Class notes, Mockingbird discussion (Andrea)

Mockingbird notes 9/18/12

Ellen: When we go to the Lilly in October we will have already been there with our groups to find something interesting, and then we will present it to the class.

Amy: We can get $30 tickets. Need confirmation of interest from people so that I can buy them. We could go on Saturday or see a Friday show and a Sat. matinee show. If we do both shows on Saturday we have to leave very early. We have a department van, fewer cars the better for gas and for parking. (and for sing-alongs, says Ellen) Two plays I am most interested in: Black Watch and the Something Something of Prudencia Heart.

Kelly: I focused on the issues of the child actors because they are central to the play. It was compelling for me. I got the sense of what Davis was talking about in not doing the realism thing but rather putting yourself in the mindset of what it would be like.

Whitney: The play asks the audience to become involved in a memory. The mob scene and the trial scene, which implicates the audience in a very particular way, and adult Scout does as well. We are involved and she becomes a mirror for our reactions. For me, that didn’t happen at all, partly because I was in the balcony. Mob scene didn’t make me feel implicated. I thought of adult Scout as separate. I saw her as another layer of time between me and the action. The posts seemed to sway both ways on that. I wondered how we could reconcile those two views.

Jennifer: Adult Scout never touched the other actors. I was sitting in the balcony too, and I share your opinion of the mob scene.

Sarah: There’s always a notion of whether actors coming from the audience is good or bad. It was important and meaningful in this case to have the mob coming from the same place as the jury. In this instance in Bloomington Indiana, this audience is that audience. I didn’t realize that people in the balcony were missing out on that. For those of you who weren’t thinking about the comparisons between the jury and the mob scene, I wonder how to think about the role of adult Scout.

Amy: Sarah, can you follow up on ways she could have been utilized to make her more visible in the trial scene?

Sarah: I don’t know where she was onstage during the trial. Had she been a spectator at the trial, that might have been one choice. She could have been in the white audience in the back looking on, because that speaks more to her role as an adult in Maycomb county. I would think she would be in the balcony.

Justin: She was up in the balcony. That’s a scene when young Scout isn’t driving the action, so it’s appropriate that adult Scout disappears into the background. It’s just a way of showing that this person had no way of controlling what was going on.

Sarah: It reinforces notions of this being a memory play rather than having an outside commentary. I would rather have adult Scout on the floor realizing for the first time the implications of what happened.

Jennifer: She does that a little bit. She introduces the judge and her father in the trial scene. She does initially take a role, but then she steps back and becomes a spectator.

Whitney: Interesting that she reinforced the memory aspect to you. The trial was the one time when we opened up the space and got a communal memory rather than a personal memory. Adult Scout stepped in between scenes to tie things up neatly, but she doesn’t after trial. It became a way of problematizing the fact that this play was framed as a memory.

Ellen: referred to Courtney’s post—play escapes confines of recollection of the person who’s supposed to be narrating. The trial is a point where play is not constrained by construct of memory play. Courtney brought up interesting point about the hand and the sudden attention, which suggests that we have viewed this character wrongly in the way that the community and judicial system has misjudged him. It pokes a hole in the case of the prosecution but also in our ability to read subjects on stage.

Courtney: Moment of trial was one of the most meaningful moments of the play. I had a hard time with the acting of the adult Scout. I was being guided in ways that I really didn’t want to be. A lot of the play was framed negatively through her, and the trial scene was the one place where I didn’t have to deal with Scout and I got to be implicated. The trial is laid out as if you in the audience are learning the facts at the same time as the jury.

Dorothy: From my perspective, I have the inverse. The only times the play worked for me is when it is the single perspective. Any time I am asked to become part of the scene of not knowing, the problem is that I do know. Whenever I’m in the part of spectator for this, it’s harder for me to give in to it, but when it’s her memories, it’s easier for me to see her view.

Whitney: Cody, you mentioned the multiple authority voices coming in at that point and its relationship to theatricality. I wonder if we can start thinking of it in terms of Davis. Is what Dorothy described a barrier to theatricality according to Davis?

Ming: I decided not to look up the story. I knew the names because people refer to it, but I went in blind and was interested in how that would affect things. I think that might be why I was much more attached to grown-up Scout and Atticus finch because they knew. I was one of the children and I didn’t know. I found their wisdom to be something of a comfort.

Jess: I had a similar response at the end of the trial. I thought, “They’re going to lay all this out and prove he’s innocent, and that will complicate things, but for sure they’re not going to convict him. I’m aware of the climate of the time, but still I thought facts would come through.” I identified with kid Scout at that moment.

Amy: What does it say about the play that we are guided to share Scout’s perspective? It could have been produced as a play without adult Scout. How does she help us take Scout’s perspective?

Jennifer: Logistical reason—adult Scout guides us through lapses in time. Was To Kill A Mockingbird written for children or have we just made it children’s reading? There’s something about the way adult Scout opens the play that helps us put ourselves in her place.

Whitney: Interested in Iris’ point about importance of putting aside social and cultural differences. Maybe using Scout’s perspective allows us to do that. Rather than ask us to strip away those 70 years, I wonder if asking us to read it through a child’s perspective puts us in a place of innocence and not knowing. We don’t have to pretend that the last 70 years didn’t happen, we just put ourselves in the place of a child.

Ming: How important is it to know that Scout doesn’t die?

Iris: Book was originally titled Atticus. Not sure why it changed, but I think there is something in the telling of Scout. There is something to explaining racism and social issues of the time as you would to a child. It allows you to be simplistic enough.

Kelly: I struggled with her narration. She never really explained the racial tension. I felt that her narration was unnecessary. There are scenes when Scout isn’t even in the room. The narration didn’t commentate on anything.

Jenna: She wasn’t offering a different perspective from young Scout. The older Scout would sometimes physically mimic young Scout, giving you the impression that Scout is re-experiencing rather than learning.

Derek: I just kept seeing the adult Scout with that role of narrator, but for me it was overwhelmingly the sense of nostalgia for a lost period of childhood and admiration for her father. Kelly said her occasional absences were strange for a memory play, and I didn’t think of that. I don’t think that necessarily contradicts the aspect of nostalgic reminiscence that I was feeling. In the first half I sat downstairs, the second upstairs and it was very different and I was irked that I chose to do that.

Amy: We should try to make present our embodied experience of the event and recognize some of the factors before we make a conclusion. The space of an event—why is it different in the balcony, why was it in that space, where else could it have been? I am interested in relationship between phenomenological explanation of being in that space and the meaning of the play. What are the salient parts of the live theatrical experience, the space it was in, and what was produced? I’d like to point to some more specifics.

Dorothy: Having it in the theater and not at a high school was significant. In the theatre it made it more important because it was an Event. There were little girls next to me who had clearly put on fancy ‘going to the theater’ clothes. That was important in making it an event and not just a play that kids are in.

Ming: all the couples around me were white and over seventy, and they were couples. They were going to see a favorite novel, and it made me think about the function of an audience in relation to age. What do we go there to do? When does the self-awareness come in?

Dorothy: I sat in the second row, felt like an asshole for showing bitterness and being there for a class while I was sitting next to kids who were really excited to be there.

Amy: The degree to which we are shaped by the people around us is profound. The degree to which we start to resonate with the people around us defines the experience.

Dorothy: There were things that the girls next to me had questions about, but the play had assumed the audience knew the answers. Kids didn’t understand the racial tension present in the play. When they said ‘rape’ the girls laughed because sex was new to them. It could have been something they related to, but they didn’t explain it further so they could understand.

Kelly: In my audience that was a very funny moment. I remember thinking that that was odd. I get it, but wondered that no one else thought it was disturbing.

Iris: I thought the laugh came a few lines later after Atticus’ technical definition and Scout’s ‘why didn’t they just say that?’

Derek: I wonder if the girls were laughing at that because of their own discomfort.

Jess: The laughter of the girls might be because saying the word ‘rape’ is a taboo.

Ming: Strikes me as something teenage girls do when they’re uncomfortable. That’s the go-to because they’ve got nothing. It’s such a scary thing so that’s how they can grapple with it.

Amy: Let’s go back to spaces of theater and their relevance. The presence of students is important, and the program mentioned the number of students who could come see it. It has a role as a pedagogical add-on, but there are lots of other ways it could be done.

Jennifer: Would you say it’s a diverse audience in terms of age? I’ve never been to a play that had people of different ages in the audience, and it affected my reception of the play. You had different audiences reacting at different times, as in this mention of rape.

Sarah: The theatre-ness of the space, with its proscenium and cushy seats, makes it possible for this play to be a family outing. The frame says that this play is separate from us, part of the past.

Jenna: I wanted to talk about how it was in the proscenium space also, because it was staged in a way that wanted to be in a thrust space. There were people going through the aisles, and the dog that Atticus shot was placed offstage. (Thrust space is when the stage is shaped to emerge into audience, a circle.) I felt this moment most during the lynch mob scene. I was seated in the back of the audience and saw that this was a nicely framed play, and then all of a sudden the space was invaded, and I was engaged in a way that I was not before. I felt that the production wanted that to happen at other moments, but it didn’t because of the stage.

Whitney: Any time there’s a refreshment stand right in the entrance of a theater, it upsets me. With a play like this it becomes really important that it is there because of the kids in the audience. The refreshment stand has a place in making it okay for children—you’re not implicated.

Dorothy: I hadn’t thought about it in terms of the making it acceptable to take children. For me it became grotesque. It would be disturbing for a black child to be eating popcorn watching this.

Sarah: I think it’s a valid question: would a black child be more terrified watching this? I don’t think a black child would identify with Tom, but with Scout. Not all children are keyed to respond to situations in that way.

Dorothy: For me, that was not true. Maybe because I grew up in the south, it was clear to me from early age that it was a difference. Reading that book, I couldn’t relate to Scout.

Derek: A lot of the play is about what the adults want to allow the children to see. You guys are repeating the same thing. You’re paralleling the same discourse, where it feels to me you are moving in the direction of not wanting children to see the play, or not wanting to have a conversation with children about the issues in the play. Almost like you are not really sure they are old enough to deal with it or come to an understanding of these issues at young age. I’m not sure that’s fair to the children to take that stance.

Dorothy: What I’m saying is that there’s something unfair about making children who would not have been Scout see the play. Being in the audience might benefit white children more. It’s much more about the family dynamic than about race. The black people in the play have no agency, and we don’t get anything from the perspective. You’re asking these kids to sympathize with the oppressor.

Whitney: I don’t think anyone is saying we shouldn’t bring kids to the play. We’re saying that the repertoire this play used was not the most engaging. It allowed children to see it from a safe distance.

Derek: I don’t know if we can say that, because I heard children asking their parents about the play. We don’t know what questions they had afterwards, or what their reasons were for seeing the play.

Amy: It is produced as a consumer object for downtown Bloomington. It’s in a nice venue. This play is written to educate and assuage liberal white people. It’s not meant to make us feel terribly guilty. We get off the hook and we get to place in a long-ago time. I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with that, but taking Davis’ perspective on the event, the traces of the repertoire that we are examining do not suggest that this was meant to be anything other than a consumable product for liberal white people.

Ming: It’s always a consumable object, anytime you show up to something.

Derek: I don’t think that’s a bad thing. We need to have opportunities to go. I can imagine teaching this book to 9^th graders. It’s difficult to come down hard on the play for its failings because it does so many other things that make it valuable.

Amy: I want us to get better at articulating what the details are that add up to experience, to be able to assess the elements we saw on the stage and in the theatre. I know we can all talk about race and politics, but I want to hone that particular lens on our intellectual eye. Casting: director thought about casting adults as the children.

Dorothy: I liked the kids. I thought they were very good, but also very much kids. Kids in audience identify with kids onstage when they can see themselves being able to play that part, and that helps them picture themselves in the experience that the play describes.

Whitney: Insert in program advertised that for one night only a certain girl would be playing Scout, so you should come back and see her. Is this really that big of an event? Is she that much better? Did anyone see the other girl?

Sarah: I sat between my students and my French teacher, and they were talking over me about their knowledge of that girl and how they wished they had seen her. They were also talking about the little boy, so there was a notion of discussing the children as themselves as well as the characters.

Whitney: Interesting in terms of discussion of celebrity in The Exonerated. Does that distract from the play?

Jess: I don’t think this play would work with adults cast as the children. There are limitations you encounter with children, but they served the piece, and it would change the story too much to have them appear as adults.

Kelly: I was wondering if this could have been done with adult Scout narrating and then going to play her younger self.

Jess: That seems more effective than the two characters onstage, as in the play How I Learned to Drive.

Ming: What about the moment when everything converges on Scout and she talks the mob out of the lynching?

Justin: I went into this wishing they had cast adults. It works. With To Kill A Mockingbird, that is the scene where it wouldn’t work simply because of the sizes in the scene. That’s a moment of theatricality.

Jess: We were talking about hair color of Scout. I think it’s interesting that they cast a blond girl. I remember vividly of that scene that there is a shining blond girl in the midst of all these grungy men.

Amy: That recalls the States argument and the discussion of Annie and Sandy. There’s a moment when the actor disappears and that actor is capable of not knowing who she is. The actor and the character simultaneously don’t get it, and we are put in the position of knowing the power she has in spite of herself, not because of herself.

Sarah: I think it is Jem’s reaction in the courtroom that makes all of this worthwhile. There is no dramatic tension in the trial, but it is Jem’s outrage that is the climax of that scene, and I think you need a child in that scene. It’s the only thing that gives it hope rather than being an implication on you.

Jennifer: The casting of Boo Radley surprised me. When he walked out of the house, I understood the affinity between them better than the Boo Radley in the movie. His innocence was very effective. His shoes were too big for him, his size, how he carried his size.

Jess: You can see why he would sequester himself from the world because he is a childlike person. It’s a reaction that one of the kids might have.

Dorothy: I thought it was a good casting choice for children’s viewing. It’s the gentle giant trope. Robert Duvall had nuance, but maybe the point of that is not to have the nuance, to make it not subtle.

Iris: My heart melted at the scene when she walks Boo home. It works onstage and it works as a metaphor.

Jennifer: I would have to disagree. I didn’t want him to say anything.

Iris: I was okay with that being his only line.

Whitney: Dill was important for me in that respect. In the way that Scout and Jem weren’t, Dill was short and squat with great glasses and a great hat. He became to me what the other two should have been. When I read the book, Scout was really small and squat and waddley, but you can’t put a child like that in that role because they wouldn’t be able to carry the role.

Dorothy: Dill was the most believable to me because he didn’t understand things. I really fell for things.

Sarah: Dill is absorbed in the movies, too, where good guys always win. I also liked the costuming with the kids, as if they were growing up faster than they needed to.