Literature Review

Playwriting with Honesty

How can we connect with our humanity and convey it honestly through writing?
Barba (2002) argues that, Theatre is intolerable if it limits itself to spectacle alone (p.
7). Opening students up to playwriting is a difficult task because many students have
been exposed only to film and television, and while theatre has similarities to these arts,
theatre is its own art form. Students often try to write film and television and inevitably
begin writing work full of only spectacle because its often all they know. Where
playwriting is powerful is when it can really be used to convey honest, human moments.
Vidalias (2008) has talked extensively about the honesty in the work that he
helps student create: If you want your play to work, you have to be honest. And my job,
as a teaching artist, is to help you do that (p. 136). Moving students away from the
spectacle requires extensive discussion about honesty which can move students in all
sorts of different directions. This is the power of playwriting: that honesty can appear in
so many different shapes and forms. It can be revealed in a small and simple monologue
or in a character description or even in a setting, but when it is revealed, it is
obvious--
this
is it. This is something this writer really knows and understands. This is an
abstract way of looking at writing and the writing process, but honesty itself is an
abstract concept that can be explored in so many different shapes and forms.
Playwriting allows students to be honest while hiding behind fiction.

Playwriting for Literacy

On top of this powerful mask of fiction, students are engaging in literacy activities
when they are writing a play. Just as in order to write a poem, students must learn what
a poem is, in order to write plays, students must first be shown examples of plays.
Students begin reading with the intent of discovering what could be useful in their own
work. Then, students begin writing their own work. Critique and revision in the
playwriting process is extremely natural: when playwrights of all ages hear their work
out loud, they can hear where change needs to occur. In this process, students are using
their reading, writing and critical thinking skills all at once, helping to show how
theatre can be effectively used as a medium of education (Bhattacharyya, 2013, p. 5).
According to Power (1938), plays are the most logical, most natural, and the
easiest art form for high-school students to write. Almost every student likes to act, and
what is more does act, if only in the imagination. Dialogue is to him as natural as living
(p. 401). This is the reason why students are so able to revise as easily as they do. They
can
hear
where their work is unnatural. They know dialogue. They live it.

Playwriting as Project Based Learning

In a project-based learning environment, it is the teachers goal to have students
create
. This means that teachers in this particular setting must allow for the mistakes
that are inevitable in the creation process. Playwriting is a perfect fit in this setting. To
write a play is to create. Students try things out, they hear it out loud, they often change
their work (but not always!). There is no right answer when it comes to the playwriting
process, and indeed, when freed of the obligation to find answers, they ask what we call

knowledge-based questions, questions that arise from their own puzzlement or

perceived lack of understanding (Bereiter & Scardamalia, 1999). This connects well to
this studys setting, where authenticity is such a cornerstone of the pedagogy (Steinberg,
1997).
This is not the first time that I have experienced a playwriting project with my
students. However, this is the first time that I have conducted action research on what is
going on in the classroom and chronicling the day to day. My prior observations of what
happens in my classroom have led me to a very specific question. How can playwriting
activities help students build empathy?
I agree with Bhattacharyyas work, best summarized in the following excerpt:

One of the primary concerns related to education today is the excessive workload
upon the students that threatens to have a dehumanizing effect upon them where
they increasingly find themselves cut off from the mainstream society...The
theatre can come to our rescue in this regard. Techniques of drama blur many
boundaries by transforming the formal space of the classroom through the use of
games and conversations, sometimes even actually breaking down its physical
order. Some minimising of the social distance between the teacher and the taught
infuses trust in the latter and makes conversation possible (Bhattacharyya, 2013,
p. 5).

In the setting of this study, teachers are encouraged to teach from their
passions--to do what you love and let the project drive the curriculum (Guerrero,
2009). As a playwright myself, I have found much joy in playwriting, and I have found
that sharing the playwriting experience with other people has helped me gain a deeper
understanding of who those people are. Because we live a playwriting experience in that
we speak to one another all the time, the structure is easy to understand, and we can
instead focus on understanding one another instead of analyzing a structure--although
this comes naturally to the process as well.

Playwriting for Empathy

There has been research that has proven that students who partake in arts related
activities, whether or not they are specifically playwriting or theatre related activities are
...more confident and willing to explore and take risks, exert ownership over and pride
in their work, and show compassion and empathy toward peers, families and
communities (Burton, Horowitz, & Abeles, 2000, p. 248). Springboarding off of this
work, I strive to develop three mindsets/skillsets in students that together create the
empathetic potential in a student: (1) the art of observation, (2) the ability to connect,
(3) the development of Imaginative Capacity through the very specific art activity of
engaging in a one-act play. Below, I will define empathy and explain how I have distilled
the research on empathy into these three categories.

Defining Empathy

According to Jeffers (2009), Empathy, at root, allows the self to identify with the
other and individuals to connect with groups, and facilitating holistic learning in the
classroom and beyond, empathy is a vital resource that offers the promise of
intersubjective understanding so essential to the survival of the human community ().
We need empathy in order to progress forward. We need one another in order to
survive.
Truly, the value of empathy has increased in todays age, as we tackle our
generations own unique problems. According to Bateson (
year
), the more empathetic
the individual is, the more likely he or she is to help those in needBateson calls it the
empathy-altruism hypothesis and predicts that an empathetically aroused individual
will feel empathic joy at learning the victims need has been relieved...this joy is a
consequence, not the goal, of relieving the need (p. 154).
Batesons work suggests that empathy/sympathy does indeed lead to genuinely
altruistic motivation rather than to helping behavior because of predominantly egoistic
motivations.
Olderbak et al. (2014) define empathy as something that refers to the thoughts
and feelings of one individual in response to the observed (emotional) experiences of
another individual. De Wall (2009) distinguishes empathy from sympathy in that
empathy is proactive. Empathy is the process by which we gather information about
someone else (p. 88). In this study, I will be focusing on three traits of empathy: (1) the
ability to connect, (2) the art of observation, (3) the development of the imaginative
capacity.

In The Empathy Quotient: An Investigation of Adults with Asperger Syndrome

or High Functioning Autism, and Normal Sex Differences, Simon Baron-Cohen and
Sally Wheelwright review the processes by which they vetted the survey that they
created to measure empathy in adults. In their initial studies, they found that scoring
fewer than 30 points was an indicator of autism (but not necessarily evidence of
autism). Their work revealed both significant empathy gaps between the general
population and a AS/HFA (Asperger Syndrome or High Functioning Autism)
population. Their work also revealed a significant empathy gap between men and
women.

#1. The Art of Observation

Because theatre is a story-telling art form, we feel entitled to assume that the
playwright got there before we got there.
~Tom Stoppard

We see that part of learning empathy is to attain the ability to

observe--everything from how others love, how others look, and the different meanings
behind different postures and facial expressions--stem from an ability to observe the
world and its inhabitants. According to Jim and
[name]
Tangen-Foster (1998), children
who feel loved, appreciated, and cared for are more likely to love, appreciate, and care
for others and for the environment (p. 3). Truly, children learn how to nurture

through the experience of being nurtured. They learn respect for others and the
environment through experiences with others in the natural environment (
p.
x
Tangen-Foster, 1998). Children are natural observers, and it is through observing that
they learn how to behave and how to treat one another and themselves.
Stuebers (2014) research tells us that empathy has also to be understood as
being the primary basis for recognizing each other as minded creatures (). Theatre can
help us recognize one another. Shakespeares Hamlet (199) says, Suit the action to the
word, the word to the action, with this special observance, that you oerstep not the
modesty of nature: for anything so oerdone is from the purpose of playing, whose end,
both at the first and now, was and is, to hold as twere the mirror up to nature: to show
virtue her feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form
and pressure (Act 3, scene 2, 17-24). In this section, Hamlet speaks to the actors who
are to perform in his fathers show and tell them that by playing, or acting, they are
holding a mirror up to the world. When we dramatize something, we put it up for
exhibition, inviting others to observe what is occurring in the piece, and inviting them to
take something away that they might be able to connect to.
Stueber (2014) also tells us that, Ordinarily we not only recognize that other
persons are afraid or that they are reaching for a particular object. We understand their
behavior in more complex social contexts in terms of their reasons for acting using the
full range of psychological concepts including the concepts of belief and desire (2014).
We are able to read different peoples body language and gain meaning from them
because we are constantly observing the world around us. It is important to note that

there is so much to see, and sometimes we miss details. However, increased empathy
seems to sharpen our observation skills.

#2. The Ability to Connect

I regard the theatre as the greatest of all art forms,

the most immediate way in which a human being can
share with another the sense of what it is to be a human being.
~Thornton Wilder

Baron-Cohen and Wheelwright (2004) tell us that empathy

allows us to tune into how someone else is feeling, or what they might be
thinking. Empathy allows us to understand the intentions of others, predict their
behavior, and experience an emotion triggered by their emotion. In short,
empathy allows us to interact effectively in the social world.

The ability to connect is one of the key themes that courses through the different
literature that discusses empathy. Indeed, it is the heart of many definitions, to be able
to identify in others something that we recognize in ourselves.
Roman Knaric (2012), who has worked as an empathy advisor to organizations
including Oxfam and the United Nations, breaks down empathy into six habits, three of

which are: Habit 2: Challenge prejudices and discover commonalities, Habit 3: Try
another persons life and Listen hard--and open up. What these three habits and
Baron-Cohen and Wheelwrights writing on empathy have in common is that
empathetic people have an ability to connect with one another.
In Jeffers research
On Empathy
, Vischer said in regards to his art, I transpose
myself into the inner being of an object and explore its formal character from within, as
it were (2009). Art is about this transposing. Playwriting and theatre, in particular,
asks the writer to become someone else, even just for a moment. This is a rehearsal of
empathy--the experiencing from the inside of someone elses mind and life. This
connection between the self and another being is key to developing empathy.

#3. The Development of the Imaginative Capacity

The stage is a magic circle where only the most real things
happen, a neutral territory outside the jurisdiction of
Fate where stars may be crossed with impunity. A truer and more real
place does not exist in all the universe.
~
P.S. Baber

The ability to observe and the ability to identify in ourselves something that we
can compare and contrast with something we see in someone else are only two pieces of
what creates empathy. The last, and arguably something we are not prioritizing when it

comes to what must be taught (Barras), is the ability to imagine--the ability to fill in the
gaps once weve observed a behavior and linked it somehow to our own. With an
unlimited capacity for imagination, we can put ourselves in someone elses life. We can
see from their perspective; we can walk in their shoes because we can
imagine
it.
De Waal (2009) further discusses emotional engagement as something that is
necessary for true empathy: ...seeing anothers emotions arouses our own emotions,
and from there we go on constructing a more advanced understanding of the others
situation (p. 72). While his work shows the ability to connect as an important trait of
empathy, he talks about how this ability comes from observing one another.

Qualifiers
While there is plentiful literature that argues that engaging with the reading and
writing of fiction and the writing of and watching of theatre helps us observe, connect
and imagine, there is also much literature that argues against the notion that fictional
works help in the building of empathy. In Lipps (1979) work, most of the examples of
empathy zero in on the recognition of emotions expressed through different facial
expressions or bodily gestures. Davis (1983) claims that it is not apparent that a
tendency to become deeply involved in the fictitious world of books, movies and plays
will systematically affect ones social relationships. However, there is evidence that tells
us that the observing of different behaviors helps us sculpt our own. Indeed, Coplans
(2004) work with narrative fictions tells us that empathy plays an important role in
text processing and narrative comprehension (). Further, Black, Turner and Bowers

(1979) work proved that subjects were able to remember a story better when they were
asked to view the information from a given perspective. Whether it is our ability to
understand the fictional work in the first place or its power to help enhance our ability
to remember, worlds of fiction intertwine with our own real life experiences.