Hats on the Floor:
Acting and Teaching
Presented to the Chicago Literary Club
March
15, 2004
Kathleen
Kehoe Ruhl
In an interview, Oprah Winfrey once asked her guests
: "What can each
of you say she knows for sure?" I
don’t remember her guests' answers, but Oprah’s question rattled in my
head. What do I know for sure about
acting, about teaching, and about the relationship between the two, I asked
myself throughout my doctoral studies. I
asked this particular question because I have been both an actor since I was
ten years old (if not before) and a teacher since my early twenties (unless you count as being a teacher
corralling my brothers to play school on the front porch during Iowa Augusts).
Crippling anxiety in relation to my work as an actor during my forties led me
to study improvisational theatre games at the Piven Workshop in Evanston. Not only did the games eventually dissolve my
performance anxiety, they were, for me, such powerful embodiments of principles
of human interaction that, several years later in graduate school, I found myself
continually connecting the games to whatever I was reading for my courses in
rhetorical and literary theory. One
assigned writer whose work frequently
pointed me back to theatre games was the psychologist Jerome Bruner whose
statement from Acts of Meaning struck me so forcefully I used it in several
conference papers. According to Bruner,
When we enter human life, it is as if we walk on stage into
a play whose enactment is already in
progress--a play whose
somewhat open plot determines what parts we may play and
toward what denouements we may be heading.
Bruner's statement seems to me to be an
account of the psychology of the individual as, essentially,
improvisation.
What, then, can I say I know for sure about teaching and acting and
their relationship?
One thing I can say I know for sure is that, as a teacher of English,
most of my life is, at least metaphorically, tax-deductible. Everything I d, in the course of a day impacts
my teaching directly, by providing me with stories for use in the classroom, or
indirectly, by informing my thinking about people and processes. Conversely, I know for sure that the lessons
I learn from teaching (and from acting) apply to other areas of my life. The
actor Brian Bedford (a favorite of mine from the Stratford Festival) said one
of the best things about acting is that everything he learns in order to
advance his craft as an actor also makes him a better person.
What I can also say I know for sure is that to teach English (or almost anything else) successfully,
teachers need to understand how people interact in groups, especially in
conversation: what engages them, what makes them either eager or reluctant to
participate, what sustains and enriches conversations, what engenders conflict
in conversation, what resolves conflict
or sustains conversation despite conflict?
Finally, I can say I know for sure that my experiences as an actor,
especially with improvisational theatre games, illuminate for me the human
interactions, especially the conversations, through which teachers and students
learn from each other. Although the explicit purpose of theatre games is to
prepare actors, the skills and attitudes the games teach are useful across the
board of life, particularly in the classroom.
Tonight, I will tell you some acting and teaching stories to show you
what these improvisational attitudes and skills look like and how they apply to
teaching. The first story is of an
encounter I had with an aspiring teacher. The second comprises several moments
from a class of aspiring teachers which I observed. The third features me, as an experienced
actor, in the position of a novice like my aspiring teachers. The fourth
presents an event in a theatre games class that comments on the previous
stories, connecting teaching to improvisation. Curtain up on Marisa's Third of
July Fireworks.
Marisa, an aspiring teacher of high
school English, was a graduate student
in a seminar I taught in which students tutored in our university writing
center and then read and talked and wrote about tutoring and its relevance to
teaching. On the third of July, 1996,
when Marisa opened the door of the Writing Center office, I assumed her mission
was to talk about her tutoring session I was to observe shortly. I was wrong.
Her mission was to complain about grades and about my comments on her
papers. The paper that particularly
troubled her was a narrative about a
teacher who had influenced her in high school.
The teacher was “inspiring” and Marisa was “inspired.” I had given the paper a low “B,"
explaining that it was impressionistic, that Marisa needed to characterize her
teacher more fully, and provide an analysis of why she had come to think of
herself as “inspired” by this teacher.
Marisa complained that her experience with her teacher was long ago --
did I want her to make up details? I
said she could provide more detail without inventing incidents, but that even
invention would not be amiss. I had
recently heard the writer Lore Segal say that invented details true to how past
moments felt don't compromise autobiography.
Stymied, Marisa took another tack--questioning rigorous writing demands
in a tutoring course. I explained the
relevance to being a tutor and a teacher of English of working on one’s
writing. I praised Marisa's prose, but insisted she could improve on this
paper. She pointed out that she was a
graduate student and had gotten “A’s” on papers throughout her undergraduate
career. Why was I the only teacher who
didn’t feel her work was worth an “A”?
Our increasingly tense discussion was interrupted by the arrival of the
student Marisa was to tutor while I observed. We put on our “game faces” and
she met her client, a young man who had written a paper on gender roles. He knew from class discussion that his peers
were hostile to his position and he didn’t understand why. Like his classmates, Marisa found his paper
offensive and explained that her response to his paper put her in a good position
to help him understand his classmates'
reactions. They worked through the paper
point by point. When Marisa told her
client it was not enough to assert his position, that he needed details and
reasons in its support, I made stars in the margins of my observation
notes. She was telling him just what I
had told her!! I looked forward to
pointing this out when we resumed our discussion of her paper later.
When her successful conference ended,
Marisa said through clenched teeth that she knew I just couldn’t wait to
tell her she had told her client exactly what I had told her. My awareness of the similarities between her
situation with her client and mine with her, which I had thought would resolve
our differences, had only intensified them.
Marisa made it clear she thought I was out to get her. Maintaining that Marisa's paper could be
improved in the face of her hostility meant I felt certain of my position since
having someone unhappy with me is a situation I try to avoid. Marisa lashed out: the seminar writing
assignments were irrelevant to tutoring,
the tutoring class was bogus, a way for the university to get unpaid
labor for the writing center. After
almost an hour of fruitless controversy, she didn’t back down; I didn’t back down. I couldn't convince her I
was trying to help her; she couldn't convince me that what I asked was
unreasonable. We did not negotiate a
truce; we just both ran out of
steam. Marisa’s set face as she left the
Writing Center showed me I had neither made my point nor charmed my student
Shaken by my uncustomary inability either to reach or to please a
student, I ruminated over the incident for hours. It was especially disconcerting to have this
impasse with a student who aspired to be a teacher. We should be colleagues,
not adversaries. I did not look forward
to renewed hostilities with Marisa at the next meeting of the seminar. I’m not sure how I planned to “handle” her
when next we met, but special handling turned out to be unnecessary. As the seminar
began, Marisa told everyone that what had happened between us the preceding
week was an invaluable learning experience for her. Our run-in made her realize how anxious she
was about tutoring and writing because she felt that without being perfect at
both, she had no right to teach. After
the class, we talked animatedly about the previous week's encounter, eager to draw out mutual learnings from the
experience. Subsequently, Marisa wrote a
fine, detailed, not at all impressionistic, paper about her development as a
tutor and its implications for her work as a teacher. In this paper, she characterized the tension
of the course, for her, as a “fear” that
. . . stemmed from the fact that I wasn’t sure how I would handle
criticism geared toward my teaching/tutoring methods. In the past all my
education courses dealt with theories and my evaluation was solely based
on whether or not I did my homework. . .
For Marisa, being tested on knowledge was
the easy part of preparing to teach.
What she feared were negative judgments of her writing and
tutoring. One can slough off not doing
well in coursework, but tutoring is the real thing; it “counts.”
Even papers about tutoring “count” because of what their grades seem to
imply about an aspiring teacher’s competence to teach. As Marisa put it in her paper,
Now, these theories were being put to the test and I wasn’t secure
enough with myself to hear the end results. I didn’t want to hear that
I wasn’t good at something that I’ve always wanted my entire life. . .
.
Marisa was my student in the first tutoring seminar I taught. A
year later, after teaching the seminar
several times, I was a participant-observer in a student teaching seminar
taught by my colleague Janice. In the
first of three seminar sessions I will
recount, Ronn, an undergraduate, led discussion on an
article by Nancy Sommers. In her
article, Sommers describes differences between the revision strategies of
"student" writers and "experienced" writers. While explicating Sommers’ ideas, Ronn
concentrates on her point that experienced writers revise based on perceptions
of audience while novice writers concentrate on what he calls “parts” of an
essay: introduction, body and conclusion. Ronn initiates discussion by asking
" How do you get from student writer to adult writer? How did the experienced writers get
there? After a few comments, he asks
rhetorically "Is there anything wrong with being a student writer, of
learning that an essay has parts, at
least for a while?" Ronn continues
to explicate Sommers, interrupting himself to say "I didn’t like this
article. Sommers makes too much pressure for students and teachers."
Janice responds: “In fairness though, students aren’t her intended audience;
she wrote the article for a journal read mostly by professors of English.” Ronn shoots back: “I read this as a
student. It gave me an inferiority
complex.” Janice probes: “So you read
this article feeling that you revise
like Sommers' student writers revise?"
Ronn responds. “Yeah, will I ever be an experienced writer? It’s an unfair comparison.” Janice asks the class “ Did other people
respond from the student perspective?” Amanda, a knowledgable graduate student,
says “I read everything as a
student. This makes me wonder if I
should even be a teacher.” Janice and I exchange glances. We are
experienced teachers and writers and see these aspiring teachers as junior
colleagues. Because we had not seen in
this article anything that threatened our sense of ourselves as teachers and
writers, it hadn’t occurred to us that the students would.
A few weeks later, when Janice asks the students which paper
possibilities they’d selected from
among choices she gave them, another undergraduate
student, Matt, replies challengingly
I took number three because it was the least difficult. I think the papers in this
class distract from the tutoring.
I look forward to tutoring. The
paper is way in the back
of my mind. I concentrate on the
kids I tutor, but I worry about the papers.
The following week, the seminar discusses
the academic conversation that their papers are attempts to enter. With
Janice’s encouragement, Matt suggests why writing "worries" him:
This is an upper level English course yet we’re used to talking to our
tutees
at the Writing Center and to the high school kids in the summer program who
don’t talk about things like rhetoric.
I have to switch from a voice for them to
a voice for an upper level course.
I’ve been having a problem all semester with this.
When Matt’s discomfort with writing for
the class is revealed as related to the level of discourse required in seminar papers for “an upper level English
course,” Janice segues from tutoring to writing, invoking Donald Bartholomae’s
article “Inventing the University.” In this article, Bartholomae describes
attempts of students to write in an academic discourse they are not quite
equipped for, making the point that student writers learn to write academic
prose by mimicking it without having either fully understood or mastered it.
Janice says that
You have to switch gears with clients and now you have to switch gears
with writing.
You’re like the students Bartholomae talks about. You have to ‘ talk to this (academic)
audience as peers even if you’re really not peers.
The students express hostility toward
academic writing (it “makes me
defensive. . . it takes away flavor”
“it's pointless, just a Ph.D. thing, scientific, not that
interesting”) and anxiety about their
authority as academic writers.(“I don’t have experience. . . I don’t know how to join that
community.”). Matt sums it up: “You’ve
gotta fake it and fake it good.”
It's not just in their writing that these aspiring teachers fear they've
"gotta fake it" As they tutor
and look toward student teaching, the sense that they don't know enough to
teach and won't be good enough in the classroom weighs heavily on them. As Marisa said in her paper, if she wasn't
good at tutoring, it might mean she wouldn't be good at teaching-- something
she has "wanted (her) entire life." Keep the anxiety of Marisa and
these other students in mind as I tell the story of my recent first appearance
as an actor in an Equity production:
I was under contract to play the small role of Clara in a production of Hay
Fever at Court Theatre six months
before rehearsals began. During the intervening
time, when people asked me what I was doing
next, I enjoyed saying I would be at the Court Theatre in Hay Fever. “I’m so intimidated” I said modestly, by the prospect of being in a play with
actors whom I’d seen for years at Steppenwolf,
Chicago Shakespeare, Goodman, and, of course, Court. My friendly fans
reassured me “but, of course, you belong with them. You’re as good as anybody.”
Having told myself for so many months how intimidated I was, I didn't
feel “as good as anybody” as I hesitated in the doorway of the Hay Fever
rehearsal room looking at the people already seated. Where did I belong? I recognized
Paula Scrofano (star of countless musicals and winner of many acting
awards), but thought it presumptuous to sit next to her. Two young women also
looked intimidating, one of them, I had just seen in Two Gentlemen of Verona
at Chicago Shakespeare-- the other, whom I didn’t recognize, was self-possessed
and sultry, as cool and aloof as the two young men seemed to be. I sat next to
the less forbidding of the young men and tried to engage him in whispers of
small talk. When I stole a glance at Paula, she smiled in a
welcoming way. Hollis Resnik swept in,
hair flying beneath a dramatic black hat.
She perched next to Paula and they chattered about people I didn't
know.
When someone announced that we wouldn’t start for a few minutes, the
women fled to the bathroom. There, Paula
mentioned that her daughter was at the University of Iowa studying to be a playwright. I leapt into her conversation. I’m from
Iowa. My daughter is a
playwright, too. On I went. My daughter is getting an MFA . . . . she's
the protégé of. . . . Too much. Trying too hard. Back off, I admonished myself. Then, it turned out the sultry girl had gone
to Iowa, too, and the blonde girl had grown up in Iowa. What a relief to have established some
personal connections. Back in the rehearsal room, our smiling director, Gary,
after presenting Krispy Kremes to the cast, hugged everyone. His hugs to Paula, John, and Hollis were
those of friends meeting after an absence.
His hug for me was a reassuring “I’m glad you’re joining us” hug.
When we began our read through, one of the first big laughs was
mine. Thank God. They like me.
This will be okay. However, as
the reading progressed, my sense of being impressed by the other actors rose,
and my confidence in myself fell.
Instead of working instinctively as I had for my first lines, I focused
on measuring up to the others. I thought
too much, tried too hard, and never got another good laugh. Complicating my being a newcomer in this cast
were my age and experience. Unlike most newcomers, who have little, if
any, experience in the task they undertake, I had been acting almost fifty
years, close to two productions a year.
Failings on my part couldn’t be excused by lack of experience. Nevertheless,
although experienced and older than anyone else, I was a novice in a
professional company and a stranger to these castmates.
At lunch, the few people who spoke to me called me “Kathleen,” because
that was how Gary introduced me. I was
too self-conscious to tell them to call me “Kathy." After lunch, we worked through the text,
looking for clues about characters and relationships. The characters of Hay
Fever consist of four family
members, four weekend guests, and Clara the maid. Clara has few lines, but many
entrances and exits. Since there was little to say about her, I took notes on Gary's statements about
acting: "Never enter a room you don’t
feel you belong in,” he said speaking of
actors' entrances.. Oh, dear. I did not prepare myself for my entrance into this room. Focusing on my
unworthiness, I had not made an entrance I felt good about.
After two days of reading, blocking began. During
breaks, those who already knew each other chatted quietly. The rest of us snacked or read in silence and
isolation even when we sat right next to one another. The few bits of information we had exchanged
on the first day of rehearsal were not extended by growing knowledge and
intimacy. My name, when it was uttered, continued to be “Kathleen.” I felt very much alone. The rehearsing itself didn’t feel any better. I was blown away by the inventiveness of the
other actors, who tried, without prodding,
different interpretations and bits of physical business. I tend to wait for directors to tell me what
to do. When Gary asked me why I was
doing or saying something a certain way, he dismissed my answers, telling me
what I should be thinking and
doing. He read my lines so I could
imitate him or he walked the way he wanted Clara to walk. I felt he was creating and I was a piece of
furniture he moved around: “No, I don’t like it there. Hm. . . let’s try it here. No.” Because everyone else in the cast seemed
quickly to have made strong choices and to be fully immersed in their roles, I
tried harder and harder to make the most of my few lines and moments, but
“trying” so hard to “act,” got in the way of acting. Gary admonished me “Relax. Don’t work so hard.” His notes for me were embarrassingly
elementary “Keep your vocal energy
up. Don’t drop the ends of lines.” “Do you realize you shake your head all the
time?” “You’re whispering.” And, most humiliating, since I stress this
very thing to teachers: “You’re not listening!”
Clearly, I had a lot to learn as an actor, but, because of my age and
experience, I was afraid to acknowledge this (even to myself). How ridiculous for an actor not to think of
herself always as learning! How can
actors stop learning if their instruments are themselves? In a essay I frequently teach, Diane
Morrow (a physician turned English
teacher) compares writer-tutor relationships to patient-doctor
relationships, observing that the least
experienced doctors feel the greatest need to prove how much they know, often
at the expense of solving a problem.
Thus, paradoxically, my very reluctance to see myself as a learner
marked me as a novice at Court Theatre. I tried
to see myself as a learner. I tried to view rehearsals as an opportunity to
learn from Gary and these wonderful actors. But what exactly to learn? and how?
One morning as I left for rehearsal, I felt almost literally paralyzed
by anxiety. “It’s a Process. Relax!” I told myself, invoking a lesson
“learned” intellectually but not assimilated emotionally. Once I was actually working, and had
something to do, to try, I felt somewhat better. Obsessively, I reviewed Gary’s
notes. “Listen. Challenge the other actor. Keep your vocal
energy up. Breathe. Don’t bob your head. Don’t look down. Don’t pause.” Complicating my anxiety during
rehearsals was a growing feeling that each time I opened my mouth, my future as
an actor was jeopardized. Rehearsal had
become performance rather than a time for discovery and exploration. Paralyzed by fear of being fired, I mentally
intoned Gary’s instructions: “jump off the high dive,” (his way of saying “take
a risk”), or “Land the lines; nail them.”
Even though Gary gave me line readings and did Clara's walk and
withering look for me, I felt I must“find” Clara within me so I could produce
her lines and looks and walks organically. When I reassured Gary that I would
eventually “find” Clara, he said “don’t ‘find’ her, just do it.” Don’t take moments “within yourself,” or be
so “interior.” To Gary, acting meant
action.
Now and then, I had a small moment of triumph. Sometimes, validation was
internal: I felt like I really, really listened and responded. Sometimes, it was external: Gary laughed heartily
at one of my lines. These moments usually were free of worry about being
noticed or cast again. These moments were about interacting with other
characters rather than feeling I was out there all by myself trying to make an
impression. However, these little
moments of competence or connection never eliminated my fear of being fired
even ten days before opening night when I noticed that the sultry girl seemed
distressed when Gary made her go over and over one of her moments. Later, in our dressing room, I found Hollis
and the curly blonde girl clucking over a tearful sultry girl. When someone made a general invitation to
meet for dinner during break, I leapt at it.
We were barely seated at the restaurant when frustration with the
rehearsal process burst out as though it
had been under intense pressure for some time.
The sultry girl, Dana, said that when she saw Gary giving me line
readings or imitating what I had done that he didn't like, she cringed, knowing
how the same treatment made her feel. Unlike me, she hadn’t begun Hay Fever intimidated;
she was uncomplicatedly excited about her first Equity show. Now, like
me, she was worried that if this show didn't go well, she'd never get cast
again. Other cast members expressed negative feelings about the rehearsal
process. Over and over, I expressed
relief at learning my feelings were not singular. How I wished we had shared these confidences
earlier.
That revelatory dinner and the intimacy of our hours together in the
dressing room made us "Theatre friends." Theatre friends are like strangers who sit
next to you on a plane. You share
intimate details of your lives in the close quarters and intense atmosphere of
a flight (especially a turbulent one)
but when the ride is over, the relationship is usually over, despite an
exchange of business cards. In the ladies dressing room, we talked about
families and books and boyfriends and acting and college experiences. A feeling of comfort crept over me because of
this dressing room camaraderie, but still, when Hollis said to me of my work as
Clara “You’re very funny, Kathleen. You
make me laugh,” I didn’t know how to respond.
I was so uncomfortable about my performance I could imagine even very
nice Hollis mocking my efforts. A couple
weeks into the run of the show, I announced to the ladies’ dressing room that I
wasn’t called “Kathleen,” that I’d been embarrassed to say so at first, and
that I was sheepish enough saying so now.
They tried calling me “Kathy,”
but they thought of me as “Kathleen." It didn’t matter. By then, I was used to being “Kathleen,” an
experienced and yet a student, actor in the Hay Fever company.
During Hay Fever, I
received lessons in how to regard acting as “a job” instead of as a momentously
self-defining enterprise. Paula and John
and Hollis read or chatted til minutes
before their entrances. No elaborate
warm-ups; no agonizing “getting into
character.” They seemed to see their
jobs as simply to go out onstage and do their work. They were fully engaged
when they performed, but upon
exiting, picked up conversations or
books till time to work again. Regarding acting as a “job” lowers the stakes
for me. My interaction with various audiences makes for different performances
on different days, some great, some okay, some not so good. For professional baseball players, batting
.300 is excellent and so is winning just over 50% of your games. Actors'
percentages may even be slightly higher than ballplayers'. It'
s a relief to know that I can fail to be “great” every time out and
still have done my "work."
As 40 some performances melted down to one, it was sad to say
“good-bye.” The run of a play is like
the run of a class: intense engagement for a “semester, then scatter like
“theatre friends,”never to be a group ever again. We could hear Gary in the
house laughing during our final performance and, in the green room, found a box
of his signature Krispy Kremes. After the performance, I hugged my dressing
room comrades one last time and headed
for home. After being “Kathleen” and “Clara” for nine weeks, I needed to figure
out how to be “Kathy” again.
Older than the oldest students in my tutoring seminar, more experienced
at acting than they were at teaching, I put myself during Hay Fever in
the same position they were in: agonizing over not being good enough and over
the ramifications of not being good enough. I was faking it most of the time
and, from my perspective, not even "faking it good." An antidote for what ailed me in Hay
Fever and what ails my aspiring teachers lies in the lessons of
improvisation. I'll embody them in a story about a theatre games class I
watched and taped one Saturday morning years ago
Theatre games, like all games, have structures, objectives, and rules.
They have “givens,” starting points, like who the players are, in what
circumstances they find themselves, and
what relationship they bear to one another. The game being played in the
class I want to tell you about is called “neutral.” In "neutral," a
single player sits on a bench "in neutral," which means not knowing
who he is. The other players, out of his
hearing, decide on his identity. During the play of the game, players, singly
or in groups, encounter the player on the bench, not to "tell" him
who he is, but to "show" him by treating him as the character they
know him to be. The player in neutral responds to their behavior, not to
"guess" his identity, but to gradually assume his identity based on the cues he receives from the others'
behavior. He mustn't do anything the behavior of the others doesn't tell him he
is capable of doing. In this game, Ted
is the player in neutral. He has been
floundering, unable to respond to the others and get himself out of
neutral.
Ted plays “neutral” in a class of high schoolers at the Piven Workshop
where he and most of his classmates have worked at the games for less than a
year. Participating with them is an
older woman, Marge, who studied at the Workshop as a high school student and is
now getting back into acting. The teacher of this class, Carmela, is, like
Marge, also a Workshop alum. Byrne Piven,
co-artistic director of the Workshop, sits in on the class. Even sitting
silently, Byrne is a vital presence. Ted, the player in neutral, is a small, quick, clever, agile young
teen-ager. Less physically mature than the others, he is also less mature in
the way of the games. He is not less gifted than the others; in fact, his
physical prowess and quick wit are assets in theatre games, but he is not yet a
skilled player; he does not quite "get" the principles of the
game. He doesn't understand that players
must work together to support the reality of their game world.
Ted frequently breaks the reality of games by asking questions about
rules or making remarks which draw attention to him during play. Frequently, he fails to maintain the boundaries
of imaginary physical objects he and the
others use together. He sometimes seems to look to an audience for response
rather than to fellow players. Instead of maintaining the bucket of muddy water
he is supposed to carry in one game, for example, he comments "Oh, I'm
totally losing the game." Carmela
coaches Ted in a game in which he carries a large bowl of hot soup: "Oh,
Ted, don't drop the soup. Nothing
flashy, Ted, you're dropping the soup." During a game in which a group of
players works together to move a large mattress, Ted capers about, failing to maintain
the weight and bulk of the object.
Carmela coaches "it's heavy, important, be careful."
In this game of "Neutral," Ted's character, although Ted
doesn’t yet know it, is a boy who has run away from home. The first player to
approach his bench sits next to Ted and reads a paper. Ted reads over her shoulder. Carmela, side
coaching, reminds Ted that the person in neutral can't do anything he doesn't
know for sure his character is capable of doing: "maybe you don't know how
to read, maybe you're a baby." A
girl sits next to Ted and eats an apple.
Ted, suspending the reality of the game, questions Carmela about what
he’s supposed to be doing. Another
player passes through the scene. Ted
watches her, looking for clues about his identity. Two girls giggle through the scene. A boy with a backpack sits next to Ted. A girl, playing a mother, seats her daughter
next to Ted while she buys
“tickets.” A bum sits on the
bench, finds a bag of popcorn next to Ted, eats a bit and returns it to Ted who
accepts it. He asks Ted "spare some
change?" Ted, again breaking out of
the reality of the scene, looks questioningly to Carmela, and says to his scene
partner "I really don't know" meaning "Since I don't know who I
am I don't know if I have any money or not." This is an appropriate response for a player
in "neutral," but by referencing the teacher outside the scene and
referencing the rules of the game within its play, Ted breaks the scene.
Outside the playing area, Carmela looks to Byrne in frustration, throwing up
her hands. The bum exits, patting Ted on
the back, "It's a hard life; you'll
be okay, kid."
Then, Marge, the older woman in the class, enters with energy, her arms
thrust out toward Ted "Oh, there you are, thank God." She embraces him violently, saying "Come on." Ted resists her embrace. "No," says Ted, "I wanna stay
here." He squeezes his eyes shut
and tries to wriggle free as she holds him forcefully. It is a powerful moment
for both players and observers. When Ted
breaks out of the scene to ask Carmela a question "Carmela, do I have to
.?, everyone in the room sighs. Carmela
says "you are such a . . . a great moment and you yanked out of it. That was a beautiful moment, don't do
that." Byrne interjects
"What's that kid's name? I'm gonna
kill him." Byrne encourages Carmela
to help Ted understand what he did wrong:
Carmela pushes Ted: What made you
ask the question? There you are totally
in the scene." Ted's response is
about a rule of the game: "I didn't
know if I could come away from the bench.
I didn't wanna break the scene. I
didn't wanna like mess it up." Byrne explains why he was so hard on the
young actor: "Ted, your response
was so terrific to Marge. That's why I
was gonna kill you . . . that was so
moving. . . a moment of real theatre. Here's where the game becomes secondary to
the human experience. The game is meant to bring forth from you a
human exchange that is valid and true and emotional and it did. So the heck with the game at this point.
Carmela emphasizes Byrne's point. "
If the truth is happening. . . We
have to be brave and we have to remain in it.
I'm older and I'm still struggling--but you can do it now--struggle to
stay in the truth no matter what a teacher's response is." Byrne sighs. " Such a lesson. Marge's
presence dragged Ted right into that moment so beautifully. Carmela, you keep using the word
"truth." That's what the work
is about." This was a
quintessential theatre games moment.
When Marge pulled Ted out of neutral, we saw the shimmer, in Byrne’s
words, of “emotional truth”--the goal of
this work. This rich moment implies much
about what teachers can learn from the games.
At the Workshop, all actors, not just the most experienced, are
considered capable of achieving authentic responses. Byrne is the philosopher
of the games, but he shares authority with Carmela and both he and Carmela
believe that even a beginner like Ted can do good work. The Workshop's emphasis on ensemble work,
like Bruner’s metaphor (that life is a play in progress into which we enter),
implies that we learn who we are from others. If this is so, everyone’s
contributions in a classroom“count.”
Students' thoughts and feelings influence one another’s just as the
teacher's do. The games' emphasis on the
ensemble rather than individual performance is helpful for aspiring and new teachers who see
themselves as alone in the spotlight.
Considering themselves as, along with their students, part of an
ensemble, could help Marisa and Ronn alleviate the pressure they feel to always
already know everything.
It's easy for teachers to say they learn from their students when they
feel confident that they already know most things worth knowing. It is hard for
new teachers to accept that, despite not knowing as much as they want to or
think they should know, it is still
fine for them to be teachers and better than fine for them to say to their
students "I don't know the answer to that question; let's figure it out
together." What better example to set for students than teacher as
lifelong learner! Yet Marisa and the
students in Janice's class feared acknowledging that they were
"novices" because they thought being learners compromises their
authority as teachers. During Hay
Fever, I thought my credibility as an actor would be undermined if I
acknowledged (even to myself) that I had a lot to learn from my director and
the other actors. I thought I was
supposed to know how to play Clara
even before I tried to do it.
My discomfort as an actor in Hay
Fever parallels my discomfort as a
newcomer to the cast: I could only become
part of that group of actors by interacting with them over time; not feeling
part of the group at the beginning
didn't mean anything was wrong with me.
When Matt said of his writing for upper level classes that he had to
"fake it and fake it good," he thought he was describing something
that should not occur, but, in fact,
we always, of necessity, "fake it" in new situations. I had to "fake" Clara by, as Gary
put it, "just doing it," until, eventually, I stepped into Clara's
skin. "Faking it" is how we learn, as Bartholomae said of student
writers in a university; we approximate
a skill til it becomes our own--anyone who's tried to change a golf swing or
tennis stroke knows that and also knows how uncomfortable, even wrong, the new
movement feels for some time. During Hay Fever, I had two new roles
to "fake" simultaneously: Clara for the play and "Kathleen"
with castmates. Aspiring teachers are
similarly burdened: like Matt, they need a self to talk with high school kids
in a summer program and a self to write papers for upper level seminars. In a strange new school, a student teacher
must "fake"a new self as a teacher in her classroom and also as a
colleague to experienced fellow teachers.
We shouldn't expect to feel comfortable in new roles at first. Missteps are natural on
the way to becoming selves that are always growing, always in progress, anyway.
Although, like Ted, in "neutral," we find out who we
are in new situations by responding to others, when we are in "neutral,"
we are not inert wet clay waiting to be shaped by those others. Even in "neutral," we bring to the
game at minimum our senses, our perceptions, our prior experience, and our
ability to respond. During Hay Fever, I caroomed wildly between feeling
I had nothing at all to offer and feeling I was supposed to already know
everything. Neither was the case. That we must be learners in our classrooms
doesn't mean we have nothing to teach; it means we must be susceptible to being
changed by our students, changed by the experience of teaching. We create a syllabus for a course before we
teach, but we also adjust the syllabus to respond to the needs and experiences
of our students as we learn to know them.
Making teacher and students an ensemble of
fellow learners depends on another lesson from the Piven Workshop--learning to
be in the moment, to respond to what
actually happens rather than to what we plan or hope might happen. Ted was too
impatient (and inexperienced) to trust that if he let himself watch, listen, and respond to fellow players,
he would eventually learn who he was supposed to be. Side coaching in theatre games often
admonishes players to “stop thinking,”
“stop planning,” or, as
In “neutral,” for example, there are many "givens." Players
(with one exception) know where and who they are. No character is allowed to give the person in
“neutral” clues; the rule is that they
must interact naturally with one another and with the person in “neutral.” What is not planned is what will happen when
these interactions occur. What is improvisational about theatre games, outside
of the fact that their outcome is unknown, is the attitude of the players. They understand that their job is to interact
with others and that this implies listening and responding truthfully to what
they see and hear. They understand that
they can’t plan responses ahead of time.
They understand that they embark upon the unknown when they improvise
and they accept the risks. In the
classroom, teachers plan activities or assignments with “givens” comparable to
those of a theatre game. These givens are based on purposeful objectives.
Teachers plan for discussions, too. They
study a text and think about what they would like to encourage students to see
in the text, based on their reasons for including the text in their curriculum.
They compose conversation-starting questions.
However, after they plan, teachers must improvise. Improvisation is what
happens at the intersection of planning and letting go.
During an improvisation, not only
all players, but every word and every action count. Anything improvisors say or do affects fellow
players. In "neutral," Marge's embrace of Ted was a grand gesture
that forced Ted's response. It obviously
"counted." It is easiest to
see how everything counts when something goes wrong onstage during a
performance. Good improvisors
acknowledge onstage accidents. When the
hat is knocked off a good actor's head
as he brushes against a doorway, he integrates the accident into the scene,
shakes his head at his clumsiness, mutters under his breath, picks up the hat,
fiddles with it, and puts it back on.
The audience doesn’t even stop to wonder whether a mistake has occurred
because the fallen hat was integrated into the scene. When a bad actor's hat is
knocked off, he tries to pretend nothing happened.The result is that all the
audience can think about is the hat on the stage floor, wondering if its fall
was planned or a mistake, wondering what the actor will do about it and when.
Ignored by the actor, the hat on the floor begins to "count" more
than anything else in the scene.
In the classroom, ignoring student resistance to particular assignments,
for example, is like ignoring a hat on the floor. I once watched a student teacher sweat his
way through a lesson to which no students responded. Despite the students' lack
of engagement, the teacher proceeded with his game plan as though the students
were participating in the way he had expected them to. The lesson was a farce. The teacher’s words flew over the heads of
the students and out the windows. Nothing was accomplished except to reenforce
the students’ idea that the goings-on of classrooms bear no relationship to
reality. Acknowledging the resistance of
the students, “playing” it, discussing it, turning it into the lesson is the most useful response in this
situation. The longer the resistance is
left to lie like a hat on the floor of the stage sucking up the spotlight, the
bigger it gets. Even seemingly minor
matters can count onstage or in a classroom.
Students may not realize the extent to which rolling their eyes when a
teacher speaks or attempting surreptitiously to do homework during class
discussion affect what the teacher does.
The teacher doesn’t realize that when she interrupts students while they
write, she implies that their writing isn’t very important. Teachers always
teach; often, though, what students
learn isn’t what teachers mean to teach.
Knowing everything counts alerts players and teachers to the importance
of what they say and do, but it shouldn't paralyze them.
In improvisation, it's not just that every person, word, and gesture
"count," it's that the game itself "counts." A theatre game
is not "practice" for some real acting that will occur later on a
stage somewhere else. What goes on in
classrooms should also not be mere “practice” for what students will do later
in some other world of junior high or high school or college. The community of a classroom is itself a
“real world” of truth and vitality. Assignments should be authentic
opportunities to use skills “for real” rather than for“ practice.” Assignments need to be worth doing for their
own sake in the here and now.
This isn’t to deny
the need to memorize times tables or the alphabet or French verb forms or
formulas for chemical reactions in order to be able apply this knowledge:
skills must be practiced to be developed.
Rather it means that we must give students real applications for their
skills and knowledge as early as possible and we must acknowledge student
potential for doing valuable work. At the Workshop, sixth graders play the same
games experienced actors play. Although
experienced players bring to the games both acting and life experiences that
younger players lack, the younger players are considered equally capable of
authentic truthful playing.
Improvisation implies that a
teacher’s questions should be genuine inquiries rather than questions to which
she already has the answers. It implies that teachers will take students’
responses into account as they move discussion forward. It implies that teachers won’t ignore
comments or questions contrary to their ideas or that complicate things in
unforeseen ways. It implies that they won’t either ignore or trample roughshod
over student resistance but will explore it.
It implies that they will guide discussion, asking leading questions,
and summarizing positions, but that the discussion will be a voyage of discovery
rather than a prescripted Q and A
between the teacher and individual students.
It implies that teachers will expect themselves, as well as students, to
learn something from their work together.
Being improvisational does not imply that the teacher has no control in
her classroom or that her planning and knowledge are superfluous. The teacher’s knowledge and planning weave
through discussion, enriching it
without driving out the ideas of the students and without driving out the
possibity that the teacher herself will learn something. Improvisation does not preclude expectations
of “excellence,” but it does preclude expectations about what exactly should be
thought or said.
One last story. A couple years
ago, in a play called Book of Days,
my opening scene was uncomfortable for me.
My character Martha had to go out and grab the audience as a by-product
of entertaining two other characters in what was basically a monologue. Martha uses shocking language, and the laughs
she gets 15 minutes into the show are the first big laughs of the night. I
usually entered the scene anxious about getting my laughs and establishing my
character with only minimal interaction with the other actors. My goal was
never to enjoy these early moments of the play, it was to get through them
without mishap.
Martha begins the scene ranting on about a young girl she’d seen “who
was pierced and stapled in every possible. . .”
Later in the scene, she refers back to this girl and others like her as
“the perforated generation.” One night,
working my way up to the phrase "perforated generation," I noted with
horror that the word “perforated” had fled my mind. It wasn’t that I couldn’t remember what I was
talking about, I just blanked on that one word. With increasing agitation, my
Martha babbled about “that generation of kids, you know, you know the ones I
mean, that generation that pierces and staples itself in every possible. . .
what is that word?” Martha ended the speech fluttering with
frustration. I thoroughly enjoyed the
moment; so did the cast and audience. By
improvising, I turned my memory problem into what Byrne Piven had called a
moment of "emotional truth." In that moment, I was released from the
fear of not doing a good job that had occupied space between me and Martha. Replacing fear with trusting what happens in
the moment of playing fused me with my character. Knowing I could solve a memory problem by
improvising successfully more than freed me from anxiety. From that point on, I was eager to do my opening scene, to see what would happen
this time and how I would
respond. I looked forward to making the
audience laugh rather than fearing I might fail to do so. Forgetting my lines as Martha was one of the
best things that ever happened to me as an actor .
Accepting the inevitability of forgetting lines and even welcoming this
happenstance can free teachers from the shame associated with “faking” it.
Knowing you always have to do
something before you’re ready to do it and that mistakes are inevitable
relieves you of the burden and delusion that you can or must know and control
everything. One thing I know for sure is
that the hat will fall off sometimes,
and that, when it does, the best thing to do is pick it up.
The other thing I know for sure is that
knowing something for sure doesn't guarantee that you'll actually act on the
information, but it is a start.