playwrites

It was very interesting to see how women were portrayed by other women in the 1920's for a seemingly critical piece based off of truth. The women in the play Trifles were depicted as extremely stereotypical women, yet they helped another woman get out of murder. What stuck out to me was that the women remained inside of the house, and mainly in the kitchen area, the entire time. They sat and talked mostly about their "trifles," while the men walked around and investigated the crime scene. I really enjoyed the actors and their ability to show as much emotion as they could while reading off of a script. The pauses they put in were usually well placed, building suspense or creating tension, but some seemed awkward, probably not on purpose and stemming from a lack of rehearsal time. It seemed that whenever the men re-entered the scene they were making some snide remark, meant to make the women's actions insignificant. Like when the men came back and were laughing about which method she used to stitch the quilt. The two genders seemed very separate in this play. 

I was interested in how each group regarded the "murder" suspect. It seemed that men looked at the case very objectively. They were only interested in the facts, who the woman was, what had happened, and where the evidence was. The women were more sympathetic, especially as the play went on. They began to speak more openly about feeling they had had as women living in the middle of no-where. The loneliness and insignificance and loss these women felt without a proper emotional release were troubling for me to hear. I thought that in a place like the Dakotas, where livelihoods were centered around farm work, men and women would behave more as equals since they needed each other to work on the farm. However, that was not the case. It seemed that women in rural areas were as unequal as women in cities.