Power from the play Freakshow by Carson Kreitzer Essay

Power from the play Freakshow by Carson Kreitzer - Essay ExampleFlip, but lacking any big businessman to escape from their situation lacking other viable options in society. As Francine Russo of the Village Voice writes in her review of the play Playwright Carson Kreitzer gets Freakshow off to a ripping start. She plunges the audience immediately into the intrigues of a turn-of-the-century sideshow tales of freaks born and made, of the genuine article and gaff, of the shame of exhibition and the terrible need to be seen. She sketches the liaisons among Amalia her muck-covered lover Matthew the idiot cola Aquaboy, the human salamander the Girl, a pert runaway Judith, the dog-faced woman and Mr. Flip, the operations unctuous barker, promoter, and paterfamilias. (Russo, 1999) Most symbolic of the enslavement of the circus slideshow performers is the way that Pinhead is kept in a cage on the stage. Whereas the mental capacity or genetic defect of Pinhead is deformed, it is important th at this type of handicap would generally be repair treated in a mental hospital or care facility. The symbol of the cage is ironic, in that the cage is equally present for the other members of the freakshow, barely invisible. The key difference between the other freakshow members and Pinhead is their amazing wit, intelligence, and irony fuses to form a type of wisdom about life and society that just now the truly excluded outsiders can possess. The intellect of Judith the Dog Faced Woman and Amalia the Amputee is also displayed as an aspect of sexuality that transgresses the barriers and boundaries of the disability and attracts the audience in a alluring manner. The humor of the characters creates a beauty born of understanding life from its worst positions of fate. On the contrary, the slavemaster mentality of Mr. Flip is merely a hyper-exaggerated example of typical new-fangled management styles, and the circus itself a parody of capitalism in the extreme. Where the mainstre am society operates on norms and stereotypes of beauty in media advertising, the circus beauties are the hideous bottom of what would be considered opposite to that ideal popularly. Yet, in this extreme, the fascination and attraction of the human race is nearly as great. The difference is that Mr. Flip is more likely to profit from the attraction of the public and their admission fees, while the freakshow cast is only given reprieve from having to exist without a role in society. As Damien Jaques writes Often using monologs, Freakshow darkly speaks to the contradictions, anomalies and paradoxes that put up beneath the surface in all of our personalities. It reminds us to not make assumptions about people or situations, and it sheds light on the dependencies that often shape the lives of plain ordinary people. An undercurrent of primal sexuality insistently flows through the piece. (Jaques, 2010) The Ringmaster is the most normal of the Freakshow cast in many ways, a simple salary -man broken by time and the weight of futility like so many others in his situation in the mainstream industrial landscape. His love of the freakshow in many ways operates on the aforesaid(prenominal) pattern of the public, and is related to his own depravity as a human being. Just as in Dostoevskys novels the characters seem fated to walk a path of self-destruction, all the while knowing that