printable versionDrama offers professors another tool for teaching, learning
BY BARBARA PALMER
Eva Meyersson, who is teaching a class on terrorism this quarter, is one of a growing number of faculty who are incorporating staged readings of theatrical works into their class syllabi as an avenue to learning.
To teach her spring quarter course, An Analytical and Comparative Approach to Terrorism, Eva Meyersson marshals the perspectives of a variety of disciplines, including economics, political science and psychology. And—in a darkened lecture hall one evening last month—theater.
In May, playwright Karen Sunde traveled from New York to attend Meyersson's class, where a San Francisco theater company performed a staged reading of Sunde's play In a Kingdom by the Sea. The drama offers a fictionalized account of the 1988 kidnapping by terrorists of Marine Corps officer Col. William Higgins, who was serving on a U.N. peacekeeping mission in Lebanon.
For Meyersson, the performance provides a much-needed complement to analytical course readings: human emotion. Faithful to what is known of the facts about the 1988 disappearance, the play focuses on the imagined motives of the American Marine and the complexities of his relationships with characters from other cultures and nations.
The play tells the story as a personal one, a distinction that Meyersson appreciates. "The study of terrorism is not a scientific field but a social phenomenon," said Meyersson, who is a senior research scholar at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research. Her work has applied the economic model of supply and demand to suicide bombers by looking at the questions, "How is it possible that you can find a supply of people who are ready to take their lives, and how is it possible that communities demand it?"
Drama can offer one way of getting at the answers, Meyersson said. "Whether you are working for the U.N. or for a terrorist organization, individuals are acting out a very personal story," she said.
The staged reading was performed by actors from the Playwrights Foundation of San Francisco and presented by the National Center for New Plays at Stanford. The center was established on campus by Executive Director David Goldman, founder of the National New Play Network, which fosters the development of new plays.
Goldman has presented several series of staged reading of new plays on campus, including a series offered by Continuing Studies. A few professors have begun to use staged readings as a curriculum enhancement, a trend that he hopes will grow, Goldman said.
In addition to presenting to students works that they otherwise might not see, the professional actors offer shadings and colorings of meanings in ways that reading the texts of plays can't deliver, he said.
Hazel Markus, the Davis-Brack Professor in the Behavioral Sciences, and Paula Moya, associate professor of English, have successfully used staged readings in the Introduction to Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity course they teach. "Students loved them," Markus said.
"Living in a society organized by race, ethnicity and culture, it is impossible to be colorblind or culture blind," Markus said. "But we Americans have not yet learned how to think about and talk about these issues. For the most part everyone is afraid of them."
Among the plays that Markus and Moya's students have seen is Bee-Luther-Hatchee by Thomas Gibbons, a play about an autobiography purportedly written by an elderly black woman but actually penned by a white man.
The plays supplement and extend the lectures and readings of the class and also provide an opportunity to confront many of the questions students have without revealing too much about themselves, Markus said. "They can instead talk about the characters in the play and evaluate their actions."
Exposing students to "a real-time creative process forces students to use not only their intellect but their empathy," Meyersson said. True learning "uses both the brain and the heart."
Goldman arranges staged readings by faculty request. He has identified new plays on topics including genetic manipulation, brain transplants, artificial intelligence, astrophysics and religion, among others. For more information, Goldman can be contacted by e-mail at davidg1@stanford.edu.