Notes for the Designer Flashcards
“The set is the…”
“The set is the bed-sitting room of a plantation home”
“It is along an upstairs…”
“It is along an upstairs gallery which probably runs around the entire house”
- adds to the feeling that the protagonists Brick and Maggie are being observed, they are ‘performing’
“fades into…”
“fades into dusk and night during the performance”
- confusion, death, relationships
“It has two pairs of…”
“It has two pairs of very wide doors opening on to the gallery”
- private bedroom space rendered open, exposed, vulnerable
“a monumental monstrosity…”
“monumental monstrosity … peculiar to our times, a huge console combination of radio-phonnograph… TV set and liquor cabinet”
“gently and poetically haunted…”
“Gently and poetically haunted by a relationship that must have involved a tenderness which was uncommon”
- haunted => negative?
- tenderness isn’t construed in a negative light => not disparaging homosexuality
- comment on the heartless state of relationships in the play
“a big double bed…
“A big double bed … the surface of which should be slightly raked to make figures on it seen more easily”
- private life exposed
“It is Victorian…
“It is Victorian with a touch of the far east”
“this monument, is a…”
“this monument is a very complete and compact little shrine to virtually all the comforts and illusions behind which we hide from such things as the characters in the play are faced with”
- shrine to material comforts
- TV set involves projection, performance of sculpted ‘perfect’ American family life, propaganda delivered through the airwaves
