Style
The style of Fires in the Mirror is a unique, post-modern play. Fires in the Mirror is a collection of multiple voices and points of views. It is a hybrid of theater and journalism. Smith went out and interviewed all of the characters and recorded their words, their physical appearance, and their surroundings to give an accurate description of who these people were. Afterward, she arranged the words to fit into shorter monologues, while maintaining the essence of what they were trying to put forth in their words and emotions.
Smith is very detailed in how each interview was attained. She gives information as to where each one was done, including the settings and environment, other people that were near, and when the interviews took place. This adds emphasis to the fact that this play is very immediate and real. Nothing is fake or made up and everything is 100% real life.
The play is written out in verse. Smith tries to emulate through the use of lines, ellipses, and other notation, exactly how things were said in each interview. This adds emotion to plain text and when read, gives evidence into how things were actually said by each character during the interviews.
Fires in the Mirror is a post-modern play. According to David Rush, characteristics of a postmodern play include there being no “author”, its purpose is to engage the audience rather than show, there may be multiple narratives interacting with each other, the structure departs from the conventional play pattern, and the play is usually fragmented. Fires in the Mirror encompasses all of these characteristics.
Read more about this topic: Fires In The Mirror
Famous quotes containing the word style:
“We are often struck by the force and precision of style to which hard-working men, unpracticed in writing, easily attain when required to make the effort. As if plainness and vigor and sincerity, the ornaments of style, were better learned on the farm and in the workshop than in the schools. The sentences written by such rude hands are nervous and tough, like hardened thongs, the sinews of the deer, or the roots of the pine.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“To me style is just the outside of content, and content the inside of style, like the outside and the inside of the human body—both go together, they can’t be separated.”
—Jean-Luc Godard (b. 1930)
“Compare the history of the novel to that of rock ‘n’ roll. Both started out a minority taste, became a mass taste, and then splintered into several subgenres. Both have been the typical cultural expressions of classes and epochs. Both started out aggressively fighting for their share of attention, novels attacking the drama, the tract, and the poem, rock attacking jazz and pop and rolling over classical music.”
—W. T. Lhamon, U.S. educator, critic. “Material Differences,” Deliberate Speed: The Origins of a Cultural Style in the American 1950s, Smithsonian (1990)