Ariel's Way and Quaker Education

The Friends Council on Education (FCE) is an association of Quaker schools and educators, embracing more than 100 schools and colleges in the US and abroad. Among its many activities, FCE organizes an annual fall gathering for heads of Friends schools (pre-K through high school). Drew Smith, Executive Director of FCE, invited me to share the story of Ariel’s Way at this year’s fall gathering, which was held at Pendle Hill, the Quaker retreat center near Philadelphia. I was delighted and honored to be asked to speak, and was especially pleased that Jessica Harris could join me in presenting, “What Love Did: The Ariel’s Way Musical at Carolina Friends School.”

Speaking at the heads of schools conference

Heads of 48 schools attended the conference and many said how moved they were to learn about the process that gave rise to the two productions of Ariel’s Way that Carolina Friends School has put up—the 2005 high school production and the 2010 alumni/professional production. It was particularly special to reconnect with colleagues Mike Hanas (who introduced me) and John Baird. Both educators are former heads of Carolina Friends, now leading San Francisco Friends School and Westtown School, respectively.

Jessica Harris as Ariel's Way dancer/choreographer

Jessica and I organized our remarks under five broad headings. I addressed the first three topics: how AW developed and connected curriculum, how AW widened and deepened community, and how AW presented and expressed the school’s mission and values. Photos, stories, and short videos brought this part of the presentation to life.

Then Jessica shared how AW summoned and spotlighted the individual gifts of the cast and crew. She read a statement written for the occasion by actor Lucius Robinson, who played Victor in the alumni production. In part Lucius said, “My experience with this show was defined by collaboration, trust, and community . . . I learned at Carolina Friends School that we are at our best when we . . . strike each other like lightning and hold one another close during the thunder.”

Lucius Robinson as Victor

Jessica also talked about how working as the Ariel’s Way choreographer opened up new professional opportunities for her in New York City. She further reflected on the confidence and the sense of creative collaboration she gained from her years at a Friends school—and how that background led not only to her becoming a founding member of Shen Wei Dance Arts but also to her establishing Decision Harmony, a company that uses movement to help professional organizations optimize their decision-making process.

In conclusion, I shared how writing Ariel’s Way helped me resolve the grief and anger I grappled with after a campus tragedy. Ariel’s Way shows how “art and imagination can transform anger, and story and song can transform sorrow” from crippling emotions to forces for creative transformation. Indeed, “this is precisely what theatre, at its best, aims to do.”

L-R: Mike Hanas, Jessica Harris, Jim Henderson, John Baird

“Art’s alchemy made something beautiful of the saddest day, and years, of my life and of my school’s history.” At the same time, Ariel’s Way “offers a distinctive way to appreciate, express, and share the vision of a world transformed by the power of love.”

Heads of eight or ten school heads took production materials to share with their theatre departments. Mike, John, Jessica, Drew Smith and I are hopeful that future productions of Ariel’s Way will be forthcoming at other Friends schools.

The Tradition that Includes "Ariel's Way"

Three decades of teaching the Shakespeare canon to young adults has given me a chance to revisit major works many times, and a lifetime of theatre going has let me see most of Shakespeare’s dramas on stage. In years past I’ve enjoyed reading the scholarship of Frank Kermode, Stephen Greenblatt, and Marjorie Garber. Chantal Zabus’ Tempests After Shakespeare (Palgrave, 2002) was especially helpful as the concept of Ariel’s Way began to take shape. Most recently I’ve devoted dozens of well-spent hours to James Shapiro’s A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare, Germaine Greer’s Shakespeare’s Wife, and Charles Nicholls’ The Lodger Shakespeare. I recommend all of these books, especially Nicholls’ eminently readable “history mystery.”

As the creator of Ariel’s Way (a musical adaptation of The Tempest), more important and useful to me than all of the fine studies I just mentioned is Irene Dash’s masterful work, Shakespeare and the American Musical (Indiana University Press, 2010). The germ for Ariel’s Way was planted as I worked one winter with middle school students on a production of The Tempest, and the following spring with high school students on West Side Story. Was there a musical version of The Tempest? I wondered. I found several operatic versions, and incidental music by Mendelssohn, Arthur Sullivan, Sibelius and others. But, with the possible exception of the “juke-box musical,” Return to the Forbidden Planet, I found no Tempest musicals, and so I set about creating one. In the process I investigated the same five musicals that Ms. Dash discusses so well: Boys from Syracuse (The Comedy of Errors), Kiss Me, Kate (The Taming of the Shrew), West Side Story (Romeo and Juliet), Your Own Thing (Twelfth Night), and Two Gentlemen of Verona.

Ms. Dash carefully and engagingly charts the development of a tradition of American reprisals of Shakespeare plays during the twentieth century. She brilliantly uses primary sources (such as Leonard Bernstein’s annotated copy of Romeo and Juliet, and letters written by Bella Spewack and Cole Porter about their Kiss Me, Kate collaboration) to show how American writers, composers, choreographers, scenic designers, and producers brought their own creativity and social circumstances to bear upon the proven power of Shakespeare’s texts. An inveterate adaptor himself, Shakespeare thrived on re-telling familiar tales to suit his own talents, tastes and times. His twentieth-century American admirers did him exactly the same service, and Irene Dash shows us how, and sometimes even why.

Shakespeare loved spectacle and music, and his collaborations with lutenists Thomas Morley, Robert Johnson, and other leading composers of his day, are well documented. The Tempest, scholars now believe, was likely written to be performed with a score, and its composition parallels the birth of opera in Italy. Had he lived in our time, would Shakespeare have worked on Broadway or in the West End? No doubt he would have sought the widest possible audience for his work, and the most talented collaborators. Wouldn’t that search have taken him to Broadway?

Such speculation is much less interesting, to me, than the sort of careful, empirical analysis that Ms. Dash conducts in the course of her study. She knows the Shakespeare “originals” and their musical adaptations equally well, and as she moves back and forth, between and among them, brilliant social and aesthetic insights emerge from her analysis as petals unfold from flowers. Her range and depth as a scholar are as impressive as her prose is delightful to read.

Shakespeare and the American Musical defines a living tradition in twentieth-century theater. Ariel’s Way finds its center of gravity just there (it is set in the 1970s), even as it continues that tradition into the twenty-first century. Grateful for the intelligence and imagination that Irene Dash focused on her task, I hope that my own creative efforts might swell the sails of that tradition, propelling it in the direction of a brave, newer world.

The Artistic Value of "Ariel's Way"

"Ariel's way": An Educational Experience for an Entire School

Forgiveness

In a previous blog post, I speculated that when Shakespeare wrote The Tempest (for the marriage of King James’s daughter to a German prince) the Bard might have been subtly suggesting to his arrogant, self-righteous and sadistic monarch (and patron) that forgiveness and love offer a more promising path to salvation than violent persecution of evil (in the form of witches or Roman Catholics).

Vengeful Victor (Prospero) and unimpressed Ariel

Nobody has dramatized, better than Shakespeare, the unfortunate consequences of unbridled vengeance. The Tempest starts out as such a revenge tragedy, but the arc of the action bends comic and romantic as Prospero comes to behave in a wiser way and ultimately “drowns” the books that guided his quest for retribution.

People of the twenty-first century have just as much to learn about forgiveness as a seventeenth-century monarch did. We have better tools to work with, though.

An impressive body of research and writing is available today on the subject of “forgiveness.” Institutes at Stanford (Fred Luskin) and at Madison (Bob Enright) have made strong claims for the health benefits of forgiveness and have disseminated methods for applying forgiveness principles. Psychiatrists such as Ned (Edward M.) Hallowell in Cambridge and psychologists such as Jim Dincalci in Chapel Hill have articulated skillful, therapeutic approaches. Religious authors—Jewish (Solomon Schimmel and Charles Klein), Buddhist (Pema Chodron and Jack Kornfield) and Christian (Everett Worthington and Bil and Cher Holton)—have discussed forgiveness in practical and progressive terms.

Victor honors the love between Miranda and Freddy (Ferdinand).

The evidence is clear that learning to “flatten the hook” of resentment and hostility can work miracles in human hearts and minds. If the barbs are extracted, we can be free at last.

Ariel’s Way is musical theater. It is a comedy. It's aim is to entertain people of all ages. It is also a play that illustrates why forgiveness matters, and how it can work its magic in a life.

When you walk away from seeing this play, you’ll not only be humming memorable tunes and recalling great performances. You’ll also be challenged (and, hopefully, inspired) to make your life freer and more fulfilling: by flattening hooks that bind you to others in dysfunctional and unholy ways—just as Victor learns to do, with Ariel’s help, in Act Two.

Why "The Tempest"?

Introducing the professional premiere of Ariel's Way (2010)

As a teacher of Shakespeare for more than thirty years, I’ve had the pleasure of studying and discussing dozens of his plays, many of them multiple times. Among the Bard’s greatest works, The Tempest appealed to me for different reasons at different times in my life.

Playing at my ninth grade prom
(1964)

Before I first read Julius Caesar and Macbeth as a ninth grader (and gleaned a suspicion of unbridled ambition as a worthy motive for living), I was already a musician playing ‘50s and ‘60s pop music at teen house parties and high school dances. When I first read The Tempest a few years later, at Ridgewood High School in New Jersey, it appealed to me primarily for its music. I was intrigued to learn that The Tempest is the most musical of all Shakespeare’s plays. Following up on that fact, I discovered that Pete Seeger wrote a setting of the Bard’s “Full Fathom Five” lyrics—in 5/4 time, no less. I used to perform that song, and smiled watching people try to dance to it. It didn’t groove quite like “I Saw Her Standing There”!

My next encounter with The Tempest came in college. I led a busy extra-curricular life as an undergraduate, and at this time The Tempest initially appealed to me as one of Shakespeare’s shortest works. “Why read more than I have to?” I asked myself as I ran my finger down the shelf of his collected plays in the Gettysburg College library, searching for one to research independently. It wasn’t quite as short as The Comedy of Errors, but it seemed to have a deeper bottom—plus I had already read it! So I chose The Tempest for a seminar presentation.

This time through, Prospero as a scholar with a vengeance—who perversely “drowns” his books in the end—spoke clearly to my condition. I was emerging as a campus activist who urged others to place politics before scholarship (or, at least, to examine the ends of scholarship in a political context). Plotting the downfall of evil, and book drowning, held great appeal for me, in that epoch!

Playing at an anti-nuclear rally (1979)

Furthermore, although I always detested Prospero’s enslavement of Caliban, Shakespeare’s use of magic and wonder in The Tempest also struck a chord for me now. I was also re-reading The Great Gatsby in another college class, and I recall being stirred by the sense of wonder in confronting the New World’s possibilities—a theme in both texts.

Ten years later, as a Ph.D. student in Religion and Culture at Duke University, I retraced this theme in greater depth. I came to grips with The Tempest again, this time as a commentary on colonialism. I learned that Shakespeare himself had been an investor in an all-fated voyage of discovery and “plantation.” He was interested in both the economic and the imaginative potential of the New World—my world.

As I delved further into the history of the play, I learned that The Tempest had been written late in Shakespeare’s career and that it had its inception in connection with festivities surrounding the marriage of King James’s eldest daughter. James I (the king who also commissioned the best known English translation of the Bible) was a patron of Shakespeare’s acting troupe, but he was known to the Bard (and everybody else in England?) as a notorious persecutor of witches—indeed, as a masochist who enjoyed watching the tortured confessions of accused heretics. In the way he structured his Tempest materials, was Shakespeare trying to show his liege a better set of religious principles and practices to live by? I, for one, came to think so.

Pursuing commentaries and interpretations (as graduate students are wont to do in defense of their pet critical notions), I noticed that while The Tempest begins as a revenge tragedy, it ends with reconciliation. No dead bodies litter its stage as the curtain rings down. Marriage is in the air as the play ends. Love triumphs. As The Tempest winds down, comedy is wrought from the stuff of tragedy. I was never satisfied, however, with the most common interpretation given for Prospero’s change of heart; i.e., that it is more “seemly” for a king to pardon than to exact revenge. Shakespeare had more to say than that—or would have had, I like to think, if the leading member of his target audience had not been a degraded, sadistic bastard! "Seemliness" was as far as poor King James could get along the path to wisdom.

Victor (Prospero) and Carib (Caliban) reconcile; Ariel, Sebastian and Toni (Antonio) look on. 

More recently, as I watched the cell-phone video of Saddam Hussein’s execution during Ramadan, I wondered again why interpreters of The Tempest have not focused more sophisticated attention on the forgiveness theme. Certainly President Bush would not have been moved by an argument for the “seemliness” of forgiveness. A more compelling case needed to be made for forgiveness, at least in our time. I came to believe that The Tempest provides an excellent foundation for supporting such an argument.

Reviewing sad and tragic circumstances in my own life—and in the lives of my loved ones—led me to value, greatly, the power of forgiveness. Medical doctors and psychologists (such as Edward Hallowell and Gerald Jampolsky), spiritual writers (such as Jack Kornfield), and black journalists (such as Ellis Cose and Patricia Raybon) all have argued, convincingly, for the central importance of forgiveness as a psychological, religious, and political act. My life and teaching has washed me up, again and again, on the shores of Shakespeare’s “New World” text. As I continue examining contemporary American life with critical eyes, I still find forgiveness to be a topic worthy of not just exploration but even devotion.

Thus, understanding the life-affirming process of forgiveness became a central concern of my most recent Tempest research. And dramatizing the power of forgiveness in a compelling way emerged as a major theme of Ariel’s Way.

A Musical for All Generations!

The inception of rock music in the 1950s opened a "generation gap" in artistic tastes that has finally begun to heal. Teenagers of today typically do not completely share their parents' tastes in music, but most of them do include music of The Beatles, The Eagles or James Brown on their iPods. The gap between parents and children is not as impassable as it used to be. Today's 50-year-old is often more youthful and broadminded than his dad was at middle age, while today's 16-year-old may be more accepting of differences and willing to talk with adults than her mom was at the same age.

The times are a-changing, again, and old wounds are starting to heal. Indeed, that is precisely the message of Ariel's Way. While an evening at the theatre too seldom satisfies both parents and children, Ariel's Way aims to do--and succeeds in doing--exactly that. The characters and cast in this show are inter-generational, and the story, songs, and staging can be enjoyed whether you're 5, 15, 50, or 85.

What's more, the plot and themes of Ariel’s Way not only warm the heart (while raising its rate!). They also prompt families to share their lives and differing perspectives in conversations at intermission and after the show. In discussing if and why forgiveness works better than vengeance, and the ways in which compassion trumps control as a way of relating to others, people come to understand their individual, familiar, and even political circumstances with more insight.

At least, that's what this writer and this cast have learned at Carolina Friends School--and through working on this show together. So come see it with your family, and see if you don't agree that art fueled by the power of love is a potent force for good in the world! To what The Beatles once proclaimed ("Love is all you need")Ariel's Way adds its own, "Amen!"

,