Summer Theatre: Real-Life Learning in Real Community
11 06 2007In honor of the Tony awards last night, I hereby announce that Favorite Daughter and Young Son have been cast to spend our unschooling summer in melodic 18th century intrigue!
Young Son gets his head chopped off in Act 1, scene 3-4 but lives to sing another day as another character. He made this freestyle Lego scene yesterday, all the while singing at the top of his lungs, “Sing, swing, savor the sting, as she severs you, Madame GEE-oh-TEEN!”
FYI, I sent a link to this post to a worried Mom this morning. Her 8-year-old (if I remember right) DS was — horrors — pretending to chop off heads after seeing some movie or other. . . normal or is therapy needed. . . I hope she read this and then runs off to buy her kids lots and lots of literature. Even if that includes some scary stories.
Nance
LMAO!
Young Son is almost 12 (and still loves his stuffed animals and friends, and Santa Claus as a personage, etc) but his love of story is most deliciously gruesome and also classically themed. Pirates for instance — his current favorite break-into-spontaneous song is, “I am the Pirate King, hurrah, hurrah” from Pirates of Penzance.
One of the lines (in his very proper British accent of course) is “I sally forth to seek my prey” and then comes:
. . . “but many a king on a first-class throne,
if he wants to call his crown his own,
must manage somehow to get through,
more dirty work
than ever
*I* [drawn out note]
do!”
OTOH he stopped reading Bridge to Terabithia partway through when a major character died. He felt sad and sort of betrayed, didn’t want to continue that way. So we wound up not going to see the movie at all, even though it was Disney and had the Because of Winn Dixie girl in it. He said “there was absolutely no way they could’ve made it good after that.”
He refuses to read the rest of the Narnia Chronicles because Reepicheep (the noble Talking Mouse) dies in Voyage of the Dawn Treader. It broke his tender heart. Kids (healthy ones) are in my experience very keen on fair play, justice and the good guys being brave and triumphing over pain, darkness and evil. Young Son wants his sister and me to pre-read the last Harry Potter for him and just tell him whether Harry dies or not, because if so, his plan is to keep him alive and the story unfinished forever, by not reading the “end.”
So would he have liked the finale of the Sopranos? Dunno — we never encouraged him to watch it and he has no interest in it or any other realistic drama. His imagination is very imaginative and metaphorical, not cruel and gritty at ALL.
I should probably add that Favorite Daughter learned by age 10 to prescreen movies and tv shows for ME, warning me when to skip over anything that hurt or was the least bit mean to children or animals. (She teases me because I won’t watch movies with animals in peril, even animated Disney movies, in which they often are . . .it’s bad enough that Disney is always killing off the MOTHERS!
Oh — and look at the rich vocabulary, not just the history, of the Scarlet Pimpernel line above. “Savor” and “sever” both in one line, how can you love learning and not love kids who love that and think it’s natural to express ideas that way?
I should probably add that Favorite Daughter learned by age 10 to prescreen movies and tv shows for ME, warning me when to skip over anything that hurt or was the least bit mean to children or animals. (She teases me because I won’t watch movies with animals in peril, even animated Disney movies, in which they often are . . .it’s bad enough that Disney is always killing off the MOTHERS!
***
Sounds like my DH watching the news. Anything involving a child in trouble is immediately turned off. It just upsets the big strapping man too much.
Nance
Exactly! It’s like hearing a baby cry in a restaurant or mall. I can’t TAKE it! Not because I’m cross at the disturbance but because I can’t shut off my auto-response machinery (and obviously I can’t go interfere when the mom is right there handling it) and so it’s like being the passenger for a ride you didn’t intend to take but can’t get off without removing yourself completely from the scene . . .
Young Son did a lesser-known Stephen Sondheim musical in 2005, “Merrily We Roll Along,” as the only child in a pretty adult-themed story about regrets, loss, disillusionment, marital infidelity, betrayal of friendship and the emptiness of traditional success. He played a child of divorce who is literally pulled apart limb from limb in one scene in front of the courthouse, his parents pulling him in opposite directions. He had to yell out in anguish, “Dad, Da-a-a-d!” as he got pulled offstage bodily by his mother and her parents.
But all of this worked for him and his sunny disposition, I think because of an artistic device that happened to suit him. The whole story starts at the end and plays backward, as the characters get younger and happier. At the end everything is wonderful because they are just meeting each other and off to take the world by the tail. It’s very poignant for adults (I cried every time) but for him it was just perfect because the “ending” was happy. At the strike party, though, he solemnly informed the director and cast that he would be writing a new opening-end to send to Sondheim, in which the characters would resolve their midlife misery and wind up as happy at the end-beginning as they were at the beginning-end.
All in all, I consider the entire experience some of the best unschooling life lessons any of us could have learned together, positive and real and meaningful — but when you just say what the plot is or read the lines, you can’t possibly understand all that, it doesn’t translate. Like school. . .and no doubt many parents would say I was a bad mother for allowing it at his age and that he would surely be scarred by it.
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