The Great Globe Itself: Teacher Preparation Guide

This year we have expanded the number of schools the tour visits from five to nine. Two of these schools are middle schools, we traditionally visit high schools. Sometimes the material is a bit mature or complex for pre-teens, and we leave it to parents to decide whether to bring their children to the public performances.

The Great Globe Itself, however, is historic and humorous and should be a hit with middle school kids. At least, the middle school kids I know, and I currently know a lot of them.

Every mainstage production at Great Lakes Theater includes a series of matinee performances for students across four states, and for every production there is an original Teacher Preparation Guide. These guides are created by GLT staff, area educators and academics including relevant articles, discussion prompts and pre- and post-attendance activities.

We do not often create a guide for the outreach tour. The last time we did this (I believe) was for the Seeing Red tour in 2008. That play was a dramatization of testimony before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, and so we provided a guide detailing the history of the committee and biographies of persons represented or referred to in the work, including Hallie Flanagan, Ronald Reagan, Paul Robeson and Arthur Miller.

The Globe is chockablock with historical personages and steeped in true historical fact (that I mess with) and so we have created a guide to hopefully bring our student audiences up to speed. Most of this original material was sourced and scribed by our education intern Elizabeth Finley, who is a recent graduate from Malone University. We are all very grateful for Elizabeth's great work, creating  this very useful guide, which you can access from the Great Lakes Theater website.

Dialect

Arthur Miller: Brooklyn
"Seeing Red" (2008)
Stage performance requires a real-time transformation into a believably different person than who you are. And this can be an exciting transformation, for performer as well as audience member. Make-up when skillfully applied, impeccably accurate costuming, a swagger or carefully crafted physical disability can happily deceive the audience member into believing that are in a different time, or place, a sharing a moment with someone unique, someone other, and this kind of artistry is what live theater is all about.

The accent, however, the sounds of the words, can make everything just a show. I really, really hate listening to a fake accent. And I am stressed about delivering one. When I have it right, it becomes a part of me, and my character, and I believe myself. When I am making hash of it, even I don't buy it and I feel sorry for the audience that has to listen to it.

There's a twangy kind of tough-guy "tawk" that I slide into when I have no formal guidance. I got away with it in college, playing Dopey in Balm and Gilead, and I spent so much time delving into the world of that character that the cadences of Wilson's heroin-addled punk that my own voice sang back to me and I was all right with that. It helped that I was also permitted to smoke real cigarettes onstage. Weren't those the days.


Porlock: Romania
"On the Dark Side of Twilight" (2010)
Every other year, I am called upon to use an accent in the Great Lakes outreach tour. Four years ago I was playing Arthur Miller, performing an edited transcript from his HUAC testimony, and I knew the "New Yawk" crap was not going to fly. And so I visited my old friend, professor Chuck Richie at Kent State. Just because a voice is woiking class, does not mean it has to be in the nose. Miller spoke from the chest, he was a muscular guy.

Two years ago we met to discuss a proper accent for the vampire Porlock (On the Dark Side of Twilight.) In this story, the young Englishman Aubrey Porlock, transformed into a vampire, is stranded in the "wilds" of eastern Europe and settles in Romania for ninety years. We decided to go with an "acquired" Romanian accent, taking special care not to go the Bela Lugosi route. No "v's" turned into "w's" like Pavel Chekov.

Yesterday, we began work on a Belgian accent. Poirot is often confused for French, so we may assume he is from the region closest to France and not, say, Holland. Exploring the International Dialects of English Archive we discovered that while most of the substitutions are like those of French, the Belgians accents we listened to do not have the lilt or "sing-songy" inflections of a French speaker.



Next up: Mustache Maintenance.

The Lady & The Bard

February is the longest month. Annually, I am engaged in the Great Lakes Theater Festival Outreach Tour. With the exception of last year's tour, this means putting my writing on hold for six weeks, my days spent in the office and my nights in rehearsal. This year we are presenting Daniel Hahn's Twice Told Tales of the Decameron which is a physically demanding piece of work. It is also tricky on the tongue.

Marketing Director Todd Krispinsky asked me to contribute to the GLTF artists blog on the production, which I have been only too happy to do. But I have had little to contribute to this blog. Or at least, nothing yet. It does not mean I have not been working.

For example, I am reading a thick book, A Shadow of Red by David Everitt, which (in keeping with today's theme) was a gift Daniel gave me after the 2008 GLTF Outreach Touring production, Seeing Red. This book deals specifically with the Blacklist in radio and television. How that differs from the Hollywood Blacklist ... well, that's what I am reading to learn. This is very helpful and informative as I piece together the post-Centennial career of Bernard Schrader, and how his work as a scriptwriter for radio may be viewed by those searching for Communist influences in the media.

Meanwhile, I have also continued to work with the Young Ladies of Noble on The Lady, which will be presented later this month. I did not imagine that creating a ten-minute play, incorporating eighteen (and now nineteen) ten year-old girls, with six forty-minute rehearsals, would be an easy task. Having said that, I have been delighted and surprised to find that it has, actually, been an entirely stress-free endeavor.

Ms. Eisenberg, Noble art teacher and counsellor for the Young Ladies, has been extremely helpful, acting as assistant director and defacto stage manager, keeping track of everything I am too dizzy to remember. All the girls grab pencils, take notes, remember everything, we pick up week to week from where we left off, and move forward. We have two more rehearsals in the actual performance space (the cafeteria) where we will be concentrating on projection -- on being LOUD. We may need to use microphones. But they each are doing a splendid job memorizing their lines, creating interesting characters. I am very proud of them.

Okay, as if that weren't enough the beautify my world yesterday, I was also summoned to the Cleveland School of the Arts (Cleveland Metropolitan School District) to act as a judge for the in-school competition for the English Speaking Union's National Shakespeare Competition. The winner would be sent to the regional competition downtown on Feb. 26.

The CSA is blessed to have Dr. Scott Miller as and English teacher and drama coach. He's just amazing. I was a little early and came walking into his class to witness an all-class project dramatizing Hamlet's To Be Or Not To Be soliloquy. This has nothing to do with the ESU competition, stuff like this happens in Dr. Miller's class every day. It was obvious the entire class had been working on the piece for some time, about ten kids, it's got choreography and original writing as well as Shakespeare's text to really get inside the head of someone considering suicide -- but choosing not to.

Then I saw ten high schools students perform monologues from Shakespeare with a commitment, understanding and excitement I rarely see in people so young. So much life, so much hope, so much deserved self-confidence. It was not easy choosing one to send to the regional competition. I live for such difficult decisions.


Harry E. Davis School
Temporary Home of the Cleveland School of the Arts

The Crucible

TRG Reality

As I got into my car to leave, Molly Kazan came out of the house ... It was impossible to keep looking into her distraught eyes.

She pointed out toward the road and told me that I no longer understood the country, that everybody who lived on that road approved of the Committee and what had been done.

After I had said that I ould not agree with their decision, she asked if I was staying at my house, a half hour away, and I said that I was on my way to Salem.

Her eyes widened in sudden apprehension. "You're not going to equate witches with this!"

- Arthur Miller, Timebends

Arthur Miller's play The Crucible debuted at the Martin Beck Theatre in New York City in January, 1953. It was not a roaring success.

"Arthur Miller is a problem playwright in both senses of the word." - Walter Kerr, Herald Tribune

"There is too much excitement and not enough emotion in The Crucible." - The New York Times

The original production was directed by an idiot, Jed Harris, who believed that since this was a period piece the performers should perform "classically" which in his mind meant everyone had to face out at the audience, never looking at each other. If you know anything about the play, or have seen the movie adaptation, you can see how this would not serve the text.

"The Crucible" was an act of desperation. Much of my desperation branched out, I suppose, from a typical Depression-era trauma - the blow struck on the mind by the rise of European Fascism and the brutal anti-Semitism it had brought to power. But by 1950, when I began to think of writing about the hunt for Reds in America, I was motivated in some great part by the paralysis that had set in among many liberals who, despite their discomfort with the inquisitors' violations of civil rights, were fearful, and with good reason, of being identified as covert Communists if they should protest too strongly.

- Arthur Miller, The New Yorker, October 1996

Put simply, Miller wrote this play in response to the House Committee on Un-American Activities ongoing efforts to publicly name and shame present and former members of the Communist Party, or anyone who even had affiliations with the Communist Party.

What I have found most ironic (when Great Lakes Theater Festival produced The Crucible a few years ago, and I played Miller in the original drama Seeing Red) is it was not Miller's own persecution before HUAC that inspired the piece. That came a few years later. And his testimony at that time makes you wonder if he were channeling the spirit of John Proctor, or if Proctor's psyche is so much a product of Miller's own he couldn't help but be surprised and shocked (in the way that Proctor is) that grown men choose or refuse not to respond to reason.

From Seeing Red by Daniel Hahn
adapted from Arthur Miller's Testimony before the House Committee on Un-American Activities
June 14, 1956

COMMITTEE Do you know or have you know a person by the name of Arnaud d’Usseau?

MILLER I have met him.

COMMITTEE Have you been in any Communist Party sessions with Arnaud d’Usseau?

MILLER I was present at meetings of Communist Party writers in 1947, about five or six meetings.

COMMITTEE Where were those meetings held?

MILLER They were held in someone’s apartment. I don’t know whose it was.

COMMITTEE Were those meetings closed?

MILLER I wouldn’t be able to tell you that.

COMMITTEE Was anyone there who, to your knowledge, was not a Communist?

MILLER I wouldn’t know that.

COMMITTEE Have you ever made application for membership in the Communist Party?

MILLER In 1939, I believe it was, or in 1940, I went to attend a Marxist study course in the vacant store open to the street in my neighborhood in Brooklyn. I there signed some form or another.

COMMITTEE That was an application for membership in the Communist Party, was it not?

MILLER I would not say that. I am here to tell you what I know.

COMMITTEE Tell us what you know.

MILLER This is now sixteen years ago. That is half a lifetime away. I don’t recall, and I haven’t been able to recall and, if I could, I would tell you the exact nature of that application. I understood then that this was to be, as I have said, a study course. I was there for about three or four times, perhaps. It was of no interest to me and I didn’t return.

COMMITTEE Who invited you to attend?

MILLER I wouldn’t remember. It was a long time ago.

COMMITTEE Tell us, if you please, sir, about these meetings with the Communist Party writers which you said you attended in New York City.

MILLER I attended these meetings in order to locate my ideas in relation to Marxism, because I had been assailed for years by all kinds of interpretations of what Communism was, what Marxism was, and I went there to discover where I stood. And I listened and said very little, I think, the four or five times.

COMMITTEE What occasioned your presence? Who invited you there?

MILLER I couldn’t tell you. I don’t know.

COMMITTEE Can you tell us who was there when you walked into the room?

MILLER Mr. Chairman, I understand the philosophy behind this question and I want you to understand mine. When I say this, I want you to understand that I am not protecting the Communists or the Communist Party. I am trying to, and I will, protect my sense of myself. I could not use the name of another person and bring trouble on him. I ask you not to ask me that question. I will tell you anything about myself, as I have.

COMMITTEE These were Communist Party meetings, were they not?

MILLER I will be perfectly frank with you in anything relating to my activities. I take the responsibility for everything I have ever done, but I cannot take responsibility for another human being.

COMMITTEE This record shows, does it not, Mr. Miller, that these were Communist Party meetings? Is that correct?

MILLER I understood them to be Communist writers who were meeting regularly.

COMMITTEE I respectfully suggest that you answer the question as to who it was that you saw at these meetings. May I say that moral scruples, however laudable, do not constitute legal reason for refusing to answer the question. You are directed to answer the question, Mr. Miller.

MILLER All I can say, sir, is that my conscience will not permit me to use the name of another person.

COMMITTEE Your are directed to answer the question as to whether or not Arnaud d’Usseau was chairman of the meeting of the Communist Party writers in New York City in 1947 at which you were in attendance.

MILLER I have given you my answer, sir.

COMMITTEE I ask you now, sir, whether or not Sue Warren was in attendance at this meeting of the Communist Party writers held in New York City in 1947?

MILLER I have given you my answer.

COMMITTEE Do you know Sue Warren? Did you decline to answer the question?

MILLER I tell you, sir, that I have given my answer.

COMMITTEE I am not satisfied with that. That is entirely too vague. Now what I want is a positive statement as to whether or not you will answer that question.

MILLER Sir, I believe I have given you the answer that I must give.

COMMITTEE Let us get that straight. As I understand, you decline to answer the question for the reason that you gave when you declined to answer the first question, or at least when you gave an answer that was not deemed acceptable, is that it?

MILLER That is correct.

COMMITTEE Are you cognizant of the fact that your play The Crucible, with respect to witch hunts in 1692, was the case history of a series of articles in the Communist press drawing parallels to the investigations of Communists and other subversives by Congressional committees?

MILLER The comparison is inevitable, sir.

The Crucible received its Cleveland premiere at the Cleveland Play House in 1954. More on that soon.

Cleveland Public Theatre presents THE WITCHES as part of Test Flight, a showcase of new works, March 3, 4 & 5, 2022.