ISTA/Scene March 07

instruments including a Duduk on eBay
and learned how to play them for the
show. Other music was provided by
CD’s (there is a lot of Music of the
Middle East available on World Music
CD’s.) Plenty of opportunities for group
dances at weddings and celebrations
and at the end.
Mark Mouck – American School of
Warsaw, Poland
Using David Mamet’s THREE USES
OF THE KNIFE to explore dramatic
structure
After playing theater games for the first
few days of a school year, I have each
of my IB I students lead the ensemble
through a game. Afterwards, they
write about it in their journals in terms
of taking leadership versus playing a
supporting role in the ensemble. This
year one of my students introduced
me to a physical variation of the
telephone game, which I have since
used as a warm up. The idea is that
one student performs an action for the
next student in line, who then repeats
it on down the line with oftenhumorous
results at the end. I have
found that the initiator of the
movement generally wants to tell a
story in mime: a freshmen being
stuffed into a locker; burying a
treasure-box; a frog trying to jump over
a log. By the time the movement gets
to the last person, the story has been
lost. The last person usually flails
about for five seconds and
Calderdale HS
Calderdale HS
16 | Scene | 2006-7 March Issue 3
then throws their arms up in confusion.
Then fingers are pointed at someone,
usually early in the line, for losing the
story. They want to turn the
destruction of the story into a story,
too, the plot of which is the loss of the
plot. Even in the little games we play,
we need to make up stories.
When devising longer stories with my
students, I emphasize making the story
meaningful to their audience. To explore
the creation of meaning, we explore
dramatic structure. In their sophomore
year, we spend a day looking at the
various incarnations of the hero myth.
The discussion springs from Joseph
Campbell’s The Power of Myth and The
Hero with a Thousand Faces. I warn
them that this discussion may ruin their
movie-going experience as we apply the
structure presented in these books to
Hollywood films. The analysis of
structure generally helps their stories,
but I wanted to go deeper into dramatic
structure with my IB students. After
reading that IB wants students to
engage directly with the writings of
theater practitioners, I bought a number
of ‘primary texts’. David Mamet’s
collection of essays, Three Uses of the
Knife, was among them.
The first line of the first essay is, “It’s in
our nature to dramatize.” That is, we
want to find meaning in everything that
happens to us (and it happens to us.)
Mamet provides a couple of examples
of finding meaning in everyday
experiences. “Great. It’s raining. Just
when I’m blue. Isn’t that just like
life” In another example Mamet goes
on for two pages describing the
perfect ball game. “Do we wish for
our team to take the field and thrash
the opposition from the First
Moment... No. We wish for a closely
fought match that contains many
satisfying reversals.” Ultimately it is just
a sphere (of sorts) moving back and
forth across a field. Ultimately it is just
water condensing in the atmosphere
above us. Ultimately it is just a
movement we are asked to pass down
the line. Just as we find meaning in
phenomena, we find satisfaction in
creating highs and lows in life, what
Mamet summarizes as the “Yes! No!
but Wait!” structure of drama. He
explains, “It is difficult, finally, not to
see our lives as a play with ourselves
the hero.”
When I first gave the third essay in
Mamet’s book to my IB 1 students last
year in preparation for a Shakespeareinspired
devised theater competition, I
thought I was asking them to explore
tragedy. A naturally comedic group, I
wanted to challenge them to
understand the nature and purpose (to
steal Mamet’s phrase) of tragedy. But
as they worked the piece over three
weeks, they realized that comic relief
was necessary for the rhythm and
tempo of the play. As they fitted the
play with the ups and downs they
thought necessary, they realized, and I,
that they weren’t studying just tragedy,
only one of the masks, they were
studying the nature of drama.
The story they created was fun... for a
tragedy. In the end, they decided it
was about what would happen
if Hamlet and Lady Macbeth, unmarried
in their story, were to meet and fall in
love. Somebody is going to cry “Out,
damned spot!” (Hamlet) and somebody
is going to get murdered (Lady
Macbeth.) Story spoiler: Hamlet kills
himself, too. But the beginning of the
process to create the story came from
the title of Mamet’s collection of essays.
In the final essay he quotes the blues
singer Leadbelly, “You take a knife, you
use it to cut the bread, so you’ll have
strength to work; you use it to shave,
so you’ll look nice for you lover; on
discovering her with another, you use it
to cut out her lying heart.” At the
beginning of the process, before they
looked to Shakespeare for inspiration,
before they considered the rhythm of
highs and lows in the play, I asked
them to use an object as a symbol or
image that would, as Mamet suggests,
“subtly change its purpose through the
course of the play.” Like the knife, the
symbol or image should not physically
change, but our perception of it should.
Mamet says, “The tragedy of murder is
affecting as the irony of the recurrent
knife is affecting. The appearance of
the knife is the attempt of the orderly
affronted mind to confront the
awesome.” Like the rain or ball
described above, the knife is neither
good nor evil. Thinking has made it
both. He summarizes the effect of
purposeful dramatic structure here:
In great drama we see this
lesson [the worthlessness of
reason] learned by the hero.
More important, we undergo the
lesson ourselves, as we have
our expectations raised only to
be dashed, as we find that we