Carlo Cignani Gemäldegalerie, “Joseph and Potiphar’s Wife”
Last week I wrote about my dear friend Bjorn Krondorfer leaving St. Mary’s College to take a very desirable job in Arizona. Today, in memory of our many collaborations, I post an excerpt from an article that we jointly wrote twenty years ago, “Ritually Enacting the Reading Experience: A Dramatic Way to Teach Literature.” Bjorn is a Religious Studies scholar who has used dance and movement to interpret the Bible (he calls it “bibliodrama”) so we decided to apply the technique to literary fiction in an English Senior Seminar class. Presented with a choice of several stories by the American writer Andre Dubus, the class chose his novella Adultery. Here’s an excerpt from the article, which appeared in English Education (vol. 26, Dec. 1994):
Adultery is the story of Edith, her husband Hank, who is a novelist and college English teacher, and her lover Joe, who is a priest who leaves the church for her and who, shortly after they begin their affair, discovers he has cancer. Edith’s affair begins as a response to Hank’s numerous affairs with his students but turns into love. Joe nevertheless continues to have deep qualms about his participation in an adulterous relationship. The novella ends with Edith telling Joe, on his deathbed, that she has decided to divorce Hank.
To enact the reading experience of Adultery, we rethought the classroom space as a stage. We formed a large circle with our chairs, leaving an empty space in the middle. . .
Bjorn introduced the play process in order to reduce the anxieties some students exhibit when confronted with new teaching methods. After asking a student to outline the story’s plot, he repeated the names of Dubus’ characters and asked students to write down the one figure they were most attracted to: Edith, Hank, Sharon (their daughter), Joe, or Debbie (Hank’s student and lover). Encouraging them to give personal explanations, he also asked them to explain in two or three lines why they felt intrigued by the character of their choice. Because the explanations were anonymous, they were generally open. After the pieces of paper were folded and placed in the empty space, every student selected a piece from the pile and read it aloud to the whole group. This mixture of anonymous writing and public reading effectively allowed participants to talk about themselves without revealing their identity. In this way, they began to experience the levels of vulnerability and intimacy which transpire in play processes.
As the class listened to what had been written about characters in Adultery, we began to understand that each participant had read the story, not only through the eyes of a specific character, but also with a set of distinct motivations. Students’ explanations of characters were often little stories in themselves. Some students identified with the daughter Sharon because they themselves came from “broken” homes; some were attracted to Edith or Hank for they, too, had been hurt in intimate relationships; some were intrigued by Hank because they wanted to know how it felt to be a “famous” novelist; others identified with Joe because of their unresolved struggles with religion and sexuality or because of his fight with cancer. A sense of the group as a whole emerged. . .
After we talked about students’ notes, thereby increasing our awareness of our multiple perspectives and of the presence or absence of different characters, Bjorn introduced the chair, placed in the middle of the empty space. He sat in it and explained the procedure for the next and central phase of our play. To bring the story to life, we needed volunteers to sit in the chair for about five minutes and be interviewed as one of the characters. The group would ask questions, any questions, and the volunteers would answer with “I” statements. The book and our notes were to be set aside: What ensued from this point on was not to be an “academic interrogation”—arguing over specific textual references—but a spontaneous playing with the story. The group was free to ask questions going beyond the text itself, and volunteers were similarly unrestrained in their responses.
Because the (exposed and lonely) chair in the middle of the (safe and more anonymous) circle made students nervous at first, Bjorn asked them to get up, mill around in the empty space, talk to each other, and sit in the chair for a few moments. This exercise broke the ice and participants became more comfortable with the space. We then entered the centerpiece of the play, the various episodes of our impromptu “tragedy.”
Rather than having the group interview the protagonists of Dubus’ story themselves (although this was certainly an option), Bjorn asked students to interview objects affiliated with each character. Because Dubus provides fairly comprehensive portrayals of his protagonists . . . , there was the danger that students might choose to simply imitate Dubus’ presentation of characters rather than to portray their individual reading experiences. By interviewing the objects, which do not have a voice in the text, students were encouraged to rely on imagination and improvisation.
The objects Bjorn chose signified aspects of the characters’ lives. Instead of enacting Hank, we talked to the novel which occupies so much of his life; instead of talking to Edith, we interviewed the car which she drives from her family to her lover; instead of playing Joe, we talked to his cross, which hangs over his bed and witnesses his lovemaking and his dying. This indirect approach to Dubus’ story had two advantages. Because the inanimate objects were identified with specific characters, they could speak for those characters, providing us new perspectives on the story: The novel could speak for and also about Hank; the car for and about Edith; the cross for and about Joe. Focusing their attention on the objects provided students distance from Dubus’ detailed portrayals of his antagonists as well as interpretative access to them. . .
[The article goes on to give an account of the interviews, first with the objects and then directly with a couple of characters—with Joe the priest and with Debbie, Hank’s student/mistress. To finish off the middle part of the process, Bjorn set up two internal conversations: the first between the car (an extension of Edith) and Debbie, the second between Joe and the cross on his wall. Here are descriptions of the class’s interview with Joe and the conversation between Joe and the cross.]
Because of time constraints Bjorn had to choose the next character to be enacted from among Sharon, the child, and Joe, Edith’s lover. Bjorn decided in favor of Joe because he might contribute to the discussion of the love and violation themes which had been surfacing in the play process. When we questioned Joe, played by Jason, he portrayed a confident man aware of his life choices. Joe seemed not to regret leaving the priesthood or engaging in a love-affair with a married woman, but he was sad about his impending death—a sadness that soon suffused the empty space and spread to the group as a whole. With our interview of Joe, the second round, the interviewing of characters, came to a close, and we were now ready to move on to a last round of dialogues. . .
The second dialogue took place between Joe and the cross. Again the group listened to the two players in the middle, though Bjorn decided spontaneously to rearrange the seating. Intending to recreate the situation of the cross hanging over Joe’s bed, he asked the cross whether she would agree to stand on the chair and talk to Joe sitting on his chair below. The cross, reluctant at first, agreed to it try it out, with the option of sitting down whenever she wanted.
In his dialogue with the hanging cross, Joe changed. He was no longer the confident, strong, resolved man who loved Edith. Instead, he turned out to be insecure and somewhat afraid of the cross. He became a child, with his body language and his verbal intonation mirroring a child’s behavior. The cross, on the other hand, remained ambiguous, shifting between a rigid judgmental attitude and moments of caring when she bent slightly towards Joe. She seemed uncomfortable with Joe’s submissive role, which appeared to invite her to assume a parental stance.
At this point, because students had shown such willingness to open up and take risks, Bjorn decided on the spot to conclude with a “living sculpture.” We opened the circle of chairs at one end to create a “stage.” Bjorn asked the five players to return once more and find a posture and gesture which would best capture who or what they represented in relation to each other. A key issue was how they chose to position themselves in relation to each other. Each could, for example, turn away from another person or object or decide to touch. They could sit or stand or lie.
The sculpture that evolved was fascinating. On the right side stood the novel, erect and powerful, arms crossed in front of his chest, looking out to the audience. Debbie crouched at his feet, looking up to him, her back to the audience. The cross stood to the left, also erect, though she projected less strength than the novel. Joe sat at her feet, sideways to the audience, looking at the car who, on all fours, was in the middle of the two pairs. We froze the living sculpture and replaced each player with someone from the group so that the players, too, could see themselves in the sculpture. It was a powerful image of the conflicts as we worked them out in the play. The novel and Debbie were locked in their unequal relationship on one side while Joe and the cross were locked in their (parent-child) relation on the other side. Caught in between was the car, embodying Edith’s inability to escape from the novel (Hank) and Debbie (the failing marriage) and to go to Joe (Her lover) and the cross (Joe’s moral dilemma).
We stopped the play, took a break, and came back to talk about the process. The students were impressed by how deeply they got involved in the story through the play and how much each character somehow made sense to them, even Debbie with whom nobody wanted to identify originally. We talked about the issues that had arisen. Everyone noted how the theme of violation had come up time and again, how we seemed to have focused on hurt, jealousy, and a general lack of love and compassion. Nobody in our enactment, nor in Dubus’ story, seemed to receive all the love he or she searched for and needed.
