Students will:

A. understand the structure of a play by viewing a
performance;

B. explore and understand possible sources for play
making;

C. make a play by improvising environments and
situations; and

D. identify different types of plays (e.g. comedy,
drama, musical theater, opera)

Acting focuses on developing, communicating, and sustaining characters.

Students will:

A. explore traits that distinguish various characters,

B. develop the skills of memory and sensory recall, and

C. imagine and enact characters in their relationships and environments.

Acting focuses on developing, communication, and sustaining characters.

Students will:

A. explore traits that distinguish various characters,

B. develop the skills of memory and sensory recall, and

C. imagine and enact characters in their relationships and environments.

Students will:

A. select, organize, and invent scenery and props for an environment;

B. use traditional and nontraditional types and sources of sound and lighting to communicate locale and mood for imagined environments; and

C. use costumes and makeup to communicate character and mood.

Students will:

A. define the meaning of the play,

B. make staging choices to convey meaning,

C. define and explore character relationships, and

D. define and explore narrative elements.

Students will:

A. collaborate to plan and organize space for an audience to experience informal presentations, and

B. promote an informal presentation.

Students will:

A. identify the characteristic elements of the various art
forms

B. select movement, music, or visual elements to enhance
the mood of a classroom dramatization; and

C. discuss the dramatic art forms of theater, film, and
television.

Students will:

A. explore the elements of dramatic presentations, and

B. share individual responses to dramatic presentations.

Students will:

A. recognize that the theater arts have a history;

B. explore characteristics of theater pieces which
identify themes belonging to particular cultures,
times, and places;

C. explore how cultures, times, and places influence
theater arts;

D. discover how communication (e.g., verbal,
nonverbal, written) is a part of daily life; and

E. examine theater arts careers and the roles of
drama professionals in society.

Students will:

A. recognize the structure of a play in a published script;

B. understand how play making is based on cultures,
times, and places;

C. make a play or write a play using characters,
environments, actions, and situations that create
tension and suspense; and

D. compare and contrast different types of plays.

Students will:

A. synthesize dialogue and action to discover, explain
and justify the motivations and actions of the character;

B. demonstrate various acting skills (e.g., memory and
sensory recall, concentration, and motivation) to
create believable characters; and

C. invent believable behavior based on diverse
interactions, ethical choices, and emotional responses
of characters described in a written script.

At William Henry Middle School, Linda Andres introduced a playwriting unit to her Advanced Composition and English (ACE program) students with a study of Paula Fox's book, Slave Dancer. The book was based on the true story of a white boy kidnapped in 1840 to play his fife to "dance the slaves" who had been snatched from their homelands. The powerful stories of the slaves in this book, as well as those in To Be a Slave by Julius Lester provided information for students to use in writing their own plays in which they would become one of those blacks, stripped of the security of their families, good health, culture, and sense of place. Mrs. Andres had read Lester's work to the students previously. To further supplement the literature selections used as historical background, students viewed segments of Roots and gathered more ideas for characters, settings, and dialogue.

In Sandra Ridgely's visual arts classes at William Henry, students made masks representing designs of various African cultures. For those students whose schedules did not include art, less elaborate box puppets were made in the ACE classroom. Playwriting was enhanced by the masks; students became the characters of the masks, and wrote plays in which they would use their masks.
Because these students had no previous playwriting experience, Mrs. Andres decided it would help students to build their scripts following the parts of a short story-introduction, rising action, climax, falling action, and ending. A review of the story line and the rules for dialogue followed. The Prentice-Hall Literature book provided guidelines for reading a play. Using knowledge of story-writing learned in earlier lessons and skills gained from reading and analyzing the play, The Phantom Tollboth, the students worked cooperatively to write and present their plays. The students' gestures and body language enhanced the characters created in the masks or puppets bringing their plays to life during performances. The masks and puppets not only added another unique, creative dimension to each character, they were excellent devices to camouflage embarrassment and self-consciousness that students often feel when performing in front of their peers.

This vignette addresses Theater Standards 1B, and 1D; 3C; 4A, 4C, and 4D; 7A; 8A, 8B, and 8C; visual Arts Standards 1A, 1C, 1D, and 1E; 3A and 3B; 4A, 4B and 4C; 5A; and 6B; and English Language Arts Standards 1,2,3 and 4

Learning activities based on the text of A Midsummer Night's Dream provide opportunities for students to compare and contrast the dimensions of characters and to demonstrate acting skills by creating and sustaining believable characters. Before students at this age level begin to act, interpret, or understand Shakespeare's Elizabethan words, they can explore characters and their relationships through improvisation.

Students are most comfortable if their beginning improvisations are related to a world they know or have seen. The play is set in a world of rustics or mechanicals, guild members, and laborers-a bellows mender, a tinker, a joiner, a weaver (Flute, Snug, Bottom, Peter Quince). The world of A Midsummer Night's Dream can easily be translated into a modern day environment of "blue collar workers." It should be made clear to students that the intent of the activity is not to promote a stereotyped labeling of a particular group, but to explore concepts in Shakespeare's play in a modern context. The characters could just as easily have been doctors, but that would not accurately correspond to the circumstances in the play.

In the invented context of a blue collar clown world, students learn to imagine and enact characters in their relationships and environments. Students must choose a blue collar activity in a work environment such as at a high rise construction site, on an assembly line at a factory, building a house, painting a room, or fixing the plumbing in a bathroom. They must then transform themselves; they are no longer serious workers, but clowns in a circus tent, trying to entertain an audience.

Within the exercise, they learn to exhibit concentration and contribute to the action of the dramatization based on personal and shared experience, heritage, and imagination. Without using speech, students must do the work activity that they have chosen, building in as much clowning as possible. For example, if the activity involved painting a room, one intent painter would paint over a fellow painter, another might step in a can of paint, another could drop a can of paint on his own head, etc.. Students are encouraged to explore conflict, another building block of theater. For example, students must improvise what happens when two painters want to use the same brush or if a worker paints himself into a corner. Working in ensembles, students interact as created characters. Small groups of three to five students are given no more than ten minutes to plan their scenarios. Then the ensembles present their vignettes to the rest of the class, using variations of movement, gesture, and expression to create different characters.

Next, students add dialogue and specific characteristics such as sleepiness, allergies, chronic stupidity, or the lack of physical coordination. Such skills are very basic and physical but help build the confidence and trust of students for more complex tasks. The students not only enjoy practicing the basic skills involved in this activity; they usually like to clown. By translating the world of Midsummer Night's Dream into a modern day context, students are able to improvise clowning such as that used by Shakespeare and learn to work together to create and sustain characters in an imaginary blue collar clown world.

This vignette addresses Standards 2A, 2B, and 2C