Brandon Q. Day and Stevan L. Hartman
THE PROBLEM
After we (the class members- ourselves
included- who seem to be pursuing careers in some area of science, as a whole)
read The Beaver Coat, we were mostly quite disappointed with the ending.
One reader said that he felt that nothing had been gained by reading this play;
another reader had a problem with the fact that justice had not been served to
the wrong-doer. Because of these reactions, my partner and I were drawn to this
play with the idea of seeing if we could create a new ending for The Beaver
Coat that might “fix” the play for us and our fellow classmates.
THE PURPOSE
What we hope to gain from this project is
to see if an ending that provides closure and a sense of justice for the reader
gets a better response from the audience. If some readers do not like our
ending, but did like The Beaver Coat after we read it earlier in the
semester, why? Will those entering the field of science react more positively
to this new ending than those going into fields more abstract such as English
and history? Dr. Sheehan talked about the two vastly different receptions of
the play, as it was originally performed, and how one group absolutely hated
it, while another thought it was the best thing since sliced bread. We want to
experiment, and see whether adding a closing, final act with resolution would
cause these groups to ultimately reverse their opinions. We will provide
hypotheses on the outcomes of our experiment, and work together to engineer an
ending that might be found suitable by the audience that didn’t fancy the
original ending in order to show the disparity between the two groups of
people.
THE METHOD
Although we reviewed the idea, we did not
like the idea of writing an entire final act for The Beaver Coat, simply
because we cannot write in the exact same fashion as Gerhart Hauptmann. We
believed that if we had attempted this, the audience would be more affected by
the inconsistency of the two contrasting writing styles than the actual content
and the reception of the new ending. We plan to create a “left-brain-friendly”
ending that could be added to the end of the existing play. In other words, our
proposed ending will not require any changes to any of Hauptmann’s original
content.
The
final act will be centered on Mrs Wolff’s daughter, Adelheid, and her growing
displeasure with her chances at actually making it into the spotlight, in
addition with her growing teenage-borne rebellion.
After some feedback from the class, we have
determined that the most effective method by which to deliver the content of
our plot is to show a juxtaposition of two timelines, one featuring the
progression of events in Hauptmann’s original version of The Beaver Coat, and the second, overlapping timeline will contain
our addendum to the existing plot. The two timelines will be complete with links
between the two, where we will visually show the viewer where our events fit
into the original sequence of events. It will be complete with justifications
and citations from the text that support the plot of the newly drawn-up ending.
To gauge the
opinions of the readers, we will take a poll of the class, who have presumably
all read the text, requesting that they answer questions about themselves that
will help in determining trends in the audience. We will also ask for their
feelings on the new ending. Did you like the original play? Do you like the
play more with the ending provided? On a scale of 1-5, how left brained do you
consider yourself? Etc.
Finally, the data will be collected
and compared with our hypotheses, any trends and notable evidences will be
discussed, all of which will also be presented on the board, if it is available
by the time of the presentations. Otherwise, the polling will take place
on-site, and the data compiled and presented to Dr. Sheehan at his earliest
convenience.
