Three Viewings

I kept struggling to find a connection no one else found; however, all of the connections seemed fairly obvious to me. I believe this was on purpose to blatantly point out the connections between all of these different people. Aside from the funeral home which ties this play together, Margaret Mary attended all of the different funerals.

A more interesting connection, or pattern, I found between the three monologues was held within the structure. In each of the monologues, some surprise is revealed near the end of the piece. For example, throughout most of Tell Tale, the audience believes that Emil is a nice man with a innocent, yet large, crush on a woman. Little does anyone know until the end of his monologue... he is married! The opinion of Emil is immediately altered. Similarly, the second monologue (thief of tears) begins the monologue sounding like a creep. Mac frankly sounds like a terrible person when she talks about stealing things off of corpses, specifically her own grandmothers. At the end of the monologue, she begins to speak sentimentally about grandmaw. By the end of the monologue, the audience has a new, softer opinion of Mac. Finally, in Thirteen things about Ed Carpolotti, the action follows a similar structure. However, this time change in character is not about Virginia. Moreover, the surprise involves the subject of this monologue, her husband. Throughout Virginia's entire story she is telling the audience how her husband died and left her to deal with debt and secrets. However, at the end of the monologue you find out he set everything up to help out Virginia. Everything worked out because he loved her and wanted to care for her. It was a very sweet outcome.

I also thought it was interesting that the last two surprised the audience with sweeter endings than they originally bargained for. This was a neat change from the first monologue.