Caryl Churchill's Play

Here are two versions of the play I'm covering with the 12th grade HL section presently:

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8JFpMH963sk

2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oWKGbjJ7LxE

It's called "Seven Jewish Children, a play for Gaza" by British playwright Caryl Churchill. I asked my students to watch both of these productions and compare them for what each production emphasises. I decided to do the assignment as well, and here's what I've written:

Audiences exposed to both the Jennie Stoller and the Warwick student drama productions of Seven Jewish Children might find themselves deliberating on what makes theater theater. The word theater comes from the Greek word theastrai, which means “to behold”. To behold is to see or observe. By this definition much of life could be considered theater; perhaps that it Churchill’s point. The Stoller production strips many of the elements of traditional drama that we count on to guide our understanding of what we observe, such as lights, sound effects, character development and staging. The Warwick production provides more encouragement for an audience member to draw certain conclusions about what he observes.

The Stoller show is theatrically barren. By removing all bells and whistles from the production, the director emphasizes the words of the script, and makes the audience do all the work of interpreting them. The viewer gets no help in deciding which of the rapidly delivered lines is true. Some are obviously biased, “Tell her she should be proud of the army”, some unsuspicious, “Don’t frighten her”. In between are dozens of lines that the viewer must quickly appraise as true or untrue; he realizes that distinguishing truth from falsehood is not easy. Typically in theater, a line’s truthfulness can be judged based on the known nature of the character who says it (Bosola’s criminal past makes all his lines suspect) or from a lighting, sound, or stage cue that indicates the integrity of the speaker (like Walter’s obvious drunkenness, or Lewis’s sneaky side glances to watch the effect of his lies on the doctors.)

        Stoller’s one-woman performance also emphasizes that one Jewish descendant could be experiencing all these contradictory voices. Her insistent tone at points also reveals the desperation people have, in general, to be in control of how a story is told. The fervor of her inner discussion shows a fear that the truth will be revealed despite whatever the parents decide to “tell her”.

        The Warwick production makes the viewer’s job of interpretation easier by including production elements which encourage the audience to be immediately suspicious of the conversation being held on stage. The darkness and sinister prelude of unintelligible whispers immediately indicates lies and hidden truths. The lamps give a ghostly appearance to the actors, and all deliberations about what to tell and not tell seem to be happening in dimly lit corners, where plots are hatched. In the Stoller production, it was possible to assume the innocence of the speaker; here innocence is not a plausible conclusion, because of the staging.

The multiple actors emphasize that the conflict is more about the parents’ feelings, not the actual dilemma of what to tell the girl (she probably won’t care as much as they do anyway). The discussion about what to tell the daughter is simply the catalyst for a debate about personal feelings on a cultural history, which may not be a topic the parents would bring up unless they were forced to, even if they had a lot to say (and they clearly do).

        The multiple actors also reveal, importantly, that one rancorous comment can fuel someone else’s rancor. At several points one person’s anger seems to provide justification for another person’s even more discriminatory statement. It’s as if one person’s small-mindedness frees another person to be even more bigoted. This is how hate becomes a cultural phenomenon, seen here at the root, in the family unit. Thus Churchill portrays a societal problem on a micro level. This is what Miller does in All My Sons when he shows the generational gap between those who lived through the Great Depression and those who have known only post-war prosperity. He also shows the conflict between capitalist values and citizen ethics within one family. Here, Churchill shows the conflicts that cause division within Israeli society regarding their past, their religion and their politics. The single family is a microcosm of a problem that exists in society at large.

The idea of gender enters the picture in the Warwich production. While sometimes Stoller impersonates a Jewish grandparent, her portrayals are androgynous; here, the men have the roles which most strongly discourage telling the daughter the unadorned truth. The men counsel against encouraging her to desire any form of connection with the Palestinians.

If I didn’t know the situation of Palestine, I would think this play were a simple recounting of Jewish struggles until the final scene, when I would be made very uncomfortable with the declarations of the ranting speaker. Even then, though, I might think the play were making a statement about the dangers of individual extremism, not structural oppression and ongoing power imbalances between nations. Thus either production will promote justice for Palestine only if the audience has some idea of the political leanings of the playwright. When one character says “The whole world knows,” is it unclear which history she is referring to: the injustice committed against the Palestinians, or the Jews’ history? The possibility that she is referring to Palestinian suffering stings any viewer who is aware of how skewed is the world’s perception of the Palestinian narrative. I hope that viewers appreciate the play’s message that the phrases and claims we see splashed across newspapers as if they are incontestable fact, are in fact as flimsy as the one-liners flung across a living room in a domestic debate designed to preempt and silence a child’s legitimate questions.

Hiking in a wadi

On Friday morning a larger group than normal met at Al Manara central circle in Ramallah to go hiking. Abu Abed, the shared taxi driver who transports the group every week, had to recruit three other drivers, and we set off in our caravan, not in the normal northern direction, but toward Qalandia.

As we trundled past the checkpoint and the grafitti'd wall, nearly desolate at 7:30 am, we swung round a roundabout where Marwan and Leen jumped aboard one of the services. Marwan, coffee cup in hand, smiling, greeted all with a jovial wave. We continued in the direction of Jericho, and stopped at the sign marking sea level, where a camel sits perpetually, waiting for tourists. Leen, Marwan's fifth grade daughter, ate a Kinder Surprise egg for breakfast while the adults pinched her cheeks and asked her kee-fiq?

The photos which follow come from the hike which followed, one of the best I've taken since being here. The quotes in the captions are things Leen said along the way.

Sunrise in Ramallah before leaving the house

"Baba, if we get lost, just follow the poop."

"Do you want to have a barking lesson?"

"It's a good thing I have good instincts: they were divas."

"My good English comes from watching films."

"That dog was cray-cray."

"Yeah, I talk to her sometimes. Well, no, not really I don't."

"It looks like there's some skin [of an avocado] in it....  The skin's not bad. ....Just kidding it's disgusting."

"Don't you love tuna?"

"You took the boring way."

Comments that intend to derail the lesson

I read an article in Change English this weekend about a student in a class who was interesting in challenging the teacher's script for the lesson with her own questions designed to derail the discussion. The author of the piece noted that the girl was quite good at doing this. She raised reasonable and legitimate objections to the teacher's or the lesson's assertions. The teacher engaged her questions and was able to allow them to lead to significant learning for both the young girl and her classmates. 

In my eleventh grade classes there are some boys who regularly ask questions that are subtle attempts to derail the lesson. They are also adept at doing so, and point out inconsistencies in what I'm saying or what the text is presenting, or what the task is demanding. These boys are smart, dynamic, and engaged. They are able to ask such questions because they're paying attention. These are some of the highest value students in the class, both in terms of my development as a teacher, and as quality control officers for the rest of the class. If they weren't there, the others would get a less complete product. They catalyse lots of unforeseen learning. 

However, their questions are hard to field. I used to just shut them down all the time. "Not the time, A. Ask me after class." But when A. asked me during a discussion of a passage of Macbeth what the difference is between ' and ", I took a few moments to answer the question. I didn't really think about responding, I just did. Looking back on it later, I thought, "That question had nothing to do with the discussion at the time. Should I have engaged it or told him to ask me later?" I concluded that it was probably good to take a few minutes, because the class might not otherwise have ever learned the difference between the two marks. I'm not planning to include that point in any future lesson. And everyone was paying absolutely full attention when I was describing the difference in their use, probably because it wasn't part of my original lesson, but they saw that I deemed it important enough to cover together. 

What was strange was that later that same class, A. raised his hand during another intense moment of discussion and asked the meanings of all the thou/thee/thy variations. I completely shut it down, saying "A., let's stick to the question we're pursuing right now. That's not relevant to our understanding of this part." Anyone could have legitimately argued that the understanding of what thou/thy/thee means is far more relevant to their comprehension of the text than their understanding of the difference between ' and ". I think by the time he asked the second question I had run out of extra minutes I was willing to dedicate to anything outside my lesson plan. 

Today in the Macbeth discussion, what I had planned on being a very quick conversation about the distinction between saying someone is "mentally unstable" which some had claimed for Macbeth in last week's writing, and "emotionally unstable", turned into a much longer conversation about whether Macbeth is crazy or not. Does it make you crazy just to think about murdering someone? Is using "crazy talk" the same as "being crazy"? With each passing comment I was concerned that the rest of my lesson was getting squeezed, and wondered where to cut it off. But each comment was closely enough tied to Macbeth that I didn't want to close it down. Eventually we moved on, and even though the activity surrounding Macbeth's dagger monologue was not as lengthy as I hoped it would be, I don't think I would do things differently the next time around. 

I'm still struggling to know how to get more voices from this class involved. Perhaps it's unrealistic, but when there are 17 people in the class, (several absent today) I want to hear from everyone. At least i know that during pair work they're all talking to each other about the text. 

What happens after the good comment?

Sometimes when I'm planning a class I look at a piece of text and think, "I would really like them to see X." With the Sons passage we were looking at today I wanted them to see the ways in which George is different from the other characters so far, how he's much less concerned with maintaining the peace and marginalising the truth for the sake of those whose feelings might be hurt.

Sometimes, in the middle of discussion, someone will make a great comment pointing out exactly what I hoped they would catch onto.


....


And I'm never sure what to do at that moment! Of course, I want to shout out and say "YES! Fantastic! That's just what I was hoping you'd see!" But I usually end up responding in a way that's not too different from how I respond to other comments; I don't want to blatantly privilege some comments too highly over others that are also legitimate.

In my planning, I sort of think "OK, and we'll try to work toward a recognition of this point." But when that recognition comes neatly and clearly, the way it often does early on in 12-2's conversations, I wonder how I can help students dwell on a certain comment more than on others. I often ask a question like "What do others think of that idea?" which actually feels very obvious, and doesn't often solicit very good responses.

Is it enough that someone just says the good point? I almost want the whole class to stop and write on that idea for a moment, or everyone to turn to his neighbour to discuss the idea for a few minutes.

It's actually much easier when the make points I haven't thought of before, that I realise as they are saying them, are actually top notch. At that point, I am saved by my enthusiasm: I simply can't hold back the fact that I think their comment is brilliant, and follow-up questions bubble out of me. That usually does elicit good comments from others. I also realise that when a good comment is made by one student, it allows me to return to that point later on for reemphasis. A comment's value is rarely realised the moment it's shared - it's value is in the way it comes back in future discussions.

Tension in All My Sons

Today was our first day back in the class room after three snow days. It took a few minutes to warm back up to All Our Sons and re-establish the fairly complicated layering of characters and the way they relate to the truth at this point.

Mother knows her husband is guilty but won't acknowledge that he sent out bad airplane parts to the navy because that would implicate him in his own [pilot] son's disappearance.

Keller maintains that he is innocent, though he knows the full weight of his crime. It seems that to him, the idea of the truth being exposed is too frightening to contemplate. Not only does he want the truth concealed, he wants Deever to be vindicated, since Keller feels that if he can get the other characters to forgive Deever, he will essentially be earning their forgiveness himself, for a crime of which they don't know he's guilty.

What became interesting in the second class was their recognition of what a momentous moment this is for Chris if indeed he is starting to doubt his father. They listed the implications of this realisation on the board.
- My father sent faulty airline parts to the army. Hence, my father cares more about the business than the lives of America's soldiers.
- My fiancee will probably leave me because my father is guilty of a crime for which her father is serving time behind bars.
- I might have to cut ties with my father if this is true.
- My rather put an innocent man behind bars.
- My mother has been lying to me since the event happened.
- All the neighbours are right in their suspicions about my father's morals and conduct during the war.

Next class I hope we get a chance to return to this and acknowledge that the fall out from knowing the truth may be so large that we would do anything to keep it under wraps.

N's comment was good. She noted that when she's arguing with her sister, even when she realises herself that she's wrong, she doesn't submit to her sister, but just continues to listen and respond as if she thinks her sister is crazy. That's exactly what Chris does here, calling George's voice "The Voice of God!" and telling him he's a "Little boy" and threatening that if he doesn't "cut it out I'll throw you out of here." Both classes picked up on how suspicious this behaviour was in Chris, indicating that he may be experiencing doubts himself.

This scene is so tense. N and M were terrific readers in the second group. The readers in the first group didn't bring it to life quite as well, but the class's comments were just as astute. Which brings me to write the post above this one about whether talk is enough.

My new favourite literary device

Tomorrow with the 11th grade we're looking at Macbeth's first hallucination, in which he sees a dagger floating in the air before him. He says,

Come, let me clutch thee.

I have thee not, and yet I see thee still____

Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible

To feeling as to sight_____

or art thou but

A dagger of the mind, a false creation,

Proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain_____

I see thee yet, in form as palpable

As this which now I draw______

Thou marshall'st me the way that I was going;

And such an instrument I was to use______

Mine eyes are made the fools o' the other senses,

Or else worth all the rest_____

I see thee still,

And on thy blade and dudgeon gouts of blood,

Which was not so before______

I have taken out the end punctuation so students can add the punctuation they deem appropriate.

I am captivated by the effect of Macbeth's direct address of the knife. His childlike fascination with the vision, his misty-eyed, unselfconscious state of wonder, reveals a tenderness in him we haven't seen yet. He seems to have stopped thinking, and is just reacting to what happens in front of him. I find it endearing.

I want to be able to tell the students what kind of device this is, and so I searched "direct address of inanimate object." An apostrophe, I learned, is not always an address of an inanimate object, but it does have this same effect of breaking with the normal timbre of the play's flow of dialogue.

Look at this magnificent example from Julius Caesar:

• "O, pardon me, thou bleeding piece of earth, / That I am meek and gentle with these butchers! / Thou art the ruins of the noblest man / That ever lived in the tide of times." Julius Caesar, Act 3, Scene 1

And this one from Melville.  

• "Ah Bartleby! Ah Humanity!" Herman Melville, "Bartleby, the Scrivener"

I think we all speak in apostrophe more often than we realise. I certainly do, during my own unpublished monologues. They capture our desire to be heard and not heard at the same time, I think. 

Are those the words of a lady?

Today in the 11th grade we introduced the idea of the "Great Chain of Being". We contrasted the idea with the study in "upward social mobility" that we talked about in September. In September we looked at this image:

And we read the scene from Raisin in the Sun from which these lines of dialogue come:

Walter: Son -- son, what do you want to be when you grow up?

Travis: A bus driver.

Walter: A what? Man, that ain’t nothing to want to be!

Travis: Why not?

Walter: ‘Cause, man -- it ain’t big enough -- you know what I mean.

Today we returned to this image and I asked them what they remembered about our discussion. They talked about following dreams and rising above difficulty, and being independent.

All good comments to contrast with the idea of the Great Chain of Being, which establishes the following power hierarchy:

We established that this was not considered a ladder in Renaissance Europe. You were born where you were born and didn't move from that point. In fact, people believed that violation of this "natural order" would result in disorder and chaos within the natural world. 

I asked students, in pairs, to find lines from the play that foreshadowed disorder in the natural world. They did so much better than I expected them to! They picked up right away on everything that the Witches tell Macbeth and Banquo, ("Thou shalt be King hereafter," "Thou shalt get kings, though thou be none.") By saying these things, argued A., they give rise to the idea in Macbeth's head that he ought to violate the chain of being. Besides, S. added, the witches indicate from the very beginning that "Fair is foul and foul is fair," foreshadowing chaos. 

Others noted that Macbeth is aware of the consequences that his rupturing the chain will have, and tells nature to look away: "Stars, hide your fires, let not light see my dark and deep desires". 

Banquo also identifies the "Instruments of evil" who will "betray us in deepest consequence." A. pointed out that when Macbeth talks about "bloody instructions which, being taught, return to plague the inventor", he expresses the idea of a "plague" that certainly violates natural order. 

I was so impressed how quickly they jumped on this idea, and the energy with which they pursued it in the text. 

The rest of the class was dedicated to a game. Students were in teams of four. We established that the setting of our scene was Macbeth's castle when Duncan arrives for dinner. They were very familiar by this point with Macbeth's hesitations/vacillations on the subject of killing Duncan, and with Lady Macbeth's desire to encourage Macbeth to do the deed. I projected six quotes in sequence, and had them identify the speaker for each, and to note the use of either violent/masculine diction or gentle/feminine diction in one or two words. 

These are the quotes from scenes six and seven. 

1. We will proceed no further in this business.

He hath honored me of late, and I have bought

Golden opinions from all sorts of people. (Macbeth)

2. Conduct me to mine host. We love him highly,

And shall continue our graces towards him.

By your leave, hostess. (Duncan)

3. What beast was it

That made you break this enterprise to me?

When you durst do it, then you were a man. (Lady Macbeth)

4. If we should fail? (Macbeth)

5. Screw your courage to the sticking place,

And we’ll not fail. (Lady Macbeth)

6. I am settled, and bend up

Each corporal agent to this terrible feat. (Macbeth)

I was uncertain how this would go. I've never tried to use a guessing game to cover an essential scene like this - usually we do something more studious; I have often given a handout with the speeches like this and they have to identify the speakers, but it's not a game setting. But given how well they knew the context, this seemed to work, especially on a rainy day when many were absent taking the SATs. 

Once we clarified the answers, the bell rang, so we didn't get to discuss the diction choices very much, but this may be one of those cases where the learning is fairly complete by the end of the activity, even without the plenary. At any rate, we'll probably return to this scene at the beginning of next class just so we can watch this film adaptation with Judi Dench and Ian McKellan. The relevant scene starts at 29:00. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YpKWWK0Pj34