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The Promise and Pitfalls of the Real

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 August 2016

Extract

Audience members sit at tables and desks in an interactive classroom, an immersive performance space designed to evoke a K–12 classroom. Blackboards are covered with homework assignments and test reminders, posters with test-taking tips and motivational quotes such as “For success, attitude is as important as ability.” Collaboraction's production of Forgotten Future: The Education Project begins as an interracial, intergenerational ensemble of actors enters the space chanting and waving signs reading “Support our Schools: Don't Close Them” and “Save our Schools” in protest of Chicago's dysfunctional public school system. They wear red T-shirts, and several are clad in the real-life protest T-shirts worn during the school closure protests and the teachers' strike during the 2012–13 school year. The audience soon claps and chants along: “There's no power like the power of the people and the power of the people don't stop” (clap, clap). Adult actors playing parents and teachers give speeches in between the chants. The kids in the ensemble try to speak, but the adults run right over them. By the end of the rally, the kids are standing off in a corner of the space, forlorn and ignored, while the adults yell on their behalf without ever asking for their perspective.

Type
Essays: On the Theatre & Social Change
Copyright
Copyright © American Society for Theatre Research 2016 

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References

Endnotes

1. Collaboraction Theatre Company, www.collaboraction.org, accessed 5 May 2016.

2. “Vision,” Collaboraction, www.collaboraction.org/#!our-mission/c2mm, accessed 5 May 2016.

3. Moeller does not use this term, but it's the process she described.

4. Unless otherwise indicated, all quotes from Sarah Moeller are from an in-person interview conducted by Dani Snyder-Young in Chicago, IL, on 7 November 2014.

5. Televised interview by Jeffrey Brown of Karen Lewis, “Chicago Board of Education Plans to Shut Down Schools, Move 30,000 Students,” PBS NewsHour, 22 March 2013, www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/education-jan-june13-chicago_03-22/, accessed 7 June 2016.

6. Carol Martin, Theatre of the Real (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 10.

7. Meghan A. Burke, Racial Ambivalence in Diverse Communities: Whiteness and the Power of Color-Blind Ideologies (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2012), 95.

8. Sarah Moeller, phone interview with author, 2 March 2016.

9. Martin, 12.

10. Moeller phone interview, 2 March 2016.

11. Guinier, Lani, “Beyond Electocracy: Rethinking the Political Representative as Powerful Stranger,” Modern Law Review 71.1 (2008): 135 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 1.

12. Kerry Reid, “Review: Forgotten Future by Collaboraction,” Chicago Tribune, 29 September 2014, www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/theater/reviews/ct-forgotten-future-review-story.html, accessed 21 November 2015.

13. Ask me again in a few years.