Word: dogg
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...both plays, Stoppard's Dogg-speaking characters confront English speakers. These entertaining encounters owe much of their appeal, however, to the cast's versatility under the clever direction of Fred Pletcher...
INFLUENCED BY the philosopher Wittgenstein's theory of language, playwright Tom Stoppard developed Dogg, a dialect which uses the English language but assigns different meanings to each word. Stoppard teaches his audience Dogg in the first play of his pair, Dogg's Hamlet, and uses it to convey his point in the second, Cahoot's Macbeth. He writes: "the first is hardly a play at all without the second, which cannot be performed without the first...
...Dogg's Hamlet opens with Abel, played by Fouad Onbargi, and Baker, played by Jeffrey Wise, throwing a football and yelling "Brick!" at each other. The boys' teacher Dogg, played by Andrew Watson, soon appears, calling them to order, and the audience hears its first conversation in Dogg. The dialogue is rendered intelligible only by the actors' movements, but eventually bits and pieces of the language are made clear with the help of Easy, a mover played by Amos Gelb, who speaks normal English...
...Like Dogg's Hamlet, Cahoot's is a play within a play; it is set in the living room of a flat somewhere in Prague. The actors are performing Macbeth for an audience of other displaced actors when the snide, cynical government Inspector (Andrew Watson) enters the apartment and interrupts the act. He chides Landovsky (Chuck Cannon) for being an actor who must sweep factories and sell newspapers to make money...
Again Macbeth is interrupted when Easy, the character from the first play, enters the apartment delivering wood. Easy now speaks Dogg and tries desperately to catch the attention of the actors who are in the middle of their performance. The only actor who understands Dogg is Cahoot (Wise), who never learned the language, but rather, as he puts it, "caught" it. Eventually the rest of the actors "catch" Dogg and continue Macbeth in Stoppard's language...