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© Huntington Theatre Company Boston, MA 02115 September 2005 No portion of this Teacher Curriculum Guide may be reproduced without written permis- sion from the Huntington Theatre Company’s Department of Education. Inquiries should be directed to: Donna Glick, Director of Education Huntington Theatre Company 264 Huntington Avenue Boston, MA 02115 teacher literary & Limelight curriculum guide HUNTINGTON THEATRE COMPANY IN RESIDENCE AT BOSTON UNIVERSITY HUNTINGTON THEATRE COMPANY Nicholas Martin IN RESIDENCE AT BOSTON UNIVERSITY Norma Jean Calderwood Artistic Director Michael Maso Managing Director Table of Contents STAFF Table of Contents 3 Synopsis This Teacher Literary and Curriculum Guide was prepared for the Huntington Theatre Company by 4 Every Good Playwright Deserves Favor 5 Tom Stoppard on the Art of Theatre Marissa Jones, Education Consultant 6 Stoppard’s Obsession with Language 6 Stoppard and the Huntington 7 The Storyteller’s Game: With contributions by Plays Within Plays Donna Glick, 8 The Business of Entertainment Director of Education and Politics Ilana Brownstein, 9 A Tom Stoppard Chronology Literary Manager 10 Audience Etiquette 10 Background/Objectives Justin Waldman, 11 Preparation and Key Issues Artistic Associate 13 Mastery Assessment Melinda Jaz, 14 Open Response and Writing Education Associate 15 Further Exploration 16 Media Assessment Amanda Rota, 17 Questions for After the Performance Education Department Manager 18 Lesson Plans Melissa Wagner-O’Malley, 20 Handout 1: Vocabulary Layout & Design 21 Handout 2: Playwriting - Getting Started Exclusive Television Partner: The Real Thing by Tom Stoppard Directed by Evan Yionoulis B.U. Theatre September 9 - October 9, 2005 SYNOPSIS The Real Thing arriages are unraveling — we see it happen as the first scene of The Real Thing unfolds. It’s not the adultery-taint- Med relationship in front of us that’s grinding to a halt, but rather the ones playing out behind the scenes. Stoppard’s play- within-a-play trick of the opening tableau is a set-up, a metaphor for what will shortly follow: the dissolution of unions between Henry and Charlotte, Annie and Max. These relationships, like the one we see play-acted in the first scene, can’t quite live up to being “the real thing.” Henry is an intellectual playwright whose current obsession is his upcoming celebrity guest appearance on “Desert Island Disks,” a radio program where he’ll discuss the eight albums he’d most like to have if stranded on a desert island. Henry prefers frothy pop classics to the highbrow symphonies favored by Charlotte, his actress wife, claiming The Monkees’ “I’m a Believer” is truer to life thanks to its lack of pretension. But Henry himself is not true: he’s having an affair with Annie, another actress. Charlotte is co-starring with Annie’s husband Max in Henry’s Noël Coward-esque play, House of Cards, a study of love and betrayal. Charlotte finds Henry’s dramatization of love hollow, and indeed, Henry himself admits the difficulty of writ- ing about love, noting “Loving and being loved is very unliterary.” Henry leaves Charlotte and marries Annie, who has also left Max. Annie, meanwhile, is true to her own cause: the Justice for Brodie Committee, a group supporting the case of a young mili- tary private jailed for attacking policemen at a demonstration and defacing a public monument. Public interest in Brodie has fiz- zled, but Annie clings to him, encouraging Brodie to champion his own cause by writing a play. She enlists a bitterly reluctant Henry to help make Brodie’s atrociously amateur script more believable. As the months pass, betrayals mount, commitments fail, and Henry’s life is further complicated by the appearance of Billy, a dashing young actor appearing with Annie in John Ford’s classic comedy, ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore. As was true at the begin- ning of the play, Henry’s world on stage and the world at home imitate each other, as Henry tries to come to terms with finding and holding onto “the real thing,” the truth of love in life and art. – SH Sketch of Tom Stoppard; Dr. Miriam Stoppard, 1982 Limelight Literary & Curriculum Guide 2005-2006 3 EVERY GOOD PLAYWRIGHT DESERVES FAVOR Tom Stoppard’s Life in the Theatre om Stoppard was born Tomás´` Straussler on July 3, 1937 in Zlin, TCzechslovakia, the second son of Dr. Eugene and Martha Straussler. When the future playwright was two, Dr. Straussler led the family to Singapore with other Jewish doctors ahead of the Nazi invasion. Subsequently forced to flee the Japanese in 1942, Mrs. Straussler and the children were evacuated to Darjeeling, India, but Dr. Straussler was reportedly aboard a prison boat sunk by the Japanese. In 1946 Martha Straussler married Kenneth Stoppard, a major in the British army stationed in India, who adopted her children. The family moved from India to the English port city of Bristol, and Tomás´` attended boarding schools in Notthinghamshire and Yorkshire. At sev- enteen, choosing to bypass higher educa- tion, he plunged into local journalism, working first for the Western Daily Press and later at the Bristol Evening World, for which he eventually began to write theatre reviews. In the early 1960s Tom Stoppard moved to London where he pursued criticism, Tom Stoppard; photo: Dr. Miriam Stoppard The romance and realism of The Real Thing was a turning point in Stoppard’s career. According to some it also was a turning point in his personal life... wrote over 130 reviews for Scene maga- the play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Award and the New York Drama Critics zine, and began to write plays. After sev- Dead, which, after opening in Edinburgh Circle prize. eral years, the results included short sto- to a rave notice from critic Kenneth Since then, Stoppard has written pro- ries, radio dramas, and a novel, Lord Tynan, was produced at London’s Old Vic lifically in several mediums, with over Malquist and Mr. Moon. Stoppard was cata- by the National Theatre and went on to sixty produced works in stage, film, pulted to international fame in 1967 by win numerous awards, including a Tony television, and radio. His full-length 4 Huntington Theatre Company plays include Jumpers, Travesties, Night and Day, The Real Thing, Hapgood, Arcadia, Tom Stoppard on the Art of Theatre Indian Ink, The Invention of Love, and Tom Stoppard is a man of many words. Scott Horstein, Literary Manager for the Cornerstone The Coast of Utopia trilogy, which will Theatre Company, culled the best and most revealing of Stoppard’s comments on playwriting have its American premiere at the Lincoln and his view of the theatre. Center Theater in late 2006. Rosencrantz On Theatre and the Process of Writing and Guildenstern, Travesties, and The Real Theatre is a recreation. It can be much more, but unless it’s recreation, I don’t see the point of it. Thing all received Tony Awards for Best Play. Shorter dramatic works by Stoppard I write plays from beginning to end, without making stabs at intermediate scenes, so the first thing I write is the first line of the play. By that time I have formed some idea of the set but I include The Real Inspector Hound, After don’t write that down. I don’t write down anything which I can keep in my head — stage direc- Magritte, and Dirty Linen. tions and so on. When I have gotten to the end of the play — which I write with a fountain pen; The romance and realism of The Real you can’t scribble with a typewriter — there is almost nothing on the page except what people Thing was a turning point in Stoppard’s say. Then I dictate the play, ad-libbing all the stage directions into a tape machine from which career. According to some it also was a my secretary transcribes the first script. turning point in his personal life, paral- When you write a play, it makes a certain kind of noise in your head, and for me rehearsals are leling his divorce from Miriam Stoppard largely the process of trying to reproduce that noise. and his new relationship with The Real Thing star Felicity Kendal. On Wordplay Outshining the Subject Matter And though Stoppard often refers to I think that [the criticism that my plays are superficially brilliant, witty, full of wonderful repartee, but himself as an apolitical writer, he has lacking in emotional depth is] — you know, is a reasonable thing to say about them, except insofar as consistently defended human rights and it doesn’t question the premise, that emotion is better than not emotion. I don’t really understand the freedom of expression in his work. In the premise. You could ask precisely that question of the author of The Importance of Being Earnest 1970s, he wrote the play Every Good Boy [Oscar Wilde]. And he might be quite surprised to be asked it, and you might be quite surprised to find yourself asking it. It’s a work of genius, that play. I’ve written stuff, funny enough, a play Deserves Favour and the television play called Travesties which cannibalizes part of The Importance of Being Earnest, of which one would Professional Foul in response to human say exactly that, you know — it’s too smart for its own good, it’s got no real emotional heart, and rights abuses in the Soviet bloc. I’m quite interested by the premise that that’s not as good as making people weep. And then I Stoppard’s numerous adaptations and think, ‘Well, all right, that’s actually quite an intelligible criticism,’ because that’s what theatre is translations of classic plays by non- best at, to just get through to your innermost heart, and just expose it for a moment.