Our Own Tree Jumpers
Posted by Emilio Robles on 2/16/2010
(Emilio has been a Teaching Artist at Steppenwolf for the last four years)
Since reading A Separate Peace by John Knowles during my sophomore year of high school under the recommendation of a good friend (PAM REYNOLDS - are you out there and listening?), I have always been moved by the strong images and the complex dynamics of friendship in the book. I attended an all-male undergraduate Alma Mater, so that’s why I can easily latch onto the personas of Gene, Finny, Leper, Brinker, Chet, Bobby and those events at Devon School that senior year with a certain mischievous scrutiny.
But what about my students at Harlan High School, Prosser Career Academy, MAS-LVLHS, or Young Women’s Leadership Academy, who are themselves just “at this teenage period of life,” as Finny says in the play? Will they connect to this story?
I am extremely proud to be part of SYA’s passionate team of about a dozen or so “admin-artist-edu-collaborators.” Together, in classrooms across the greater Chicago area, we prepare students for what they will see on stage, connect these events to their personal lives, and inspire reflection about the play itself and/or the ideas and thematic content.
Whenever the entire process begins - indeed no matter what the show - the thought of what to bring to the classroom as Steppenwolf’s “human face” and “Educational Ambassador,” in addition to the thought of what can be at stake in a typical 50-minute class period, can be rather intimidating for us. It can be risky. Inviting. Daunting. Much like the tree branch, which adorns many a book cover of A Separate Peace.
Had you passed by the third floor conference room of the Steppenwolf admin building anytime on Tuesday, January 19th or Friday the 22nd, when our SYA teacher training was happening, you might have thought that you were witnessing the inner-workings of some “secret society” not unlike the infamous “tree jumpers” from the book, under the careful guidance of Michael Rohd., Artistic Director of Sojourn Theater and Assistant Faculty at Northwestern University.
Our training is part planning time, part discovery and part exploration for the work the SYA team will be doing in the classroom. Our training is always a rigorous, thought-provoking inquiry of the production. We search for the themes and issues that will resonate with students.
“What’s coming up for you? Where do you think you guys want to go?” Michael asks us in his genuinely supportive tone (I ask myself, “Why he is staring at me directly?”).
Several thematic lines of exploration are thrown out by the group: the war as a backdrop for the events and how it compels some either to act or not to act. What it means to be brave or take a risk. People not really “knowing why” they are friends with others.
“I wonder - and I want to get the kids to ask themselves - if they even really are friends,” I say, not holding back.
For A Separate Peace, we craft images of significant moments between Gene and Finny. We improvise scenes about good friendship and situations that might “test” a friendship. Hours pass. We break down into smaller groups. Pedagogical tactics are brainstormed and modeled. Some things meet with enthusiastic approval, others never even make it to the chopping block. Passionate dialogues ensue, notes are fastidiously taken and exercises are perfected and paired down.
Somehow, at the end of the day, I am reminded of a passage from the original text: “This was the tree, and it seemed to me standing there to resemble those men, the giants of your childhood, whom you encounter years later and find they are not merely smaller in relation to your growth, but that they are absolutely smaller, shrunken by age… (for) the old giants have become pygmies while you were looking the other way.”
February 17th, 2010 at 3:02 pm
Good stuff, Emilio.
I remember reading A Separate Peace when I was a sophomore and just being struck by how homoerotic it was. I went to a conservative Christian school, and all my buddies made fun of the book, and it became standard practice to write “JOHN KNOWLES IS GAY” on the inside cover of all the books. Secretly I reeeeally liked the book, but could never admit it. I understood following Phineas to the ends of the earth. I got it, like wwwayyyyy down in my self I got it.
And I wish I could go back and tell all those silli repressed sophomores (myself included), “Yes, he is in love with him, and yes there is something extremely romantic about following your bros and extremely tragic in betraying them, or watching them fail.” I wonder what my class would have said. I know my students now would explode first and then get serious about it eventually. It’s interesting. I should really read this one again. . . . . . it scared the shit out of me when I was fourteen.
Keep up the good work, E.