Unit of Study: Incorporating Theatrical Pieces into the Young Adult English and History Classrooms

Why I Chose This Genre & Canonical Work:

Young adult students at the high school level can tire of reading canonical works of great literature without finding a connection to any characters or themes in the texts. In a modern world of YouTube and social media outlets such as Facebook, high school students are becoming disconnected with how the canonical written work on paper can enrich their teenage lives. Often times, young adults are asked to read these books, write papers, and take exams without ever being given the context for how these integral books fit in with their lives. Similarly, public school students in California are required to take European history in their Sophomore year and American history in their Junior year and are taught from giant history textbooks with few references to young adults their own age. In many high schools, curriculum in the English classroom is taught in conjunction with curriculum in the History classroom. For example, some high schools choose to focus on the Holocaust in the history classrooms while English classrooms read Elie Wiesel�s Night during Sophomore year. This curriculum integration between history and English begins to show students how works of fiction or non-fiction represent the ordinary people involved in these extraordinary historical events.

The canonical play by Arthur Miller titled The Crucible represents a part of American history that is often taught at the Junior level of high school. This play focuses on the Salem Witch trials in Puritan New England and the text itself was written as an allegory to McCarthysim, a time in the 1950s when the U.S. government went after assumed Communists in America. The Crucible presents these historical themes and themes of intolerance, lying, taking responsibility, reputation and manipulation, while centering on a strong, young adult female protagonist. Plays like The Crucible are the perfect texts to get students involved in the classroom because plays are best when they are acted and experienced rather than read.

The integration of plays and musicals into the classroom can enrich history lessons and they can allow students to connect to something beyond words on a page. Plays and musicals that relate to history can inspire young people to explore the lesser known stories and books relating to a particular historical time period thus, History and English are best studied in conjunction with one another. Plays and musicals can simply supplement history lessons with specific themes like intolerance which is found in The Crucible and can supplement the theme of intolerance in the study of the Holocaust or the American Civil Right�s Movement. Once the plays or musicals have been introduced in the classroom, more often than not these works have also been developed into films therefore, a discussion can be lead about film adaptation, director choices and film editing. Not only will students gain a history and English lesson, they can also make sense of the production process in live theatre and film. The following unit of study will explore how plays, musicals and other theatrical pieces can connect students to history and to each other as young adults.

Launching the Unit:

The following quotation can launch a discussion about the importance of artistic creation as it pertains to the making of history. Howard Zinn wrote The People�s History of the United States, which gives a voice to those everyday people who had experienced and created history beyond what is currently taught in the textbooks. Students can discuss the impact of written works on revolutions and political and social movements. Also, have students decide which groups of people, cultures, ethnicities and races are misrepresented in history:

"What most of us must be involved in--whether we teach or write, make films, write films, direct films, play music, act, whatever we do--has to not only make people feel good and inspired and at one with other people around them, but also has to educate a new generation to do this very modest thing: change the world." – Howard Zinn Artists in Times of War and Other Essays 

Using the Center Piece:

            The centerpiece text for this unit is Arthur Miller�s The Crucible. According to Amazon, The Crucible is �Based on historical people and real events and] uses the destructive power of socially sanctioned violence unleashed by the rumors of witchcraft as a powerful parable about McCarthyism.� The play focuses on young adult girls in 17th century Puritan New England who falsely accuse many women of practicing witchcraft during the time of the Salem Witch trials in order to avoid trouble for attempting to practice witchcraft themselves.

According to the Arthur Miller Society Official Website, �The husbands of some of the women involved try to convince the judges as to the girls' deceit, but find them unshakeable. Eventually even the most prominent members of the community find themselves indicted, and the tension mounts as the central protagonist, John Proctor, must confess an earlier adultery in order to save his own wife from being hanged based upon charges brought by his former lover. However, because his wife lies about the adultery to save his name, the judges fail to believe his charges. Proctor is given the chance to save his own life by confessing to witchery and naming names, but chooses to die rather than betray his friends and neighbors.� Among many themes in The Crucible, the play focuses on themes of manipulation, peer pressure, dishonesty and intolerance, many of which can speak to young adult high school students.

The following teaching resources and ideas can be implemented in a high school classroom to support the text:

A)            Have students read Arthur Miller�s essay titled �Are You Now Or Were You Ever?� from The Guardian/The Observer dated June 17, 2000. The essay discusses American paranoia from the McCarthy era as it relates to the similar hysteria during the Salem With trials. Have students talk or write a journal about their own experiences with American paranoia or have them give examples of paranoia in other countries at other times. Some examples could be the Muslim discrimination after September 11th, 2001.

B)            Since this is a play in essence, allow students to become the directors and actors for an integral scene in the play. The courtroom scene calls for an entire class�s participation and this approach could allow for more classroom discussion about blocking, dialogue interpretation and other directing choices. Smaller groups can also be formed to allow for students to work as a team to direct smaller scenes in the play.

C)            Throughout the course of reading the play, students can write journals for each of the following characters to discuss their fears and emotional responses to the play�s action: John Proctor, Elizabeth Proctor Abigail Williams and Reverand Hale.

D)            After reading the play, have students view the film The Crucible (1996) directed by Nicholas Hytner. If there is limited time in class, pick the most important scenes for viewing. Students can write an essay comparing and contrasting the director�s choices with their own interpretations of the play. Students can also point out the strengths and weaknesses with adapting Arthur Miller�s play onto film.

E)             Hold a �Puritan School Day� for one period of school instruction. Students will have to dress, act and participate in a day in the life of a teenager at school during the Puritan era of America. Have students sit in their prospective gendered sections and model a strict instructor of the times. Students often learned exclusively by memorizing Bible passages and listening to the instructor lecture.

F)             For the visually artistic, students can create a comic strip in graphic novel form of one of the critical scenes in the play to present to the class. Comic strips should include dialogue but students can modernize or change the era of the play�s setting as long as they justify their creative decisions in written form.

Extending the Unit:

            Many plays, musicals, and books that can be read as reader�s theatre can supplement historical units in English classrooms. All of the characters in these texts and musicals offer a perspective of history and/or cultural and social change from the point of view of everyday people. The following list of texts and songs are summarized and are given as examples for their specific and respective historical units:

 

Monster by Walter Dean Myers: According to pinkmonkey.com, Monster is about, �A sixteen year old boy named Steve Harmon who] finds himself on trial for murder after he is accused as acting as a lookout for the young men who actually commit a robbery at a Harlem drugstore and kill the store owner. The story is presented predominantly from his own viewpoint in the form of a screenplay.� Steve�s story has many themes relating to teens including peer pressure and self-identification. This novel is theatrical in that it is written in the form of a screenplay so students can easily adopt certain scenes into their own short films or comic book reels. This novel can supplement discussions about cultural struggles in the Harlem district of New York City, and can supplement historical and cultural discussions about racial discrimination as it relates to the Civil Right�s Movement in the 1950s and 1960s and the Harlem Renaissance.

 

Joe Turner�s Come and Gone by August Wilson: According to enotes.com, this �play was inspired both by the 1978 Romare Bearden artwork Mill Hand�s Lunch Bucket and the blues song "Joe Turner�s Come and Gone." The song, which was recorded by legendary blues artist W. C. Handy, was first sung by many estranged black women who had lost their husbands, fathers, and sons to Joe Turner—a plantation owner who illegally enslaved blacks in the early twentieth century. Joe Turner�s Come and Gone is the third play in Wilson�s ten-play historical cycle, in which the playwright is chronicling the African-American experience in the twentieth century by devoting a play to each decade. Set in a Pittsburgh boardinghouse in 1911, the play examines African Americans� search for their cultural identity following the repression of American slavery. For Herald Loomis, this search involves the physical migration from the South to Pittsburgh in an attempt to find his wife. Pittsburgh was one of the many urban areas in the North that other blacks migrated to in the 1910s in an effort to flee the discrimination they faced in the South, while attempting to find financial success in the North. Herald�s search for his identity, represented as his song, is unsuccessful until he has embraced the pain of both his own past and the past of his ancestors and moved on to self-sufficiency.� This play would easily supplement a discussion of the repercussions and failures of the Reconstruction period following the Civil War and the end of slavery. Many of Wilsons plays discuss the struggles of African American families to establish their identities in their country following the atrocities of slavery. Since this play is partially based on a song, students can listen to the song and analyze it as a class to discover how it relates to Wilson�s text. Songs were often sung among African American slaves, so the class can also discuss the importance of song in the African American culture and how music plays in modern African American culture. This play can also supplement units about the Harlem Renaissance because as African Americans migrated North, so did the culture and traditions. Themes such as intolerance, discrimination and identity also relate to many other books and scripts presented in this unit of study.

Witness by Karen Hesse: According to the summary on the back of the book, this novel focuses on �Leanora Sutter, Esther Hirsh, Merlin Van Tornhout, Johnny Reeves� and many other characters �among the unforgettable cast inhabiting a small Vermont town in 1924- a town that turns against its own when the Ku Klux Klan moves it. No one is safe, especially not the two youngest: twelve-year-old Leanora, an African-American girl, and six-year-old Esther, who is Jewish. In this story of a community on the brink of disaster, told through the haunting and impassioned voices of its inhabitants, Newberry Medalist Karen Hesse takes readers into the hearts and minds of those who bear witness.� As we did in class, this book is best read in the style of readers-theatre with one or a few students playing each character of the story. Since the book is written from many points of view, students can continue this trend and write journals entries for their respective characters.

 

Angels in America by Tony Kushner: According to enotes.com, �Angels in America is an �epic� drama, which means its plot unfolds over great distances of time and place, involves many characters, and more than one story line. Two complete plays form the entire plot: the first part, Millennium Approaches and its second installment, Perestroika. Together, they present more than thirty characters in eight acts, fifty-nine scenes, and an epilogue. For all its intricacies, however, the plot of the play is quite simple. It is the story of two couples whose relationships are disintegrating, set in America in the 1980s against a backdrop of greed, conservatism, sexual politics, and the discovery of an awful new disease: AIDS. It is this backdrop that provides Angels in America its magnitude and sets it apart from other love stories. In this play, the plot is largely driven by its themes, which are viewed from different characters' perspectives, as through a kaleidoscope, as the story unfolds.� Angels in America presents a more recent look at history in America. This play may be more appropriate for Juniors or Seniors in high school who have completed American history and can have a context for America as a country in the 1980s. The development of AIDS in America is a vital topic and Angels in America gives many diverse perspectives on this time. Rent is a movie musical that is hugely popular among teenagers and can be viewed in conjunction with a reading of Kushner�s Angels in America. The Laramie Project by Moises Kaufman is another play discussing homosexuality and gay rights that is often performed on high school stages and this play can also be read as readers-theatre in a classroom because it consists of many monologues voiced by a large cast. Queer and LGBT history is finally being recognized as legitimate history that should be taught in schools and Angels is America is the perfect addition to this history lesson.

Ragtime by E.L. Doctorow: According to the summary on the back of the novel, Ragtime is set in the years before the First World War. One lazy Sunday afternoon in New Rochelle, New York, the famous escape artist Harry Houdini swerves his car into a telephone pole outside the home of an affluent American family, Almost magically, the line between fact and fiction between real and invented characters, disappears. This is the era of Henry Ford and his Model T; of Emma Goldman the revolutionary; of J.P. Morgan, the great tycoon; of Evelyn Nesbit, the former chorus girl, for whom some lovers pine and others die. All of them cross paths with Doctorow�s brilliant fictional creations, including Tateh, an immigrant Jewish peddler, and Coalhouse Walker, Jr., a ragtime pianist form Harlem whose insistence on a point of justice brings this spellbinding classic to a shocking climax.� This book is a novel, not a play, but it was developed into a film and then a musical in later years. As established, this book focuses on the ordinary people and famous people including Booker T. Washington and Henry Ford, who helped create America as we know it today. Themes such as immigration, women�s rights, and the cost of celebrity still ring so clear in modern America. Many of the songs in the musical directly discuss these themes along with topics like racial discrimination while using classic ragtime tunes from the turn of the century.

 

Zap by Paul Fleischman: According to paulfleischman.net, �In this madcap new play for high school and community theater, a struggling acting troupe attempts to compete with TV by offering seven plays at once and letting the audience zap back and forth among them. Behold parodies of Chekhov, Beckett, and Agatha Christie collide with Neil Simon, Tennessee Williams, and Richard III in a theatrical train wreck of massive proportions compounded by a tell-all performance artist.� This is a great introduction to many of the greatest plays written in the English language and can prompt many students to want to discover these play like Shakespeare�s Richard III and Tennessee Williams� A Streetcar Named Desire. This play may best be read as an introduction to a unit using plays or other theatrical pieces because it is humorous and pokes fun at the serious plays that high school students may have learned to detest.

�Three Five Zero Zero�

From the Musical Hair

 

Ripped open by metal explosion


Caught in barbed wire


Fireball


Bullet shock


Bayonet


Electricity


Shrapnel


Throbbing meat


Electronic data processing


Black uniforms


Bare feet, carbines


Mail-order rifles


Shoot the muscles


256 Viet Cong captured


256 Viet Cong captured



 

Prisoners in Niggertown


It's a dirty little war


Three Five Zero Zero


Take weapons up and begin to kill


Watch the long long armies drifting home�

 

While noticeably controversial, this song from the counter-culture musical Hair demonstrates the violence in the Vietnam War and the anger felt by Americans at home who were protesting said violence. This song is raw and intense in order to draw attention to the listener and viewer of the musical because this show was written and performed during American involvement in the Vietnam conflict. Students can discuss imagery in this song, much like they could with any other poem.

 

�I Know Where I�ve Been�

From the Musical Hairspray

 

There's a light In the darkness

Though the night Is black as my skin

There's a light Burning bright

Showing me the way

But I know where I've been

There's a cry In the distance

It's a voice That comes from deep within

There's a cry Asking why

I pray the answer's up ahead yeah

'Cause I know where I've been

There's a road We've been travelin'

Lost so many on the way But the riches Will be plenty

Worth the price The price we had to pay�

 

This song is directly related to the protests and marches during the Civil Rights Movement in America. Hairspray deals with many forms of discrimination against African Americans and even the over-weight Tracy Turnblad and her mother. This song is especially well-rendered in the more recent Hairspray film and is sung by Queen Latifah. Students can watch this particular scene as discuss the directorial choices of visually putting this song on film.

 

�Back to Before�

From the Musical Ragtime

 

There was a time

Our happiness seemed never ending.

I was so sure

That where we were heading was right.

Life was a road

So certain and straight and unbending.

Our little road

With never a crossroad in sight.

Back in the days

When we spoke in civilized voices-

Women in white

And sturdy young men at the oar.

Back in the days

When I let you make all my choices.

We can never go back to before.

There was a time

My feet were so solidly planted.

You'd sail away

While I turned my back to the sea.

I was content,

A princess asleep and enchanted.

If I had dreams,

Then I let you dream them for me.

Back in the days

When everything seemed so much clearer.

Women in white

Who knew what their lives held in store.

Where are they now,

Those women who stared from the mirror?

We can never go back to before�

 

As discussed with E.L. Doctorow�s novel Ragtime, this song that plays toward the end of the musical is directly related to the changing of attitudes in women who would further the process of the women�s suffrage movement at the beginning of the 20th century in America. Students can discuss the roles of women at the time and this song can be discussed along another canonical text: F. Scott Fizgerald�s The Great Gatsby.

 

�Do You Hear the People Sing�

 From the Musical Les Miserables

 

ENJOLRAS

Do you hear the people sing?

Singing a song of angry men?

It is the music of a people

Who will not be slaves again!

When the beating of your heart

Echoes the beating of the drums

There is a life about to start

When tomorrow comes!

 

COMBEFERRE

Will you join in our crusade?

Who will be strong and stand with me?

Beyond the barricade

Is there a world you long to see?

Courfeyrac:

Then join in the fight

That will give you the right to be free!

 

ALL

Do you hear the people sing?

Singing a song of angry men?

It is the music of a people

Who will not be slaves again!

When the beating of your heart

Echoes the beating of the drums

There is a life about to start

When tomorrow comes!

 

FEUILLY

Will you give all you can give

So that our banner may advance

Some will fall and some will live

Will you stand up and take your chance?

The blood of the martyrs

Will water the meadows of France!

 

ALL

Do you hear the people sing?

Singing a song of angry men?

It is the music of a people

Who will not be slaves again!

When the beating of your heart

Echoes the beating of the drums

There is a life about to start

When tomorrow comes!

This song comes from the musical Les Miserables, which chronicles, among many characters, a group of French students fighting at the brink of the French Revolution. This song is the perfect supplement to a unit on any revolution, including the American Revolution, which partially inspired the French to revolt in the first place. Obviously, this song can be discussed in conjunction with Victor Hugo�s novel Les Miserables, but it can also be used to discuss some American revolutionary documents such as the Declaration of Independence if a class does a close reading of this document.