The Night Watcher

Based on your experience in watching The Night Watcher, what benefits do you see in the genre of theater for telling “true” stories?

As these stories in their own respective way try to reach out to us I realized the subtle yet unique method of how each genre does this.

Watching a live theater performance is probably the best time to heighten the senses to which you will be using for engaging in the play. It is because you are preparing yourself and seeing to it that you are analyzing something that is in action rather then seeing or just reading. Watching live theater extracts different conscious thoughts, and those instinctive thoughts manifest into something you would of never realized with simply seeing, or reading something.

What makes a good storytelling? It is not simply learning all the styles of presentations and use of power point but also letting yourself engage in different perspectives; areas of knowledge. It is with your different perspectives along with effective techniques of storytelling which coincide to become something new and different, something with meaning. And it is with Charlayne Woodard’s powerful performance I saw the "pointers" of Ira Glass.

Woodward demonstrates sufficiently the use of anecdote. Like Ira Glass has said, the use of anecdote allows for suspense to happen and in effect brings out the innate desire of a close or how Glass put it "feels like something's going to happen". Not only is this more the reason to concentrate harder but it draws questions to the audience and the answer shortly comes as the play progresses. Another method I saw being used was Moment of Reflection Glass talks about. So the whole play was about how Woodward encountered different children in her life, non of her own. So from the start it is pretty clear that she is telling stories of her live with different people but what is this all accumulating towards? And that is the question that Glass stressed heavily. If there are interesting sequence of events happening but the end doesn't reveal anything new, then the key point becomes dead along with the events prior to the ending and vice versa; if we understand the central question and the reflection part but have trouble putting the sequences together, then the meaning is dead.


So by having a effective anecdote that can be followed by the audience along with a key point that is revealed at the end = engaging and thought provoking story.