By Richard Gambino
This winter, I saw a very unusual production of a play at the Bay Street Theatre. I went with a great deal of skepticism. I knew the play to be an extremely difficult one, and I had doubts about the people doing it being up to the job. Shakespeare’s The Tempest is one of the hardest plays I know to do or to understand. Not only because of his four-hundred-year-old English language, characteristic, of course, of all his work. But much more formidable, its plot and settings are very contorted. Most daunting of all, some of its concepts are mind-bending. The play raises basic questions about reality itself. For example, is it reality we’re watching, or “magic”?
Two of The Tempest’s most well known lines raise the very matter of how real is the life of humans’ “being” or existence itself. Toward the end of the play, one of its main characters compares us to “thin air” and says, “We are such stuff as /Dreams are made on; and our little life /Is rounded with a sleep.” “Sleep” before birth, “sleep” after death, with but “a dream” between them. And this play was to be done at Bay Street by children. Kids, ages four to 13. So I approached the production by the Hayground School not expecting too much.
I could not have been more wrong. One, the kids caught me up in the play’s dramas, and in its ideas. And, two, the experience brought me back specifically to my life-long preoccupation with matters of learning and individual development and meaning. In schools and beyond. At all ages.
One of the greatest books on the development of the human mind and spirit is Erik Erikson’s Childhood and Society (1950), in which he described eight stages of human growth from birth through old age. There is a challenge to personal growth at each stage, and he developed them with great clarity and wisdom. For example, in the ages between six and eleven, the challenge is to develop a sense of being able to do things in the world. Between the ages of twelve to eighteen, the challenge is to develop a sense of one’s identity. To quote Erikson, “There is in every child at every stage a new miracle of vigorous unfolding and a new responsibility for all [i.e., for parents and teachers].”
But how each stage’s challenge is met, I think, is all-important. It all depends on a kid’s experiences in addressing it. In the experiences lie the differences between failed education, adequate education, and education that is truly first-rate. In turn, this determines the quality of personal growth, and the kind of individual who develops. For example, my grade school experience in a Brooklyn public school in the late 1940s and early ’50s was adequate at best. I learned to read and write, to do arithmetic, and memorized some history, civic matters, and the names of some musical pieces. Anything less would have been an educational failure. But the experiences could have been much more than merely adequate, with much better development in me and my schoolmates.
I’m not off on a tangent — all this has to do with the questions of why have young kids immersed for a month in a production of The Tempest. Isn’t it way over their heads? What’s the gain?
“Educational experience” has become a cliché that is seldom examined. In the most basic sense, it means becoming familiar enough with something to use it. For example, being able to read and to do arithmetic, and to know who Abraham Lincoln was. And, sad to say, many experiences — at all stages of life from toddlerhood to old age — rest with the level of basic familiarity. But there are richer experiences. These transform individuals as entire persons, whose skills, thoughts, feelings, judgments, memories — in fact, an individual’s entire consciousness or “being” (as in “human being”) is integrated seamlessly into a dynamically moving organic whole with coherent, systemic internal integrity. This makes the “dream” that is life meaningful, as opposed to drifting through life or being knocked here and there by it, these latter types of experience all too common for kids in schools. Take a few moments in quiet to remember your own school days, and judge how much of each kind of experience was involved, the vital or the drifting. I’m reminded of Walt Whitman writing of his own school experience, that the best he remembered about it was he had a seat near a window and he could look through it as he daydreamed about being outside.
The educational experience of The Tempest for the children — all of the kids in the school participated actively — included both a month-long immersion in the culture and history of the time in which it was written, and its qualities transcending these which have made it a work of art for all times and places. The two performances at Bay Street were the culmination of all this well-integrated learning. Proof that the arts in education, done well, are very important — even in truly difficult economic times.
The kind of great educational experience I’ve described also makes life joyful — the kind of joy that comes from having well accomplished something well worth accomplishing. The great joy of fully living that made Schiller and Beethoven associate such joy with the place where reside those souls who are blessed (Freude … tochter aus Elysium).
It’s the joy I saw so greatly experienced in the Tempest, kids projecting their voices on stage, doing well their best to give words their great meanings, beauty and power, at home with the costumes, sets and props they made, and displaying and relishing the associations they formed between the play’s ideas, words and characters, and words with words, ideas with ideas. The children clearly showing their understanding of the play’s drama-struggles (between people, and between people and nature), and all this enriched by some of their school mates at the dark edges of the stage competently and excitingly playing more types of drums than I can name. And older kids cueing younger ones with regard to music as well as lines. Did the school children “get” all that is in The Tempest? I haven’t, and I’ve been thinking about some of the play’s ideas for fifty years.
The dramatic and educational experience I had that day at Bay Street was such that, to borrow a line from another of Shakespeare’s plays, I left the theatre “as one new-risen from a dream.”
RICHARD GAMBINO is a Professor Emeritus at Queens College, holds a PhD in philosophy from N.Y. U., and was, by appointment of Governor Mario Cuomo, for eight years a member of the New York Council For The Humanities.
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