DIONYSUS IN STONY MOUNTAIN

This post is for a school assignment.

Last Tuesday, I watched a play in the Exchange District called Dionysus in Stony Mountain written by  Steven Ratzlaff about a psychiatrist named Heidi and  being heavily influenced by her manic patient James. The play is broken up into two acts; the first, I found to be incredibly convoluted by an overload dialogue, monologues and convoluted by extremist Nietzschean ideologies. It was hard to glaze over and find your mind wandering elsewhere amidst this dialogue overload.


The second act I found to be much more interesting and engaging because of the realistic relationship Heidi and her uncle shared. I found the characters in the second act to have much more of a realistic interaction and found some sort of resolution to their conflict.


Viewers have expectations of relationships and interactions between the characters presented to us, and when they don't meet these expectations we begin to question to authenticity of their relationship. This is exactly what happened to my impressions of Heidi and James in the first act.
Ratzlaff did, however, do a good job at incorporating Nietzschean philosophy into our modern political discourse.