cricket and playwrights (no, the paper's not finished yet)

[lauradi7dw]

The paper's due in six hours (which includes transportation time to Lowell). The body of it is mostly written, but I'm in the process of changing the introduction and conclusion, slightly altering the thesis. Something or other about playwrights using deception to draw in the audience. Not worded coherently yet. I was browsing through the online Literary Resource center with playwright as the keyword, and didn't come up with anything useful. I did find a distraction, of course. There is this line from an article about Harold Pinter: "...cricket, which was far more to Pinter than a game of bat and ball. He was not the first distinguished playwright to love the game. J.M. Barrie, Samuel Beckett and Terence Rattigan were cricket lovers, and the roll-call of modern dramatists in imaginary flannels makes a run-heavy batting order: Alan Ayckbourn, Tom Stoppard, David Hare, Simon Gray, Ronald Harwood." I don't have the time or the expertise to assign them all positions or to come up with an opposing team of poets or musicians or something, but I'm amused. I do know a very small amount about cricket. Saturday afternoon, walking past the South campus softball field after my Psych final, I noticed that the normally all-female all-American game preserve had been converted into an rather different thing, a cricket pitch entirely populated by men speaking a language I couldn't identify (not too surprising - I can't recognize any South Asian languages). I noticed that they'd set up stumps but there were no bails. I asked a spectator. He said that they weren't bothering because it was just for practice, and then said "you watch the game?" I mumbled something about having English friends and wandered away, not feeling the need to mention my own version of clueless screaming backyard participation (plastic bat and all) with other bellringers.

Comments

[miraclaire.livejournal.com]

But clueless screaming backyard cricket is the best kind :) For one thing, you learn how ingrained "drop the bat after hitting the ball" is. Who knew elementary school PE had so much influence? :)

[lauradi7.livejournal.com]

What I learned in elementary school was that "slinging" the bat before you run was an automatic out. This turns out not to be the rule in major league baseball. Graphic evidence of its usefulness was the occasion at Girl Scout camp when the batter *did* sling the bat. The girl behind her ducked, leaving the girl behind that with a broken nose from having the bat hit her face. The broken-nose girl was named Liz Taylor, fairly memorable. Years later there was a woman in my dorm with the same name. I asked her if she'd had a broken nose at Girl Scout camp, and the answer was yes.