When Language Lessons Make for Good Theater
Photo: Robert Caplin for The New York Times
A teacher of English as a Second Language, Néstor Rodríguez, moderated questions from students to actors during a play.
By FERNANDA SANTOS
Published: April 9, 2008
The plot goes something like this: Francis and Margot Macomber are on safari in Africa. Mr. Macomber, a hard-drinking British diplomat, runs scared from a lion. Mrs. Macomber, hardly one to shy away from adventure, scorns his cowardice and proceeds to have a fling with their guide. Out hunting buffalo, she shoots her husband dead.
Cut to Ana Nuñez, 46, a home-health aide seated in the audience. “You shoot your husband intention or accident?” Ms. Nuñez, a native of the Dominican Republic, asked in lilting English.
Devin Moriarty, still in character as Mrs. Macomber in this adaptation of Ernest Hemingway’s “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber,” responded: “Oh, my! It all happened so fast.”
So much for the fourth wall.
In traditional theater, conversation between actors and audience are rare. Scenes unfold without interruption, save for intermission. The power to guide the plot lies with the actors; the people watching are left to, well, watch.
But this week at the Wings Theater, an Off Off Broadway spot in the basement of a landmark building at 154 Christopher Street in Greenwich Village, an unconventional experiment is at work. The seats are filled by a multinational coalition of English as a Second Language students, who have the power to ask Ms. Moriarty and the other three actors questions or to tell them to replay scenes they may not have fully grasped.
The students are also quizzed, in something akin to a live reading-comprehension exercise.
“When you do a regular play, you’re kind of in control, you call the shots,” said Tim Douglas, the actor who plays the guide, Robert Wilson. “But in this format, anything can happen.”
One part theater, one part language lesson, the production is the brainchild of two teachers who share a performing arts background. The director, Barbara Bregstein, is a Spanish instructor who ran two small theaters in Cambridge, Mass., in the 1970s. Néstor Rodríguez, who teaches English as a Second Language in the continuing education program at City College and worked as an actor in his native Colombia before moving here in 1995, is the presenter, moderating the audience interaction.
Ms. Bregstein and Mr. Rodríguez do not tell the actors about the untraditional aspects of the production until after auditions. They named their company Educational Theater and have financed it mostly through ticket sales ($10 a head to meet the Macombers).
They generally stage short stories rather than plays, which would be too long with all the interruptions. The actors will play a scene of no more than a few minutes, then freeze. The lights come on and Mr. Rodríguez stands up to ask the students about what they saw. (emphasis added)
“What time do you think it is?” he inquired after the first scene on Monday, opening night.
“April 7, 2008,” replied a young man. “Very good,” Mr. Rodríguez said. “But what I want to know is what time it is in the play.” (Mrs. Macomber had indicated noontime.)
Mr. Rodríguez asked four questions and got one correct answer. He asked the students if they wanted the scene to be repeated, or if they wanted the play to continue.
“Repeat,” the students said in a strident unison.
Confronted with the same questions at the next break, they flipped their right-to-wrong answer ratio to three to one. Ms. Bregstein said that she developed the format in a spurt of frustration over the quality of instructive English videos Mr. Rodríguez showed her eight years ago. At the time, they were both teaching English at the downtown headquarters of District Council 37, a municipal union. The videos were the only teaching material Mr. Rodríguez could find.
“The content was so weak and so cheesy and so bad,” he said.
Ms. Bregstein wrote the first of the plays, shown in 2000, and has since adapted short stories by Bernard Malamud — “The Magic Barrel” and “Idiots First” — as well as Plato’s “Apology.” There are two seasons a year, one in the spring and another in the fall, and often each season features one original work.
This is the first time Ms. Bregstein has adapted a Hemingway short story.
“As long as the stories are in the short-scene format, the students will get them, even if the material seems complicated,” she said.
“The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” runs through Saturday, with multiple shows every day except for Friday.
In the audience on Monday, there were students from China, Burkina Faso, Guinea, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Mexico and Ivory Coast. Maria Pagán, 56, who moved to New York from Colombia in 1996, said it was her first time seeing professional theater.
“I like how they play, how the story develop,” she said hesitantly. “Now I know I understand theater,” Ms. Pagán added. “And I try to come more.”
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