. The play showed how easy it is to make people look guilty and come to assumptions based on no real evidence. The police were not going to accept the fact that Khaled was innocent. They treated him unfairly based on there own prejudice against immigrants. Khaled was a writer and his research on topics made the police jump to conclusions. If Khaled were not Arab-American, would the police jump to those same conclusions?