Fortunetelling and Archetyping: a Genre Study in the One-Act Play
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
Anderson 1 Collin Anderson ENG 505 Dr. Mary Kennedy 8 December 2010 Fortunetelling and Archetyping: A Genre Study in the One-Act Play I. In Defense of the Genre Study Adolescent students crave context. They want to know how the things they learn fit into the real world; they need assurance that school isn’t just elaborate babysitting or meaningless toil. Their knee-jerk question is “so what?” and this bothers teachers for good reasons. I’m convinced that acontextuality is a large part of the reason that students tend to be so put off by an ELA writing curriculum that declares its singular intention to make them “better writers.” All writing—with the likely exception of what Bomer calls “school-based inauthentic nongenres” (118)—has an audience that wants to read it for some reason or another, hopes to be surprised, entertained or informed, and situates itself accordingly. Bomer, citing parking tickets and pamphlets (117), suggests that genre is one of the first things we assess about a text, long before we start to read it. Furthermore, written English itself is only one “genre” within a much broader array of “texts” that we “read” in day-to-day life. Genre, therefore, makes much more sense than topic as a structural unit in the ELA classroom. For my part, having volunteered to adapt The Wizard of Oz from memory for my own 5th-grade class production, and having won a playwriting award two years later after a particularly successful class genre study, I am understandably indebted to dramatic writing. Writing my own work and seeing it performed has forever altered the way I read and witness plays. The demand of developing characters who are not ourselves, and seeing these characters through their goals and struggles, cultivates versatile minds and personalities in playwrights. The process also helps students “read” their own lives for dramatic content—subtext, anyone?—and assess their own struggles. Writing drama is about creating and resolving issues using words rather than actions. More than anything, however, the one-act play is the genre that is most evidently “about” other people. Lev Vygotsky argues that students are most inclined to learn socially; reading dead poets, students easily forget that the poet is actually communicating with them, and writing dead essays, they forget that they themselves are communicating. Compared to the intricate inner worlds students must develop in writing short fiction, memoir, or poetry, the one-act play signifies something refreshingly external and tangible. The buzz of a collaborative classroom enhances, rather than distracts from, the writing process, and the introduction of others in revision is less an invasion than a step towards realization. Cooper introduces eight elements of a good genre study, to which I have loosely adhered: reading models, listing basic features, choosing topics, inventing and researching, planning, revising, reflecting and assembling a portfolio (47-49). There is perhaps an overemphasis on the order in which Cooper presents these elements, Anderson 2 especially that reading models precede writing itself. Bomer suggests that moving flexibly between reading and writing is the only way that students can understand that one can only learn to write by reading—and that writing changes how one reads! We cannot, therefore, present the reading of one-act plays and the writing of one-act plays as separate acts. Students should be aware from the outset that they will be writing a one-act play. If students don’t already have a personalized writer’s notebook, establish one early in the unit. They should try to write or brainstorm at least half a page daily if they don’t have another writing assignment for the class. I would encourage these notebooks to be graded randomly or holistically, so that students almost always have access to them. Students who are fans of serialized television shows might be interested to know that even those with less dense plots often have “Bibles” that include a huge amount of easy- access information about the characters and their backstories. The writing journal will encourage not only consistency (how many siblings a character has, etc.) but will hopefully ensure that students write far more than ends up in their plays. Instead of a two-step process in which the teachers model and then the students imitate the teacher, I recommend simply completing all the assignments at the same time as the students. Yes: this means that you will be producing your own one-act play every time you do the genre study. You should make it clear to students that you’re doing all the same work that they are. Students will not take risks unless they see teachers taking risks as well. The following genre study in one-act playwriting is designed for 11th grade ELA students. It fulfills the following national Core standards for ELA: Analyze how an author’s choices concerning how to structure specific parts of a text (e.g., the choice of where to begin or end a story, the choice to provide a comedic or tragic resolution) contribute to its overall structure and meaning as well as its aesthetic impact. Write narratives to develop real […] experiences or events using effective technique, well-chosen details, and well-structured event sequences. Engage and orient the reader by setting out a problem, situation, or observation and its significance, establishing one or multiple point(s) of view, and introducing a narrator and/or characters; create a smooth progression of experiences or events. Use narrative techniques, such as dialogue, pacing, description, reflection, and multiple plot lines, to develop experiences, events, and/or characters. Use a variety of techniques to sequence events so that they build on one another to create a coherent whole and build toward a particular tone and outcome (e.g., a sense of mystery, suspense, growth, or resolution). Use technology, including the Internet, to produce, publish, and update individual or shared writing products in response to ongoing feedback, including new arguments or information. Write routinely over extended time frames (time for reflection and revision) It also fulfills the following New York State ELA Standards: Standard 2: Students will read, write, listen, and speak for literary response and expression. write original pieces in a variety of literary forms, correctly using the conventions of the genre and using structure and vocabulary to achieve an effect . use standard English skillfully and with an individual style . identify the distinguishing features of different literary genres, periods and traditions and use those features to interpret the work Standard 4: Students will read, write, listen, and speak for social interaction. make effective use of language and style to connect the message with the audience and context Anderson 3 II. Playwriting as Social Empowerment Homework: “The Most Massive Woman Wins” Response I would suggest starting the one-act play “marinating” with reading and responding independently outside of class, possibly while finishing up another unit in class. Madeleine George is an extremely successful student-playwright, an alumna of the 1993 and 1994 Young Playwrights Festivals. You don’t have to tell students that she was only eighteen when she wrote “The Most Massive Woman Wins” until after they’ve read it (you can give them the option of watching the Greely High School performance on Youtube instead, though make sure they all have copies)1. In my classroom, students will have set up blogs early in the year for reading responses, to enhance their sense of their classmates as an audience; if students are still writing paper responses that only the teacher sees, they may feel better about being insensitive or “not caring” about what the play has to say. Ask students to respond to the play, with social empowerment in mind. Start a list of different things this might mean to students (if anything at all!). Hopefully, you can sculpt their responses into something along the lines of: “society has problems that seem inevitable, but by helping all people to acknowledge these problems, we will be able to combat them.” Acknowledgement is the first step to empowerment, and that’s where art might come in. Art often seems to be about humor and entertainment for its own sake, but it can use that appeal to talk about more important things. Students’ responses should be twofold: a) how does “The Most Massive Woman Wins” deal with social issues and encourage social empowerment? and b) if you [the student] were to write a play that dealt with a social issue, what would that issue be? ARTSsmart provides extensive lesson plan for the play; obviously, although its role in this genre study is abridged, it is a play that both rewards extensive unpacking and (as the “important note to educators” emphasizes) demands that a teacher is sensitive to “teachable moments”: Use protective interrupting if necessary when working with students on these issues. If a student does disclose something personal or distressing or if you need to interrupt them from disclosure, ensure that you follow up with them on a one to one basis as soon as possible after this has occurred. (3; emphasis mine) An effective class discussion about this play will not reveal every student to be sensitive to the topic, but rather will demonstrate to some students the response that a powerful play can elicit. In short, responding to this play will motivate those kids who need “real- issue” impetus while other students work in a lower-stakes framework. Do not require that students’ plays be about the social issue they wrote about; as we’ll see in Zagone, not all plays need to be socially-themed.