DramaLit Blog 1.0: BU School of Theatre

While checking my e-mail today, I saw this astonishing headline on Yahoo News: “Unexplained shower of apples falls from sky over town” Apparently, “More than 100 apples mysteriously rained down upon a small British town on Monday night. The still-unexplained apple shower left 20 yards of city streets and car windshields covered in the cascading fruit just after the daily rush hour.”  Woah!  Crazy! So the first thing that many people might think of is:  The Bible!!  Frogs rain down from the sky in there, and since it is a document that governs so much of America, why would this be weird?  Don’t freak out, it’s just the lord.  Giving us a little bump on the head!  A reminder to wake up!  Ok, so I am being sarcastic.  but why not?  So many people believe the Bible verbatim, as literal truth, so why would people be surprised that apples are falling from the sky?  And yet people are surprised.  Apparently Biblical truths only exist when convenient (for some people, I’m not generalizing all Christians here, just the fanatics).  Apples during rush hour?  Not so convenient. But those hardcore literalists that really do practice what they preach are calling the apple shower a miracle. Scientists have tried to explain the shower too.  They are saying that the apples must have gotten swept up in a hurricane, then the wind lost pressure right over the town.  Both science and religion are a way of explaining the unknown.  What I think is truly magical about this apple shower though, is that we can’t explain it!  We can’t explain how it happened, we can only try to contextualize it for ourselves.  Contextualize….does that remind you of something?….Oh yes!  Dramaturgy!  With dramaturgy we are perhaps more able to look at the lineage of a piece of work and understand where is came from.  but in the end, what we really do is contextualize it within this moment.  Here and now.  We look to the past to understand the present. Everyone has a different framework in which to make sense of the apples, just as we all have different frameworks to make sense of art.  It is exciting to me that we don’t know, and may never know, where the apples came from, how they fell from the sky.  We only know that they did.  And there’s something magical in that.  Just as there’s something magical in that divine spark of inspiration that leads one to create art.  We receive the apple, then we try and make something of it.  I hope that we never figure out where the apples came from, or why we feel that spark of inspiration.  I hope some mystery remains to push us on, to remind us of the magic in the world.  to remind us that we don’t know everything.  To push us to question what we do know, and to always have some wonder at the universe.