The themes – After reading Act III

Back to Teaching the Play

See-think-wonder: Some of the themes an instructor may want to address in relation to Questa Sera are gender roles and the condition of women in the early 20th century, Italian society and the southern question, the relationship between fiction and reality. Depending on what they want to focus on, instructors can either guide the choice of the themes to discuss by selecting some passages to use for the following activity, or can ask students to come to class having chosen some passages they want to focus on. Students are instructed to discuss the passages in small groups according to the following sequence, and then report to the classroom:

  1. See: What do you see in the text? Discuss only what you notice and try not to interpret or analyze the text. Only point out the people, objects, and/or events that are in the text.
  2. Think: Now based on what you noticed in the text, how do you interpret what is going on? What do you think about the people or events in the text? Now, using evidence from the text, you can share their own thoughts and ideas.
  3. Wonder: What questions do you still have about the text? What questions are unanswered in the text? Does this text make you wonder about ideas or events in the larger world?[1]

Concept maps: An alternative or additional option to start the discussion is creating collaborative conceptual maps. Provide each student with a big piece of paper and ask them to write in the middle of the sheet either a quote from the play that they find particularly interesting or a big idea or question that they have derived from their reading. All the other students then respond in writing to the core concept on the sheet of paper: they can write additional quotes, questions, thoughts, elaborations, textual references, personal connections,… The pieces of paper can be hung on the wall or spread around the room, so that students can move in the space and contribute to all of the maps. The completed maps can be used as brainstorming for individual response papers or as launching points for group discussions.

Themed performances: In small groups, students choose a theme they want to focus on and a scene from the play where they see the theme emerge. They then have to try and perform the scene with the specific intent of conveying a message about the chosen theme, and present the performance to the class; the rest of the class can try to identify what the theme and the message are. The class then discusses the experience. The purpose of the exercise is to allow students to personally embody and experiment with the complications of the theatrical interpretation process, linking the discussion back to Illustratori, Attori e Traduttori and the issue of theatrical authorship.

“Tutto il teatro recita!”: Students are asked to reflect on the many components that constitute the theatrical experience. The prompt for group discussion is: “What does Pirandello’s quote mean? We have already worked on the human components of theatre (director, actors, audience); what additional components can you identify?” Students are then asked to select passages from the text that allow, even call for, explicit experimentation with the theatrical form, and to reflect on how they would play with these passages in a theatrical production. An actual production would be an excellent final project; a few ideas on the topic are presented in the next session.

[1] From the Handbook of The ArtsLiteracy Project at Brown University.

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by Anna Santucci (PhD Candidate, Brown University)