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"Fragments" Theater Performance Review

Ayna Ghotbi Yaghubi

Fragments is written by Edward Albee and directed by Sara Karimian Eghbal. It’s among the Environmental theatre of festival which is performed in the Café of City Theatre Complex. Fragments is the collection of 9 persons who are gathered in one place and talk about themselves. In the beginning they exchange some parables together and during this time they talk more and every one decodes some parts of himself for the audience. One of them is surreal poet, the other one is a middle-aged man who thinks hasn’t lived enough, one woman who has relations with her doctor, and the other woman is a person who buried her dog. They talk one by one and listens to others ideas and finally they return to parables. As Albee has said himself the play doesn’t have a certain plot, complication and resolution. It doesn’t have logical sequence. It moves like a piece of music and by its own logic little by little forms. In fact the narration of each person is not fragments to move the whole story as a classic drama. But only simple words of persons, and even in a lot of times they don’t decode the speaker’s personality. They only narrate what they like and the others say their comments. It’s so similar to social networks of these days. The people who have a page and write something in it. It maybe has meaning just for themselves and readers. The cycle of separate lives gathered together in today’s social networks. The performance of Sara Karimain is not just based on the original text. She has manipulated Albee’s text according to the performing atmosphere which is in Café. In the beginning of the performance she gives an envelope to each audience which has a parable inside. The actors are also among the audience. One of the actors starts as a narrator and explains the situation. He/she randomly asks spectators or actors to read their own parable. The start of the performance is a good and acceptable one as an environmental theatre. The actors’ playing is logical, simple and well. The audience can see actors as themselves in this Café. Using mobile and tablet in a good way in this performance is another good point. Although Albees’s play is written at a time when there was no social network, and the performance in 1994 has been designed like a therapy session but creative performing and mise en scene of Karimian has updated this dramatic text for today’s audience.

The ending is different from Albee’s play. The original text in the ending backs to the parable of the beginning and there is a cycle. But in this performance Karimian takes a model exactly after the dialogue of middle-aged man who wishes to hug and cares for others more. It’s like a moral conclusion at the end that in comparison with the atmosphere of social network is a good choice. To select the presence instead of absence.




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