Hello, Internet.
So, it’s wintertime again. Christmas and New Year’s have passed, MPOLs are fast approaching, snow is welcome to fall anytime now, and our class has completed yet another Winter Exhibition . This year, our task was significantly different from previous years. First of all, we were working all together as a class in a sort of giant group project. Second, instead of coming up with an idea or solution to a problem and pitching it, we took all our learning from the unit we just did in Humanities and transformed it into an interactive performance piece.
As you might expect, this was quite the mammoth task. The last time we all had to work together as a class devolved into Lord of the Flies-style anarchy, so our general outlook going into this project was perhaps a little bleak. However, this time we were able to overcome our past failures and work together successfully.
We started out by assessing the constraints of the project and the information we had to incorporate. The subject matter we’d been studying had three main layers– the events of the Salem Witch Trials as portrayed in The Crucible; the communist witch hunt that took place in the 1950s (which was our main focus); and how both of the above connect to today. Our job as a class was to create and perform a cohesive story that clearly showed what was going on in the 1950s, while also connecting it back to the 1600s and forward to today. It also needed to have audience interaction throughout every section.
Based on this information, we began to plan out exactly what we were going to do, and divide up responsibilities for carrying out said plan.
We divided up our exhibition plan into seven stations, and related each station back to one or more major themes of our project.
The first station would show a soldier returning from WWII, and outline the benefits of the GI Bill.
The second station would show the soldier now in a tableau of typical suburban life, possibly a family buying a new appliance, to show the conformism and consumerism dominant in 1950s suburbia.
The third station would show the soldier being drafted for the Korean War, torn away from his happy suburban existence and not understanding why he had to fight in this war.
The fourth station would show an anti-communist rally, a sign of the public really starting to be aware of and unhappy about communism in America.
The fifth station would show the effects of the communist witch hunt and blacklist on people working in Hollywood (then Hollywoodland), who were largely targeted as potential communists.
The sixth station would show an alleged communist on trial by Senator Joseph McCarthy, a prominent anti-communist figure at the time, and the Chief Counsel Joseph Welch.
McCarthyism was the practice of accusing or condemning people with insufficient evidence, usually of subversion (although the term is also used more generally). McCarthyism came about as part of the red scare, and essentially consisted of a communist witch hunt, focussed on government officials or public figures like Hollywood stars and directors. The name was derived from that of Joseph McCarthy, a US senator who rose to power in 1950, and started the practice of McCarthyism in an effort to eradicate the communist spies he believed had infiltrated the US government. Prior to, and perhaps contributing to, the rise of McCarthyism, a few communist spies had already been discovered, notably Alger Hiss. The general public was very split on whether or not they supported McCarthy– many believed in his methods, and thought he was doing great things for America, but others found him to be extremist and unfair. Those who disliked McCarthy looked to the then-president, Dwight “Ike” Eisenhower, to stop him from accusing or condemning people unfairly or without evidence. However, for the majority of McCarthy’s reign Eisenhower did little to either support or stop him, and was said to outright refuse to engage with or sometimes even mention him. McCarthy’s power began to fall apart in 1954, when he started investigating and accusing people within the US army and administration, and Eisenhower was forced to address McCarthyism and attempt to bring it to an end. The US army worked to discredit Roy Cohn, a lawyer involved in McCarthy’s investigations, and Cohn’s assistant David Schine. McCarthy and Cohn ended up being accused of abuse of power, since they had worked to clear an easy path for Schine to get into the army, and be given special treatment, by use of threats and intimidation. As the final nail in McCarthy’s coffin, Eisenhower sent out a memo to the secretary of defense ordering that no department employees were to testify for McCarthy, regardless of who this would benefit, and that if McCarthy called them to testify they should ignore him. This wrecked the last of McCarthy’s credibility, and his career. He ended up turning to alcoholism, leading to his death in 1957.
The seventh station would feature an address from then-president Dwight Eisenhower, ending with the line “we can make America great” as an allusion to the political scene of today.
A lot of this was later changed or scrapped– the first two stations were melded into one and reset as a suburban family having a dinner party (with lots of jello), the Eisenhower speech was moved to the start, and the anti-communist rally was instead made a pro-communist rally. We also decided to have the Hollywoodland scene be set on a production of The Crucible, in order to allow us to directly include and comment on parts the play.
Because we were working in such a large group, we chose two DRIs to be in charge of the project and make sure everything ran smoothly. (Both of them did a great job.)
With all our ideas and plans in place, it was time to bring our vision to life. This required two main areas of work: building the sets, and writing the script.
While everyone was involved with both of these things, I spent the majority of my time working on the script. In order to make it as authentic as possible, I researched some 1950s slang and peppered it in. I also did a fair amount of editing, and spent time memorizing my lines– most of which, interestingly enough, were actually just lines from The Crucible, because I was a part of the Hollywoodland scene.
That was also an interesting scene to make props for, because they were actually allowed to look like props. We had a Bob-Ross-esque forest backdrop that we painted ourselves, a Hollywoodland sign made from cardboard letters, and a series of trees– some real (and very heavy) potted ones, and some fake ones that we borrowed from the drama room.
We also had a bit of a stage set up to do the in-story acting on– in one unfortunate moment, part of it unexpectedly collapsed beneath me, breaking one of the fake trees, and causing me to scream a small amount of bloody murder.
This wasn’t the only technical difficulty we faced in trying to set up the exhibition– we also had to improvise a wall last minute when the mechanical walls in the gym didn’t work, leaving us to divide our stations with some choir shells and a massive amount of black curtains. However, things ended up working out okay, since having smaller “wall” pieces actually allowed us a lot more control over how we set things up.
The exhibition itself went really well– we had four people acting as guides who led the audience through every station and acted as a consistent character called Charlie Powell whose story helped tie everything together.
In the first station, the audience watched President Eisenhower deliver a speech about how America could move on from World War II into a new and better age. The speech introduced and gave an overview of many of the topics important to the later scenes. It also helped engage the audience and give them a window into the world they were about to be immersed in.
The audience then moved on to the next scene, where they, and Charlie, were guests at a house party being thrown by a suburban couple called Patrick and Susan. In this scene, the audience got to hear a little bit about the GI Bill, have a glimpse into the nuclear family, and get a taste of 1950s consumerism, as well as 1950s food. One of the audience members, chosen at random, was also handed a Polaroid picture of Patrick, Susan, and a blender. The pictures were taken on each run-through, and given to the audience immediately afterwards.
From the party, the guide and audience made their way out into the street, where a group of communist protesters was trying to rally forces to support their cause. The protesters explained the witch hunt that was taking place in America at the time, and made the case for communism. In the end, they gave the guide a pamphlet about communism, which he then quickly handed off to an audience member.
From there, the audience continued making their way through the suburban streets, where they encountered two military officers trying to recruit soldiers to fight in the Korean War. Charlie got into an argument with the military officers, and ended up getting a draft letter, but moved on quickly to the next scene and handed the draft letter off to an audience member rather than reporting for duty. This scene reflected the country’s disinterest in the Korean War, which was a proxy war and thus seen by many as not really directly an American issue.
In the interest of getting away from the military officers, Charlie and the audience quickly hurried onto the set of The Crucible, where an upset cameraman and actor were waiting for Charlie to play Abigail. They talked about how their director, Michael Gordon, can no longer work on the film because he’s been put on the Hollywood blacklist– a list of people banned from working in Hollywood because they were believed to be communists. One of the audience members was given a clapboard and asked to help direct, and another was given free tickets to see the premiere of The Crucible. Charlie and the actor playing John Proctor began to do their scene, but midway through they were interrupted by a cop who accused Charlie of being a communist, and dragged him and the audience members to a senate hearing.
At the hearing, Josephs McCarthy and Welch attempted to provide evidence to support their claim that Charlie was a communist. After mentioning a somewhat communist-related tattoo Charlie bore, they turned to the audience, who were able to use the items from the previous stations as evidence (Anton Chekhov would have been proud). Despite some actual evidence being provided, the guide was dismissed by Joseph Welch, who claimed insufficient evidence, and then asked Joseph McCarthy whether he was completely void of decency. With the hearing done, the audience was able to leave– but not without experiencing one last element of the exhibition: a video compiling every time Trump has used the term witch hunt during his presidency, set to the backtrack of I Put A Spell On You.
All in all, I think this was the best exhibition our class has ever done. We worked together well as a whole group, incorporated multiple very in-depth topics, and did enough script-writing, set-making, and acting for a theatre class. I do wish we had had a little more time to memorize our lines, especially for the guides who had to be in every scene and often had a lot of attention on them, but with some occasional improv I think everyone did a fine job even so.
I really enjoyed learning about the 1950s, especially because we got to learn about people’s everyday lives, and it was easy to draw some clear connections to today (and to the 1600s, apparently). I would happily do a similar style of project for our next exhibition.
Toodles.