Drowning While Laughing
Portia Coughlan : Drowning While Laughing The humour in Mariana Carr's 1996 play, Portia Coughlan , richly emphasises the poignant story of harrowing tragedy because it is humour that humans rely on when the depth of tragedy runs overbearingly deep, " Comedy and tragedy , however, confront man with the most extreme situations that he can experience."(Guthke.166.)It is through these extremes in emotions that the audience can truly experience second-hand what the characters must be feeling , their loss, grief , and the sudden break from those emotions by a seemingly inapproiate comic interlude. In Portia Coughlan , we meet Portia while she is alone suffering in the misery of her thirtieth birthday, she is terribly unhappy with the choices she and life itself have chosen for her, she is wallowing, " Ud's me birtha taday...Thirty half me life's over."(Carr.2.). We see that Portia is very unhappy about her birthday, and she feels that she has already lived half of her life and has very little living left, but there is humour in this exchange between Portia and her husband, Raphael, because after all she is only turning 30 and is been behaving as though the world has completely fallen apart, as apparent in Raphael's reaction
In tragedy a touch of judiciously placed comedy or irony is apt to enhance the tragic awareness,. )Although, she is being serious you can't help being amused at the notion of the apparently very serious and forlorn Portia , thrashing and sweating with anyone, from this point we haven't seen Portia as a very passionate character. Portia Coughlan is a tragedy because it is so heartbreakingly real, you want to cry for the shame of it all, " A real evaluation of the methods of contemporary playwrights will only come about when the student of the modern stage has learnt to shift his focus of attention from a consideration of tragedy and comedy as literary and dramatic genres to an evaluation of laughter and anger as intellectual and emotional responses to theaterical effects. New York:1966;Random HouseHirst, David. Portia has these meaningless affairs to try and fill up the void in her heart. In scene two , the entrance of Portia's Aunt Maggie May and her simpleton husband Senchil, provide some comic relief. New York:1984;MethuenBibliographyCarr, Mariana.
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