AP English students head to the south sea;
Class to attend live performance at Proctor's Theatre
April 12, 2010—Tom Reiter’s AP English Language and
Composition class will voyage to the south sea as they watch Rogers and
Hammerstein’s classic tale South Pacific live at Proctor’s Theatre on April 15.
“Thanks to a grant from the theatre, the entire trip will cost next to nothing,”
said Reiter, whose class recently finished a unit on changes in the treatment of
war in literature and film over the past 150 years.
“Now we can take the unit one step further,” said Reiter. “We’ll watch how
Broadway took the war in the Pacific to depict how war and prejudice affect
love. That theme is as universal today as it was when South Pacific was penned.”
He added that being able to bring students to a live musical at the caliber of
South Pacific for practically free is an added bonus.
The musical applies to the texts they’ve been studying in class. Students read
three novels starting with Stephen Crane’s realistic depiction of the Civil War
in The Red Badge of Courage and ending with Tim O’Brien’s The Things They
Carried, an award- winning novel about Vietnam War.
Students also selected a novel involving war and literature to read outside of
class. Choices ranged from classics, such as Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms and
Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind, to Joseph Heller’s satire Catch 22 and
Herman Wouk’s epic novel The Winds of War.
Finally, the class also looked at Hollywood’s treatment of war—watching the
first 10 minutes of John Wayne’s The Sands of Iwo Jima, a patriotic unrealistic
war film and Oliver Stone’s haunting academy award-winning film Platoon.
After the musical, students may be able to “wash that man right out of their
hair,” but hopefully the wonderful Rogers and Hammertsein tunes will remain with
them forever.
In addition to attendance at this event, the grant from Proctor’s Theatre has
afforded Duanesburg students in kindergarten through twelfth-grade the
opportunity to attend other live performances, educational programs and films at
the theatre throughout the 2009-10 school year.
Learn more about the district's other initiatives with Proctor's Theatre this
year:
Students take part in Proctor's Theatre media project
Students create full-scale theatrical production thanks to arts-in-education
grant
Class of 2010 to graduate from Proctor's Theatre
District awarded $10,000 Arts-in-Education grant