"Trying to Find Chinatown" or play production/staging

This week there are two very different kinds of questions--one very specific consideration/idea and one more creative re-working. Choose only one of the two topics below for your discussion posting this week. For your responses, feel free to respond to any posting on either topic.

Topic 1: "Trying to Find Chinatown"

What, really, is identity? When people ask me, "What are you?" (I do get asked that more than you might imagine), my quick answer is, "I'm Irish," but am I? I have never been to Ireland, do not speak the language, rarely eat the food (though I do love potatoes; is that a stereotype?), and so on. To be fair, I am (like many in the U.S.) more of a mutt with some smatterings of Scottish and English as well, but Corbally is an Irish name still known in County Limerick.

Discuss the following:

Don't rush here; this one-act play is a lot more complex than it might seem (and so is the question about what makes up identity).

Also, be sure to support your position with details from the play (I certainly would not overlook the long monologue where Ronnie names a whole lot of people (you will want to look them up) or the fact that the stage directions mention he is playing his violin like Hendrix.

Some tips and added thoughts:
This particular discussion begs for a little bit of research on ethnicity/race/identity (what do sociologists think about this?). If you do include researched material, please include the Works Cited entry and/or links to other sites.

Also consider such recent events as the Rachel Dolezal controversy.

You might even want to look up and refer to Nell Bernstein's article "Goin' Gangsta, Choosin' Cholita" (which is available on the internet as I type this).


Topic 2: Play Production/Staging

For this challenge, I want you to pick one of your favorite all-time movies and think about all of the changes that would be involved turning it into a play.

Special Note: do not pick a movie that was based on a play (such as Doubt) or a movie that has already been made into a play or musical (such as most Disney films). Also, if you want to really embrace this challenge, pick something that is hard to imagine turning into a play (something very visual such as Avatar, for example. A very talky movie would be pretty easy to stage with almost no sets or projections, but something like The Revenant would require some creative choices.

Replies to this topic would probably be in the form of additional suggestions. For example, I might imagine that The Martian could be done with a recreation of mission control on stage and all of the parts on Mars could be done on a huge projection screen, representing the Mission Control computer screens. Of course I would have to give lots of details in my post. Someone might reply that that could be flipped with very interesting results--we only see what is going on on Mars (giving the viewer some interesting set/scene shifts), and that same projection screen would be images that the astronaut sees from Mission Control, from China, etc.

There are loads of possibilities, and for added fun (?) you can imagine this on a big stage with a huge budget and ALSO on a small stage with almost no budget.