 |
 |
Cliff, Cliff, Cliff. . . . Hornets? I? To paraphrase Simon Grey's Butley, who says, ``You know how it tires me to teach books I haven't read,'' ``You know how it will tire REEDers for me to debate disciplines I haven't kept up in.'' I can only thank you for your extensive comments, tell the class that what I WOULD have said (a la Capt'n Andy in SHOWBOAT) had there not been REED-L, and then to read your comments and those of Allen Frantzen. - Allen's comments came to me directly (is this list set up so that automatic replies go only to originators? I don't like that, because it means that subject line associated with threads of discussion don't get carried along, so that it's hard to reconstruct the thread later.) ...anyway, Allen Frantzen wrote the following, which -- since he told me later he intended these to be distributed -- I shall insert here. - Date: Thu, 29 Nov 90 08:52 CST From: FRANTZEN <[log in to unmask]> To: Patrick W. Conner <[log in to unmask]> Subject: Teaching drama _ 1. Drama offers an opportunity to discuss how the textual overwhelms the material in the classroom. Anything one can do to offset this--e.g. films, recordings, impromptu stagings--reminds students that drama as text is social text, material, political, not just ideas on paper. 2. Students seem to know that drama was a way of teaching those who could not write the fundamentals of religion. Drama taught everybody, of course, not just what a student once called the lower crust, and it taught more than the beauties of religion. Take the end of 2nd Shep as a case in point: material conditions for the downtrodden have not improved, but they've learned to give to the Church and accept be thank- ful. --So there, soft-line, marxy, gets things moving in class. - - BACK TO PAT CONNER AGAIN: - Cliff and Allen are saying related things, I think. the important thing is to contextualize the drama within the culture it obviously sought to serve (wrong verb, but I'm in a hurry), and in the late middle ages, that wasn't Latin monastic culture, even in the way the Regularis Concordia represented as special Latin or latinized culture. So those students who can't sing the Quem quaeritis won't be disadvantaged. Good. Because.... - ...that lets me tell them about the time I played Mak in 2nd Shep. (If you haven't ever memorized a dramatic role, rehearsed it for three weeks, and performed it --even badly-- then you can't really understand --I think-- how dramatic text and drama are related.) For lack of actors, we made what theatre people call a `discovery': Not only CAN Mary and Joseph be played by the actors who play Mak & Gyll (as we did), but they SHOULD be played by those actors. And recognizably so. When the participants in the parodic nativity are seen as the participants in the Nativity, transformed from thieves (the thief hung with Christ on the cross, is in the eighth circle of Hell, etc.) to the powerful images of the Holy family, then the purpose of God on earth is revealed, and the Angels' Gloria is not a transition device, but a comment on the mystic moment. (& there are its ties with the liturgy, but you don't have to look beyond the parish Mass to find them.) - Have any of the folk who've read the great REED database come across information about actors being double-cast for such purposes? Is it a commonplace to talk about 2nd Shep as double-cast in this fashion. (I don't mean double-cast; that's when you have two actors for one role, I think. What is the term?) I remember teachers telling me that the Nativity at the end of 2nd Shep is a tableau, and I always assumed that it was thus formally separated in some way from the play. We assumed that when we produced the play, but were forced to rethink it, and the effect of the way we handled it was tremendous. I should also add that I was amazed at how good that script makes very amateur actors look. I assume that there is some recent commentary on such things, and I shall have to look it up. Thanks Cliff and Allen for references and comments. - --Pat