The Family Bond in Two Plays
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In the plays Joe Turner's Come and Gone by August Wilson and And The Soul Shall Dance by Wakako Yamauchi, the playwright in each case develops a strong sense of the importance of the family bond as each explores the way people cope with their roles in a subculture within a larger, dominant culture that generally does not value them or their cultural background. In each case, the characters aspire to something better than they have already achieved, defined usually as economic success in the American society of which they are a part. In Wilson's play, these aspirations are found in the black community among people whose ancestors were slaves and who themselves do not feel fully part of American society. In Yamauchi's play, the characters are Japanese immigrants cut off from their homeland and from much of their own culture by great distance as well as by the power of American culture as it reshapes the daughter in the family. In both plays, a sense of alienation is a divisive force in family life. Joe Turner's Come and Gone is a play about the search for identity among a black population cut off from its roots by the salve era. In Herald Loomis's story, the story of the black experience in America is played out on a smaller stage. Loomis was kidnapped by a man named Joe Turner who forced him and others to work as a slave and pick Turner's cotton. This lasted for seven years, after which Loomis set out to find his wife. He and his wife and infant daughter had a farm
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ruly a herald of a brighter future.
In her play And The Soul Shall Dance, playwright Wakako Yamauchi draws on her own experiences as a farm child to tell the story of two farming families who seek to survive the hardships of the Great Depression. These families face not only the difficulties of the depression economy but also homesickness, prejudice in their new country, and interpersonal problems. The primary theme is the value of family in facing such difficulties and the fact that greater damage is done when there is no family support. The play shows how groups can offer support to members when faced with a larger society that does not value them, but the immediate support of the family is most important. One difference between these Japanese farmers and the black people in Wilson's play is that the Japanese remember their traditions, knew who they were when they lived in t heir own country, and now are lost because they have been separated from that world they knew.
Many of the forces affecting these families are shown to be the same in each case, and ultimately it is the nature of the family structure that determines who succeeds and who fails. Both families are immigrants in a strange land. Both have hopes of retur
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 2044
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page)
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