Responding to a play text PG.1 for DB

1. The Long Christmas Dinner traverses ninety years by accelerating ninety christmas dinners and chronicles several generations of one family.

2. The Long Christmas Dinner is a play about the passing of time and how it's inevitable nature is so crucial to the human condition.

The Characters

Location

The Bayard Home

Transitions only take place when characters exit or enter the stage. They exit only when they die and enter only in the beginning and also when they are born.

Questions

So in the world of the play...does the first christmas take place in the 1840's?

Central Ideas

- ageing is somewhat a social construct

- how nice it is that people can cherish life for its brevity and repetition

- how somethings won't change over time

- ABSURDIST PLAY (not only cynical but ironically optimistic because this idea states that because there is no meaning we should embrace everything life gives us (change) aka. what time brings us.

- Another point is that...no matter how stubborn a human decides to be about changing there is no choice. The fact that the whole play takes place in one location or the 'bayard home' emphasizes the fact that human's can try as hard as they want to in not changing...and try to accomplish this by not moving but the message is that time will win...u can sit in one chair (like do the actors in the play) and one spot, live in one house for your entire life and maybe you wont change your clothes but your hair will grey, your bones will become frail, and you will realize that you are old and you have no power against time so better just enjoy it.

- One act play

The scene in which the initial characters or the first generation of the Bayard home appear and share their first Christmas Dinner at the new house

The scene in which Mother Bayard dies of old age and exists to the left of the stage where the black portal (death) is located