♥ Introduction ♥

“The Woman Who Gave Birth To Rabbits” by Stephen Gracia is a perfect script to read just in time for Halloween. This play is gruesome, comedic, and a terrifying true story, but my favorite part is it is as true as the playwright who created this play. 

 ♥ Thoughts ♥

Initially, I thought this play was weird because there was simply no explanation for how Mary Toft birthed rabbits. At the Macaulay Building, we attended a play reading. I asked Stephen what inspired him to create this, and he revealed that similar to me, he was confused as to how Mary birthed rabbits. The more he researched, the more confused he got about how and why this happened. So, his approach was to put two people in a room and imagine the extent of how bizarre this situation would get if this story were to unfold before our very eyes. I find this process very interesting and wanted to know more about Stephen and his actors than the play. Some other ideas that were brought up that stuck with me are making art accessible and affordable, being able to put a reasonable price on the labor it took to create the art and the idea that art is no longer yours when you publicize it.

At that moment, I found myself having a brief moment of gratefulness. As a consumer, I take artists and musicians for granted despite aspiring to become one myself. Playwrights, authors, and musicians appear to be nothing more than names on a paper until you engage with them about their thoughts, ideas, and inspirations. Then the idea of “Does America honor their poets” came up, and I say we honor the work but not the poets. We experience and relate to the human aspects of the art, but we rarely experience the human aspects of the person who created the art. Naturally, many of us don’t realize how to separate the conversations we have with art from those we have with the artist (usually because we aren’t gifted with the opportunity to converse with the artist). How do we fix this? We pay attention to our artists. We support our artists. We need art to give meaning to our lives, but we can’t have art without artists, and artistry is a very noble occupation contrary to popular belief.

♥ Conclusion ♥

What was just a simple homework assignment, became an eye-opener to me. This experience at Macaulay is one of my favorite and most unique seminar trips and has opened my mind to new ideas about art, especially those who create it.