The Great God Pan Play Analysis

We’ve all experienced it before, the pursuit of forgotten memories; the tinge of helpless perplexity that stumps our consciousness, bothering us until our obstinacy relents to a shrug of the shoulders. Amy Herzog’s play, The Great God Pan, explores such sensations. Burgeoning playwright Amy Herzog attempts to illustrate this pursuit through the character Jamie, a potential victim of child molestation. This November, The Great God Pan opened at Davidson College’s Barber Theatre. Directed by Dr. Sharon Green, the gingerly evocative play provided an opportunity for six Davidson students to grapple with Herzog’s mature and sensitive characters. The play opens as Jamie, a journalist living in New York City, meets an old childhood friend, Frank, for coffee. Not long after the curtain opens, Frank admits to Jamie that he is pursuing criminal charges against his own father for child molestation. Frank asks Jamie whether he can …show more content…
The set included four different rooms that overlapped on stage. The placement of certain items, like Chinese take-out boxes and ice cream containers, helped solidify the snapshot quality of the narrative. In addition, the backdrop consisted of a series of scattered white panels that represented the stability of Jamie’s brain. The set existed as a smooth crystal veneer soon to be obscured and broken. As Jamie’s mental state destabilized, the panels progressively turned red and cracked. This set differs from the first and most popular production of The Great God Pan by Playwright Horizons directed by Carolyn Cantor (director of After the Revolution - another successful play written by Herzog). Their set was much more abstract, for it was “filled with projections of verdant forest” that theatre critic Erik Haagensen believes “suggests that everyone is wandering in the same woods but all is not