Shoe-Horn Sonata
Writing a Visual Impression According to Misto and Marquis
The job of taking a reader into the world of a given text requires the writer to offer a visual impression that drives the imagination. Depending on the form of the text and upon its selected content, there are a number of ways to do this, whether these ways are through devices in the composition, the use of media support or some combination of the two. As the discussion here will show, there are a lot of ways to create a distinctive visual impact for the reader of a text and that the elements shaping any approach will depend a great deal on the chosen format of the text. In the discussion in this essay for instance, we find that very different approeches are used to create this experience for the reader of John Misto's play "The Shoe-horn Sonata" and the reader of Don Marquis' poem Tom-Cat.
Misto's play, our core text, and Marquis' poem, the chosen text, both give very descriptive presentations though they are very different in their approach. In the Misto work, the very fact that it is a play accounts for so much of what it is able to accomplish in terms of stimulating the visual experience of its reader and/or audience. Since we fall into the category of readers, it is most sensible to consider the effect which the language in the text has on the reader. Here, a great deal of justified anger comes through the text, though not as directly...
In Shiela and Birdie, the audience is given two protagonists who are struggling to deal with their past while coming to understand how they have been failed by their governments. Their language is straightforward and revealing such as where Birdie says about her Australian government that "They told us we were on our own. Just like they told us once to keep smiling." (Misto)
There is a resigned but bitter feeling in her language which helps to make a really strong sense of isolation, a visual concept that is further hammered home by the fact that the two women are the only actors shown onstage. That the male voice of the interviewer come from an figure offstage that can't be seen only improves the strength of this distinct visual impression of the women as having been isolated and abandoned by a patriarchal government. This idea is powerfully supported by a number of visual aids used to carry the narrative. Misto uses a large number of sounds, songs, images and video footage to recreate the historical period described by Shiela and Birdie, including the showing of photographed material about the fall of Singapore, the Japanese naval attack on the characters' nurse ship and the various abuses shown to the protagonists during the war. These images help to place the audience in the context described through the memories of the play's main characters. They are also used to show certain…
