O Beautiful Review

I perceive O Beautiful as representational to a large extent. By definition, the representational play should be performed in a way as if no audiences are there, which is the case in most scenes of this play. I remember vividly that there was a scene in which the character Linda cried and it was so vivid that I personally completely got so absorbed in the event and forgot she was acting. However, there is also a small part of presentational performance involved in this play. In a scene of the talk show, the host directly threw an audience of the front row a bunch of questions. In general, I think this play is a combination of representational and presentational performance.

I think the central conflict lies between Lennie’s need for attention and the unavailibility of it. In my opinion, this conflict promoted the development of the story because nearly everything Lennie did was to draw others’ attention or get others’ approval. I think that’s why he chose to take part in the talent show in the first place. Ever since he performed in the talent show, he had been feeling ashamed. He was seeking for attention but couldn’t get it—Alice was preoccupied with her own problem and Lennie’s mom couldn’t understand him. When he came home on the day before he committed suicide, he could even not find his mom. This leads to his suicide in some degree.

O Beautiful is a thought-provoking play that concerns many current issues like teenage pregnancy and bullying. As a production performed in a theatre located within a university, most audiences will be teenagers, and it will be super easy to trigger their empathy—our feeling of kinship with the characters through the subject matter of high school students. For example, after Lennie screwed up the talent show, his classmates kept making fun of him by texting him. I am pretty sure that many of us had similar experiences, so it won’t be absurd for us that Lennie took such an extreme action to commit a suicide.