Having spent several weeks "getting into" the topic with the boys, I began
the process of writing the play with three brainstorming sessions--one
in each class. I explained to the boys that we would be writing a
play about the Oregon Trail, and I explained the idea of the "Old Timer"
who would tie together a number of "episodes" from the Trail.
Unlike the teachers, the students seemed to immediately understand the
function of this character, although it was later necessary to help them
avoid relying too much on his narration. I asked the students to
help me brainstorm ideas for interesting or important events or stopping
places on the trail. These could be specific historical events or
more generalized problems or episodes. (The book the teachers were
using for their social studies unit was organized geographically, taking
each subsequent important stop on the trail as a chapter.) As we
brainstormed, and put our ideas on the board, we discussed which ones would
be most interesting dramatically, which would be difficult or impossible
to stage effectively, etc. I include the results of our three brainstorming
sessions (one for each class) at the end of this article. The most
popular ideas were an "Indian Attack" (suggested by all three groups),
various deaths by misadventure, such as being crushed by a runaway wagon
on a steep hill, and an attack ON Indians. This focus on violence
and death dismayed me, but it didn't really surprise me. As I have
said, teaching in an all-boy school has been a learning experience.
However, I made it clear to them that I would be doing the selecting, and
that they could probably forget about staging a bloody battle. I
pointed out that, in addition to the extreme difficulty of staging such
an encounter convincingly, our audience--the whole student body--would
include Jr. Kindergarten boys who would probably be frightened. They
saw the justice in this, but continued to agitate for topics that skirted
the edges of violence. After we decided, in discussion, that the
most interesting dramas were the ones with intellectual conflict--two characters
with opposing points of view, difficult decisions to make, etc.--I started
hearing suggestions about deciding whether to attack the Indians, etc.
A word about a word: Throughout the early sessions with the boys,
everyone consistently used the word "Indian"--except me. I never
made a big deal about it, but when someone would make a suggestion that
included the word "Indian," I wrote down "Native American." Later,
when we were scripting the play, we talked about it, and decided not to
use the word "Indian" in our stage directions, and to substitute "Native
American." However, it seemed historically accurate to have the characters
in the play say "Indian," since they certainly would not have said "Native
American" in 1845. Later I learned that the fourth-grade teachers
had made a policy of never saying "Native American." One of the teachers
had native friends who strongly objected to "Native American" on the grounds
that "American" was a word they hadn't asked for and didn't want.
Furthermore, in a sense the native people the Oregon pioneers encountered
were not "Americans" since their land was at that time not part of "America."
(That of course depends on one's understanding of the word "American,"
but it's a valid point. Actually, most of the native folk I know
prefer the word "Indian.") The teachers had been saying "native people."
By the time I learned this we were well along on the project, and I had
considerably bigger problems than that one word, as will become clear,
but I thought it well to get the point squared away here. What we
eventually settled on was the word "Indian" in all dialogue, and the expression
"native people" in stage directions. (Our school needs to get its
act together on this issue. Every year the second-graders recite
an essay that includes the line, "Now, of course, we prefer to be called
'Native Americans'"--and then go on to use the word "Indian" almost exclusively
for the rest of their "Pow Wow." Some consistency seems in order.)
Once all three classes had generated a list of ideas, I selected three
from each list. I made my choices with the whole play in mind, so
that we would have nine "episodes" that were well balanced and dramatic.
I divided each class into three teams and assigned each team an "episode."
(Even though I chose the nine topics with the whole show in mind, I made
sure to assign each class only topics that their group had suggested.)
There was some disappointment expressed by those whose ideas had not been
chosen, and by those who wanted to see a lot more violence than I was willing
to allow, but we discussed the concept of editors, and the fact that I,
as editor, had to make each class's three scenes fit into the whole play
in a balanced way, and the students seemed to understand. As it turned
out it was a good thing we had that discussion early, because it became
necessary for me to do quite a bit of "editing." The nine episodes
were assigned to the three classes with no concern for their chronological
or narrative order in the final story. My idea was that after we
had nine finished scenes, I would put them into a logical order and glue
them together with lines for the "Old Timer." The boys understood
this instinctively, even though, as I was to learn, their teachers didn't
at first. I have never figured out why the concept was so much easier
for the children than for the adults, but I suspect it must be related
in some way to popular entertainment forms. The nine "episodes" originally
selected were as follows (in random order):
A family makes the difficult decision to move to Oregon.
A group arrives in Oregon and has to decide whether to move on to California.
A group arrives at Chimney Rock, and a woman falls to her death trying
to carve her name high up on the rock's surface.
A group of native people hold a meeting to decide whether to attack a group
of pioneers.
A group discovers the incredibly bad food and snake-infested conditions
at Fort Laramie.
A group must decide whether to attack the native people or try to trade
with them.
A group arrives at Fort Bridger and finds it empty--all of the soldiers
have gone hunting.
A relief party rescues a family whose wagon has been trapped in an early
snow.
A group at the Dalles must decide whether to raft down the Columbia River
or trek around Mount Hood.
All of the above were suggested by the students, and selected by me as
representing a variety of outlooks and different kinds of conflicts.
I was especially pleased, in light of the number of people who wanted scenes
about killing Indians, by the student who suggested looking at the issue
from the natives' point of view. The nine episodes we ended up with
were not quite the same nine we started with, and the minor crisis that
caused most of the changes was extremely humbling to me. Still, I
look on it primarily as a learning experience.
In class, once each team had been assigned a topic, I put them to work
writing their scenes. I told them to concentrate on dialogue, rather
than spectacle, and to be clear about how the scenes would end. In
a few cases, notably the two involving groups deciding whether or not to
start a battle, I dictated how they must end--they must decide in favor
of peace. I knew that might be dishonest of me--although it turned
out to be extremely fortunate--but I knew too well what would happen if
I once let the boys loose on a battle scene. One could stage a battle
with a whole class of fourth-graders together under supervision, but not
in one group who is competing with two others for a single teacher's attention.
For the most part, each boy invented his own character's dialogue, and
a "scribe" took it down. I moved around the classroom, side-coaching,
settling disputes, and encouraging each team's "scribe" to get words down
on paper. I reminded the class again and again that we were writing
a "first draft" and that it was more important to get the words out there
than to be sure they were perfect, but even a lot of professional playwrights
have trouble with that concept, and it was difficult to keep them from
getting bogged down in small details. By the end of one period, most
of the groups had at least a skeleton of a plot, and by the end of two
they all did. The scenes they had written were pretty simple--dialogue
is not easy to write--and had a lot of rather silly jokes in them.
(In the Fort Laramie scene, for instance, two men fainted from the smell
of the food.) Despite my rules and my careful selection of material,
we got more death than I had bargained for, as the group with the scene
arriving in Oregon decided to kill one of their number with rabies.
Still, I was fairly pleased with the results of the first-draft writing.
I thought I had nine scenes with good, clear dramatic action and clearly
differentiated characters, and as a drama teacher, that's what I was looking
for. All of which made the classroom teachers' reaction to the first
drafts that much more upsetting.
It is clear to me now that I should have kept in closer contact with the
classroom teachers throughout the project. At the initial meeting,
two of them had made noises that suggested they intended to attend some
or all of the drama classes, but you know how that goes--they got busy
with other concerns. There were times during all the fuss when I
believed unquestionably that it was not my fault, and that THEY should
have kept track better of what I was doing, but the truth is that everyone
involved failed to stay as well-informed as they should have, and failed
to communicate as regularly as necessary. Whatever the reason, the
classroom teachers' first hint of what was actually going on in the writing
process was the first drafts, which I typed in script format and handed
out to the boys. About a day after one class had seen their drafts,
I was at lunch when one of the classroom teachers came to me and said,
"I've been looking over this play, and I can't have my students perform
this." I was shocked, and I admit, panicked, because there wasn't
really time to start over, and I had no idea what was wrong. As I
talked more with her, trying to save my emotions for later, it emerged
that she had two basic problems with the script. First, it was too
short, and therefore "not at a fourth-grade level." She felt that
fourth grade should be capable of much more detailed writing and that these
very simple scenes were unacceptable. Especially, she wanted many,
many more facts about the Oregon Trail to be revealed by the writing.
I could have reminded her that what she held was only a first draft, and
that we intended to fill it out. I could (and probably should) also
have pointed out to her that writing dialogue is very different from writing
narrative prose, and that in fact even the first draft was not bad for
45 minutes work from fourth-graders. (Later, when another teacher
gave me some samples of the boys' writing in class "to see what they're
really capable of," I didn't find it to be much more sophisticated than
their output in my class, but until you've tried, as I have, to write dialogue
that contains exposition, you don't know how difficult it really is.)
But I didn't bother with any of that at the time because her second problem
was much more serious, at least to me. She felt that the scenes were
historically inaccurate. It happened that her class's scenes included
the one in which the pioneers contemplated attacking the Indians.
Since all three of the classes had independently generated this suggestion,
it never occurred to me to doubt its historical accuracy, but the teacher
assured me that not only did they never learn about even one instance of
pioneers attacking natives or natives attacking pioneers, the teachers
had stressed over and over again that such things NEVER HAPPENED.
(Not quite true of course, but that's beside the point.) The scenes
her class had written, she said, proved either that they hadn't taken the
assignment seriously at all, or that they had learned nothing about the
Oregon Trail. She also felt that some of the humor in the scenes
showed a lack of respect. (In addition, the scenes, she felt, suggested
that the trail was only three episodes long and her students all knew better
than that. That was of course only because I hadn't made the overall
plan clear, and when she understood that all nine scenes would eventually
be put in logical order and tied together using the character of the "Old-Timer"
that concern was satisfied.) That teacher showed the draft to the
other teachers, whose reaction was similar to hers.
I didn't know what to do. I felt ashamed that I had let the boys
pull the wool over my eyes about "Indian attacks." I was hurt, too,
that they had lied to me about the historical accuracy of their suggestions.
Clearly I had allowed the "fun" aspects of drama class to overwhelm its
position as a serious course. I knew I had learned a painful lesson
about giving an inch and yielding a mile, and I have applied that lesson
to my subsequent teaching with considerable success. But I also had
an immediate problem. How was I--and it certainly felt as if I'd
have to do it myself--going to rescue the play? I was bitter--why
had they waited until now to have a problem with it?--but that was unreasonable
because if they had shown little interest in the goings on in my classroom,
neither had I made any concerted effort to involve them. It still
strikes me as odd that none of the boys mentioned anything in social studies
class during the weeks of early writing that alerted anyone to the historical
discrepancies, but apparently they didn't. In the future, I will
also be sure to do my own checks on the history, but I was approaching
the project with the idea that the boys knew their information, and besides,
given the particular slant the teachers had taken, I'm not sure such research
would have helped in this case. At any rate, I knew I had to get
over my emotional reaction to the problem and apply myself to solving it.
Each class was in a slightly different stage of the process when the problem
first came to my attention, but two of the classes had time for one more
writing session at the scheduled drama class time. Their classroom
teachers
had, as one of them put it, "read 'em the riot act" by the next time I
saw the students, so they were already prepared to work hard, and I spent
only a little time expressing my disappointment and hurt over their taking
advantage. (The truth was that I felt it was mostly my fault, but
as a teacher I thought it important not to "let them get away with it.")
I explained to the boys exactly what their teachers (including me) were
concerned about, and made it clear that they were expected to supply details
and stick to the version of history they had learned in class, even though
their own version was "more fun." Their teachers had once again made
noises about coming to class to help me watch over the writers--there are
always things that slip through the cracks when one is trying to side-coach
three groups at once--but at this point they didn't. By the end of
that second class, the remaining two classes had produced scenes that were
better than the first class's first drafts, but still had many of the same
problems. And at this point we were drawing perilously near to the
time when we would have to perform our play. I made it clear to the
boys that I would be doing some "editing" over the weekend, and that we
would probably be doing some comprehensive re-writing next week, possibly
not only during drama class time. I also made it clear to the classroom
teachers that it would be all right with me if they worked on re-writes
without me, and also that I would be glad to come into their classrooms
to work at any time when I was free.
Over the weekend I re-typed all the scenes (still in random order).
I then went over them carefully for historical accuracy, level of detail,
and dramatic and narrative quality. With a few exceptions I'll get
to in a moment, I did not make significant changes in the scripts, but
wherever I found a questionable passage, or a place where I thought more
detail was needed or I thought the dialogue or plot was unclear, I inserted
questions, in red. (I did this all on the computer because I do virtually
all of my written work that way, but it would have worked just as well
by hand.) The questions were in smaller type and right-justified
so that they didn't interfere with the reading flow of the scenes.
These questions ranged from simple questions of fact ("what would the pioneers
really have eaten at Fort Bridger?" "Could a person really have recovered
that fast from Cholera?") to stylistic issues ("Doesn't it seem odd that
these characters all speak in unison?" "Why does he agree so easily?
Doesn't anyone object?") and also included simple notes like "more detail
here." I presented these annotated drafts to the classroom teachers
as soon as they were printed, and encouraged them to read over them and
add any other notes. (As it happened I had done a pretty good job
of anticipating their concerns.)
As I have said, for the most part I didn't make wholesale changes, rather
suggesting places where the students might make changes, but there were
exceptions. I re-wrote the scene in which the group debated attacking
the native people, changing as few lines as possible, so that it became
simply a debate about whether to try trading with them or just give them
a wide berth. I was able to do that without changing all that much,
because it was still permissible for some characters to fear the natives--just
not for them to propose killing them. I also rewrote the scene in
which native people debated about what to do about the destruction caused
by the pioneers, so that they also did not propose violence. (That
actually involved only one line change.) In the final version of
that scene they never do arrive at a conclusion, but it is followed by
the scene in which a group of native people stop a wagon train and demand
a toll. I excised a few mildly scatological jokes about buffalo chips,
although I left one in the Fort Bridger scene. Finally, I cut the
ending from the "shall we go on to California" scene, in which one of the
characters died of rabies. The teacher specifically asked me to do
that, but I probably would have anyway, because it made a truly bizarre
tag at the end of what turned out to be the closing scene in the play.
At first I was acutely uncomfortable making any changes at all on my own,
rather than having the boys make them, and I did it only because we were
fast running out of time. However, I have now concluded that it probably
improved the quality of the learning experience for the boys to have changes
and edits made in a variety of different ways. As I explained to
them in my "post mortem" discussions after the plays were finished, writers
in the real world often encounter editors whose cuts and changes may happen
for almost any conceivable reason, or even apparently for no reason at
all. (The "post mortem" discussions with the boys after the play
were an extremely successful activity in lots of ways.)
The process by which the next wave of edits was made varied from class
to class. One teacher--the one whose class had been least far along
when the crisis presented itself, and therefore the one whose first draft
was in the best condition to begin with--went over the scenes with his
class, and made some minor changes, when I was not present. (In the
final version of the play his class's scenes were noticeably the shortest
three, but did not feel less complete or less accurate.) In the other
two classes the classroom teacher moderated a discussion in which my questions
and hers were discussed, suggestions were made, and I frantically took
the changes down on my laptop computer. (Fortunately I type very
fast.) When we came to places where the main problem was simply lack
of detail, the students called out dozens of details and pieces of information
and I did my best to format them into dialogue. From a purely dramatic
point of view, the finished product ended up with too much detail in places--people
don't really talk that way--but the process of learning how to put expositional
material into dialogue, and the critical thinking required to come up with
the relevant details were more important. Usually as I was taking
down dialogue and expositional detail I didn't bother with which character
was which, simply labeling every character "someone," or, in a few instances
differentiating only between two or three classes of character rather than
between each individual--as, "Soldier," "Pioneer," "Native Guide."
Then afterwards I went through the new versions of the scenes and inserted
appropriate character names, being careful to make most parts about the
same size. Of course, by doing it this way I put my own stamp on
the plays, so it could not truly be said that the boys had written the
scenes "all by themselves," but that was all right. Ultimately one
of the strengths of the project, in my view, would be its intensely collaborative
nature. As I told the audience of students and parents before the
performance, the classroom teachers, teams of students, individual students
and I had worked together on this play in virtually every conceivably combination.
Since the theatre is inherently collaborative, I thought this was about
the most real experience I could have devised--though of course I didn't
really devise it.
In the course of these in-classroom editing sessions, a few of the plots
underwent further significant change. Because the teachers decided
characters in the play shouldn't die, the Chimney Rock scene was changed
so that the climber was merely injured, rather than killed. This
provided an opportunity to get in a lot of details about how difficult
it
would be to travel with a serious injury, and also incidentally removed
the necessity of finding out how a person would really be buried if they
died on the trail. In the Fort Bridger scene, the soldiers who had
originally been out hunting became fur trappers instead, for reasons of
historical accuracy. The one scene which contained a confrontation
between native people and pioneers was further changed so that the main
focus became the pioneers' need for help from the natives. All of
the scenes grew a lot longer and more detailed. By the time the re-writes
were completed to everyone's satisfaction, the day of the performance was
only a week away.
Of the playwriting, all that was left to do was to cement the nine scenes
together in a logical order as one coherent unit. It had always been
my intention to do this part myself, so I had left it for last in the confident
knowledge that I could do it on my head. As it happened it didn't
come out quite the way I had hoped it would, for two reasons. Right
from the first printed drafts I had included lines for the "Old Timer,"
but I had not really even tried to make them perfect, considered as transitional
lines. They were just there to hold the place until I came up with
the precise lines, which I couldn't really write until the order of the
scenes was decided. However, by the time the order of the scenes
was set (by me, with help from one of the classroom teachers) many of the
classes had memorized their scenes, and I couldn't make significant changes
without throwing them off. Moreover, the class that had edited their
scenes without me had discovered they had one more student than roles,
and had assigned the "Old Timer" lines to a student, so in those scenes
I couldn't change them at all. (I played the "Old Timer" in the other
six scenes.) As a result, the "Old Timer's" lines in the final version
of the play are more talky and less transitional than originally envisioned.
(Also, of course, there are now two "Old Timers" instead of just one, but
that actually worked well, because we ended up sort of chatting with each
other about the old days, which seemed more naturalistic than if we had
just addressed the audience, as I would probably have done had I been alone.)