YOU THE MAN - XC - 4th Quarter

I did enjoy the play. I thought that i had a very strong message and that the way it was conveyed was very affective. What the actor was trying to portray through his characters was that domestic violence and rape are a lot more complex and harmful then thought to be. What he made very obvious is that they are things that we can see and either choose to do or not do something about. The characters each represented a different view point of the issues at hand. One was the father of a girl in an abusive relationship. One was a boy who saw a girl he knew with a guy he knew in an abusive relationship, and another was about how the "high school student" saw a rape type scenario unfold in front of him on tape. In each situation the characters react differently and what makes it so interesting is how the actor tried to make it as real as possible by having the characters make a decision that we would probably make differently. The underlying dynamics in all situations is the failure to call for help, and once people finally get that call or alert that something is wrong, they take no action to try and correct the wrong that is being committed right in front of them. The violence was able to continue because no action was being taken to stop it and the perpetrator was never confronted to the seriousness of his actions. What i would really like to analyze is how with "the virgin Larry," he sees and has a video tape of how his best friend raped a girl, but he was still to afraid to say anything to anyone and because of that, nothing was done until someone did say something. What made it worse is that Larry stood up for his friend the first time a girl had said he raped her, and then when he saw the video of his best friend actually raping the girl, he was still in shock. I didn't understand why the friend would lie to Larry about something like that, especially when Larry is sticking his neck out for him on the basis of trust, because the friend said he would never do something like that. Then, there was the father who's daughter was in an abusive relationship and how that really did impact the family. The daughter was spending more and more time with the boyfriend, maybe only because he made her or because she was afraid. Whatever the reason is, it is still messed up. What made it even worse is that he couldn't even do anything to help his own daughter because she didn't talk to him about what was going on in her life. There was a communication breakdown and in that loss there was a girl who was crying out for help, but the dad was already sealed out. The final part i would like to discuss is the character who was friends with both the girl and boy in the relationship, and he knew she was being abused and they had to secretly talk about it because the boyfriend has people spying on her. When they did try to talk, she was almost okay with what the boy was doing because she didn't know any different, and was scared of what change might bring. The discussion was very helpful because the people in my room, really did understand how wrong it all was and hearing their opinions on it only made me think about it more. They brought up points, like how scary it can be to have to choose between doing the right thing and your friends. It may seem easy, but they are still your best friend, and before you tell anyone, you always want to see if you can talk to them and make them stop without getting them on trouble. My group also said it can be scary to have to deal with domestic abuse, no matter who is it, because if you take one wrong turn or say the wrong thing to someone, then it could be really bad for someone involved. Personally i think that the play was very insightful for these issues, it did bring up some great points and good ways to solve problems that don't always have an obvious answer in this type of situation.