Teaching for Freedom

Just before our last performance of Oscar Wilde's "The Importance of Being Earnest," I gathered the cast in a circle, the way I had seen other directors do it. I gave a few notes, and then I gave the best advice I could think of: "Once you're on stage, you can do whatever you like. You can say whatever you like. No one can stop you." The kids knew their lines, the blocking, the set changes. We'd rehearsed and rehearsed, and this was the last performance. I'm not exactly sure what I was after, but I wanted the students to play the play, or at least to know that they could. For weeks, we had adhered to lots and lots of rules and drills and agreements, and now it was time to let all that go, if possible. In earlier performances, I had played with the play in order to make the students do it. Now I wanted it to be their turn.

In the first scene, Ernest has to look for his shoes. I didn't want him just to "act" like he was looking for his shoes, so I had the prop master put his shoes in a different location for each performance; he actually had to look for them. Under the sofa? Under the side table? Where?

Before Aunt Augusta arrives, Algernon has to eat all the cucumber sandwiches. For one performance, I had the students secretly prepare twice the normal number of sandwiches. We all got to watch Algie squirm to get them down--he ended up sneaking a few between the couch cushions for later.

The play started, line after line, just as rehearsed.

The butler appeared, unscripted. Without a word, in the background, he picked up Ernest's discarded bathrobe, put it on, poured himself a sherry from a bottle on a side table, and left the stage. No one in the audience knew that we had never planned nor rehearsed this whimsy. They were amused, we were beside ourselves. (For the record, the boy who broke the ice was--and is--about as taciturn as any high school boy can be, reserved and observant, but also a determined, solid character. It was no accident that he was the first to test this ice of improvisation, and it was no accident that his improvisation was silent.)

From that moment on, this last performance gathered steam. Not every actor dared to break the boundaries of the play as rehearsed--these were high school students. But many did, in character, and the play went on, richer than it had been, richer than we had imagined it.

Afterward, one of the dads--a real actor-director, not an amateur stepping in to fill a need, as I was--said, "...they were free." And he meant it. After hours and hours of rehearsal, lock-step performances in which they tried to "get it right," some of them dared--within the confines of the play--to improvise.

The risk, the giddiness, the creativity, the responsibility, all spoke to them more plainly and more boldly than any classroom lecture or discussion could about the real preparation for freedom, the responsibility of freedom, the possibility of freedom, and the reward of freedom.

Sometimes, the best things we teach, we teach unconsciously, inadvertently, and we only recognize them in hindsight.