There were many differences from what I saw/heard then from what I read. First, when I read it in my head there aren’t many emotions in the voice that I’m hearing, I’m busy trying to make a mental image, imagining what is going on. This isn’t the case with the play that I saw. Because they were an image in front of me, I could focus on the emotions and the how the characters interacted with each other, It was like I was watching a movie for the first time, but I knew what was going to happen. There were also differences from what I imagined in my head, like watching a movie after reading the book, you pick up on what you and the movie had differentiated. For example, some of the characters I had a different view one, Clov I thought was going to look or be a bitter person because of all the negative things that he thought was funny and only speaking to Hamm. In the play, he was not close to what I imagined but the opposite. This applied to most of the characters, including Nagg and Nell. I think they had to do it this way to intrigue the audience, give a different light on the characters.
-Denny Huang
Denny, I strongly agree with your point that it helped to know what was going to happen, and that knowledge made it much easier to focus on how characters interacted with each other. I was specifically fascinated by the imbalance of power in Hamm and Clov’s relationship, and spent a lot of my time during the play focused on that. The staged reading of the play probably helped most effectively in honing in on those small details, like the characters dependance on each other at times.
I feel like you make a good point with the fact that reading the text distracts us from the emotions and feelings that the characters go through. We get lost in the translation of the text and trying to picture the events that are unfolding that we sometimes forget to think about what the characters are going through. There are advantages to seeing something in different medias such as text, plays, or even movies. Although the play couldn’t get as much details in as the text, it made up for it with the wide array of emotions and feelings that the actors portrayed.