The General Feeling of My Show

As a male that has now lived for 21 years, I am caught in a limbo of youth and adulthood.

At first I thought this was a feeling of confinement which is why I have named my piece STUCK. So I started to explore this confinement and started to write down everything that left me feeling stuck, not only in my life but in who I am as a person.

I started to discover that it was not about age or career, but it became a confession of what I believed my male status was.

How Masculine Am I?

I then Google searched “what makes a man?” After filing through several Westlife covers, I found this article;

http://uk.askmen.com/top_10/dating/traits-of-a-real-man.html

It essentially highlights the ten things that make a “real man”.  As I read through I started to wonder at what age people felt they had achieved any of these criteria. But I found there is no way to distinguish a man, nor masculinity. I tried to think of the man that the woman would get up and sing karaoke for at a pub, but I could not picture what that staple man looked like.

I tried thinking of someone standing up to someone and making a stand for what this world needs, but I could not think of anyone. There are no radical politicians, there are no prominent activists that we can look to and say “yes, he is a man he is what males should aspire to be”.

This formulates the structure of my play. Four male characters are performed on stage, representing four statues of male identity crisis.

Despite my heavy personal influence on this, in a similar fashion to Rachel Rosenthal, I am furthering the performance away from myself. I am putting the ideas I have of the male personae in environments such as football pitches and music venues. These are places where many people have memories associated and have their own perceptions of what people go there.

It’s looking for answers which hopefully after the performance I will have.