When I first read the playwright that was handed out in class, I was astonished by the sheer bizarreness of the whole pregnancy situation that was going on. Whilst Mary was giving birth to a child, Joshua and Thomas were discussing the future the child would have, especially predicting the gender that it’ll turn out to be. The moment that felt the most distributing though was when Mary gave birth to two rabbits, which created a sense of horror of the type of pain Mary had gone through. It was even more shocking when reading the dialogue of Thomas cracking jokes to lighten the negative mood around him, while Joshua was distressed about his lifelong dream of raising a baby boy. The concluding parts of the play were the most interesting part of the whole play, as the truths were later revealed to the reader on Joshua and Mary’s true intentions. Despite Joshua wanting to raise a baby boy, Mary didn’t agree with the idea but still gave in to Joshua’s desire. This resulted in catastrophe as they were arguing amongst one another about who was right and wrong.

       All of the actors did a phenomenal job in acting out their characters. When I entered the building, I expected the actors to be fully dressed up and have props to act out certain scenes but was left with laughter seeing the actors dressed formally as they recited the playwright. Even so, though, it was interesting hearing the emotions that they were conveying, especially Mary’s disappointment when laughing at the irony of the whole situation and Thomas’s sense of silliness, as he tried making many jokes. The added dialogue was particularly very interesting, as the actors were putting their thoughts on how the scene would go outside the scope of a script and more into a real-life setting. The most important thing the actors did though was communicating to their audience. I sat on the back of the whole play, so I was able to witness the laughs that many of my classmates had when Mary and Maggie screamed as well as the saddened faces many had when seeing the terror on the face of Mary’s actor.

       Learning about Stephen Garcia left me with something fascinating, especially learning about his perspective on the whole story he wrote alongside the stuff about art we discussed in class. I recalled the entire class being shocked when learning that the playwright was based on a true story that occurred in several hundreds of years before. Taking inspiration from this, it was interesting to hear that Garcia tried to navigate through the confusion of the whole situation by imagining what two people would discuss with one another, whilst the rabbit pregnancy was occurring. Lisa also brought up an interesting question to the actors and Garcia about the sense of morality that comes with putting a price tag on works of art, which connected heavily to what we learned about John Berger. It gives me awe when seeing Garcia’s experience with navigating around that difficulty, especially when being put off in putting things for free or at a relatively cheap price, even when the message of his plays is more important to him than the value of itself.

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