With the official end of the magazine club in sight (although that hardly means the end of the school magazine) I have decided to embark on a new club. Instead of just choosing something I enjoy I decided I should ask the students what they might want and lo and behold they chose something I would have never personally considered offering - a drama club.
Don't get me wrong, I'm all about other folks acting. I love movies, I love the theatre, I loved the Boston Ballet's performance of "Cinderella" because of how much acting there was in it. I do not however have any experience or real discernible knowledge about theatre and how you go about teaching it. I still don't but I tell ya what, I have a handful of plays in my possession now that I will read over this long weekend and try to get a better idea of what we might want to perform for our play. The first two were recommendations from my father, "Our Town" and "Julius Caesar". Old timey, classic, whatever you want to call them, they've been done an awful lot and there's a reason for that but I wanted to look into some newer plays too.
So I picked up The Laramie Project, a short one hundred page 'actor-driven event' about the murder of Matthew Shepard in Laramie, Wyoming in the late 1990's.
I know the story well, I was engrossed with it when it was happening. I was a teenager when it occurred and I was shocked with the manner in which folks were responding on so many levels. I did however only know what I was being taught by the newspapers and TV shows I watched (and heard from folks around me) whereas the folks in the Tectonic Theatre Project out of New York decided that they would, four weeks after the brutal murder, head out to Laramie and attempt to interview as many people from the town as possible and try to paint a picture of what had happened and try to understand the how and why.
It's a sore subject for many folks - homosexuality that is. For some reason (cough, religion, cough) there are some pretty strong, and pretty powerful, anti-gay sentiments floating around the United States. Sentiments that, when an explanation is attempted, not much more than "because I said so" is retorted. The surest sign of being wrong in any situation is only being able to explain your rightness with "because I said so." Fact is, most folks who know gay people have no problem with gay people, folks who don't know gay people are the only ones who hate gay people. Sure, this might be oversimplifying it and there are exceptions of course, it's pretty standard though.
So when I picked up the play I expected there to be all sorts of meddling done by the authors (just like they do on the TV news - edit out things to change the meaning of what someone said) but there wasn't that much. What was there was a very sad story of a person being killed and a community that was very much at odds with itself and each other after being thrown into the national spotlight.
I realize now after finishing the play that if I were to attempt to teach this to a group of middle school students that there would be parents and teachers up in arms (the violence is explained graphically, faggot is used profusely, and both sides are represented (relatively) evenly). What I don't understand is why anyone would be anything but happy that as a society we are intelligent enough to discuss things like this. Why when we have so much violence and hatred in our entertainment that we loathe (as adults) do we refuse to really tackle those issues with the youth?
It also brings up the age old question, why do folks hate each other?
I'm no fool - I understand that when you are down it is a much simpler task to pick yourself up by bringing others down but I, more importantly, do not understand how folks don't see themselves doing this and cut it out. It may be easier to pick on someone who is different than you, especially when you have such vocal support from large groups of people, but how do you not realize this is wrong? It is all so indicative of one of the biggest issues we face here in America in terms of bettering ourselves as humans;
I'm right so you must be wrong.
Just because you think you are right does not mean that everyone else is wrong. It just means you disagree. I believe that all human beings are equal, some people disagree and say that is not true. I believe that being gay is not a sin, in fact, I don't believe anything you can't control is a sin (don't get me started on the whole idea of "sinning" to begin with), some people still think it is. We disagree.
I believe that even if you disagree with me you have the right to live a happy and comfortable life free of fear, and unfortunately, as long as we live in a country where things like this happen, I will know that people disagree with me.
This is a rare opportunity where I am certain that those people are wrong.
Maybe I will teach this...