For my third purchase blog, I decided to do something a little different. Instead of attending a lecture or a symposium or something like that, I decided to try attending a play. This play was called “Ashley’s Tapestry: an Untold Tale” and was written & directed by a senior in drama studies named Ashley Howard, with help from her mother, according to the credits in the play’s program.
For starters, the play was a very good and very interesting autobiographical sketch of the author’s life from birth through her attendance at SUNY Purchase, with scenes that fill in the plot as well as scenes that take inside the somewhat troubled mind of our protagonist. The play begins with a girl dressed as a fairy sitting on a wicker chair and pretending to be surprised by the presence of the audience. From there, the story begins with the fairy telling that the story shall describe a girl who grows up to be a passionate artist who is constantly struggling with the negative feelings in her heart and her desire to find her “prince.” The opening scene after the attention shifts from the fairy to the stage takes us into the room of a hospital where we have a strange occurrence. A woman checks into a hospital, thinking she has pneumonia and bronchitis, but the doctor suspects instead that she is pregnant! He orders a pregnancy test, and is very curt with her, because he seems to be sure of his decision and is not responding to her hysteria and insults that she hurls his way. In the next scene, we find a different set of doctors talking to the woman who tell her that she had a pregnancy test earlier and that the test came back positive, however, they have no idea who ordered the pregnancy test, and the doctor who ordered it seems to never have existed! She then calls her husband to tell him she’s pregnant and he is surprised, for he is wondering what she did with all the medicine she took for the case of pneumonia she thought she had, and her response is “you know, I never really did take all that medicine…” Then, the play went a little down hill from there!
Over the course of the next two hours – Ashley, the daughter who was born to the confused mother who ends up being the author of the play(!), greatly details her life – singing, dancing, grade school, moving to New York from Chicago, High School, becoming “boy crazy,” and other minute details of her somewhat ordinary existence. She thinks of this as the “fantasy” part of her life where everything went well, there were not any major issues, and her life was going very smoothly.
The next section of the play details Ashley’s life at SUNY Purchase, where on her first day she attempts to locate the Big Haus dormitory, and in doing so, gets exposed to the wide “tapestry” of the Purchase student population, that results in a comical scene full of improvisation where different students from different parts of the school each show off their wild personalities. This part of the play also details the challenges of her college career – becoming an RA, deciding what to major in, her love life, and finally her grandmother’s passing.
Ashley’s play, and her passage from fantasy into reality, reminded me of some of the reading that we did earlier in the semester about virtual reality, and about the passing back and forth between body and cyberspace. What comes to mind are the article “E-mail trouble” by S. Paige Baty, and William Gibson’s Neuromancer. You see, just as Baty passed back and forth between her realities in the matrix, which she used to escape through the streams of e-mails she sent every day, and just as Case went through the harsh reality of withdrawing from his escapades in his “matrix” when he was considered the cyberspace “Cowboy” after being infected with toxin, so this girl Ashley made the transition from fantasy into reality as she came to realize the ups and downs of romantic relationships, and finding one’s way in the world.
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