Alyssa Easterly

Script Analysis- Scott Plate

In the Blood Analysis

1. Theme of High Class versus low class, the people Hester interacts with have
low moments, but Hester lives in a perpetual low state. She stays low except for
her sexual encounters with higher-class characters like the Doctor, Welfare.
Within that theres a theme of being able to write vs. illiteracy and talking
with slang as part of that illiterate world.

2. Hope v. Failing faith for Hester. Her kids give her the biggest hope, she says to
Amiga without her kids shes got nothing (p.17) Her faith and hope increasingly
slip as time endures, on p. 20 she calls Jabber an accident.

3. World doesnt like women theme with lines like I dont think the world likes
women much (p.35) and Jabber doesnt want to do certain work cause he
thinks its girls work (p.8).

4. Character name significance. The name Hester is slang for hooch in the UK,
which means she eventually gets called a slut out loud by the Reverend on pg.
64. The characters names correlate to how they communicate. Beauty talks
about ribbons for her hair twice (pg. 10), Trouble steals a police bat (p. 11),
Amiga Gringa speaks in riddles that are foreign to Hester, Welfare uses
alliteration like weight of the world weighs on these Hester (p. 32).

5. The five brother bedtime story parallels to the five children she has. In her
story the brothers are her five kids fathers and she introduces the characters in
the same order the kids characters are introduced in the play. First brother
Brains (father of Jabber), second brother Tough Guy (Bully), third is Wild
(Trouble), fourth brother is Looker (Beauty), fourth is Honeychild (Baby.) and
Hester is the princess. (p. 12)

6. Sexual innuendo. Hester tells her kids their fathers have died in a war and are
now worms (p. 21) which are phallic symbols, Jabber describes writing letter A
to Hester as Legs apart hands crost the chest (p. 8), and later on the Doctor
has her do the spread & squat when giving her a check up (p. 23).

7. Deliberate uses of silence heighten moments throughout the play, making
awkward tension and indicating to the actor that there needs to be some
moments there. A first one happens after Jabber wont read the word Slut to
her (p. 12), another happens after Hester threatens to hurt her children (p.52)

Unifying Principle

A woman living off hope is trying to pull herself from rock bottom to a better life.