Regarding your thoughts about Comedy versus Tragedy titles correlating with things (”nouns or phrases”) and names (”tragic person”); my obsevation is that comedy (a joke) that makes one laugh is an attack that has missed its mark. As long as the tragedy happens to someone else, we remain secure, although weary. Comedy, if personified cannot be an attack, unless it is infantile (We will laugh at a baby smacking its mother but it is the action that is funny not the baby.) “The Three Stooges” may be a comedy act but they and each is a tragic figure. I can imagine a great comedy entitled “Victor Borge” but, I suspect, by the time it goes into production the investors will have changed its name to “A Night of Comedy with Victor Borge.”

Two friends of mine and myself attended the play “A Clean House” (at Actor’s Theatre in Louisville) some months ago and were smitten by the dialogue and touching humor in the play, an interesing and moving performance, well acted and well written.

I am going to recommend this set of posts, blogs, whetever you would prefer to call them. to some friends because I find the discussion points have been fascinating and thought provoking, a set of “mini lectures on the construction of plays, themes, devices used, etc. Very interesting. Points 13 and 15 make we want to try to write a thriller (even though I hate them as a general rule!) and a rhymed play just to see if an interesting one could be done in this day and age. Thanks again for the interesting and thought provoking discussion.

Roger Conner Jr

If “Boston is not a theater town,” as you say (which is debatable), it doesn’t have anything to do with leftover Puritan ethos. I have seen this reason used so many times to explain away anything that may or may not happen in New England, and it’s always an argument made by people who don’t actually live here.

Time was, Boston was a major tryout town for New York. Those days may have come and gone, but there’s still plenty of theater in Beantown. If there’s a lack of theater, it’s because it’s underfunded, because funding ends up pouring into big empty institutions like the City Center who mostly do touring shows of out-of-town productions. But there are still plenty of mid-sized and fringey companies doing their thing in Boston.

But a lingering hatred of theater and the arts stemming from Puritanism? You’ve got it wrong. You don’t walk down a Boston street feeling the lingering pulse of the pilgrims–that’s just a false idea of Boston, the way getting mugged every other block is a false idea of New York.