 Welcome everybody back here to the Martinis Siegel Theatre Center here at the Graduate Center CUNY. My name is Frank Henschkern. I'm the director of the Siegel Center. It's great to see you all here also such great numbers. As you all know, we are restarting our programs and slowly trying to get back into life presenting and presenting what we think are meaningful events, events that have an impact and events that deal with the main mission of our center to bridge academia and professional theater, also international and American theater, but also to plan the foot of academia I think in the research for the theater that we have in town and the performing arts. And tonight I think is one of the evenings which we are very proud to present you tonight. We have Jim Wilson with us at Jordan. Yes, and we are having a book celebration. We, as you know, we publish many books and journals here at the Graduate Center and at the Siegel Center to get together with Marvin Carlson, who is also the director of publishing. We are the largest publisher of our place in translation in the world, by the way, and next to many other things. We published six books in the last eight months. A little corona background next to many other things we did as the prelude festival. But tonight we're going to see a conversation with Jim and Jordan about a book that's topic is of significance always is, but perhaps even now a little bit more in the big pictures about the representation of teachers on the stage and in the performing arts in the American stage. And I think it's a big topic. It touches on many, many issues on on gender on race on ideology and how do you deal with the transfer of information. How do we transfer information to a next generation. That's what teachers do that's what the Graduate Center does that was our great program does. And so I would like to welcome both of you guys to come in here. And Jim worked for many many how many years did you work on the book. Well, I was just telling somebody about 10. But it wasn't 10 straight years I started it on a sabbatical lived on my desk top of my desk top, and about a year and a half or so. Yeah, it's like a great novels. You know, it take they take their time you go back and forth your weight. And, and we have the highest respect for everybody who presents a book who finishes a book I think so much. People go bananas about a touchdown but write a PhD write a book and defend it and present it this is a big achievement. So, Jim, welcome at the Segal Center thank you for joining us tonight and we all would like to know more about failure fascism and teachers in American theater. I want to thank Frank a couple of weeks ago. I saw I'm in the hallway and he just said how's your book coming I said oh publication is imminent and in typical Frank generous and celebratory style said well we need to do something. So here we are so thank you. And I also want to thank. And I also want to thank my dear friend and GC alum, Jordan Schiltkraut, who hadn't even read the book when I asked him if he would participate in this and he unhesitatingly said yes so thank you Jordan. I want to thank all of you here tonight it really means a lot to me. My partner Kevin Lustig who offered constant encouragement throughout and is the Paragon of patients. And then one of my all time favorite artists tug rice, designed the cover. And so, and in this case, I beg of you, judge this book by its cover. And I'm also thrilled to see so many of my dear friends who've come from far and near to be here tonight, and I also just want to call attention to the fact that several of my former and current students from LaGuardia, the Graduate Center and Berg are here tonight so I appreciate that number of colleagues from LaGuardia and the Graduate Center are here, and some of those colleagues are actually former students. So, and I also just want to call attention to my former professor and my academic role model, Marvin Carlson so I'm. Looking at all of you here this evening all I can think is, I didn't order enough food, but there will be a reception following. So, what I would like to do is, since I do not expect anyone to buy this book at the retail price. I will not be buying this book. So what I thought I would do is just give you a brief tour before Jordan and I sit down to have a conversation about the book and the work that's in it. And I do want to also say, I did donate a book to the DTSA the doctoral student, doctoral theater student association, and they are conducting a raffle. I urge you to take a chance. But it's for a very good cause it's for student travel and research endeavors so even if you don't want the book. And you can contribute to the DTSA that would be great. All right, so let me tell you a little bit about this undertaking undertaking. I took on this project, because of my deep love for both teaching and theater. Although I wear many professional hats as a program administrator as a theater historian, as a reviewer, I am in the words of Miss Jean Brody, a teacher, first, last and always. I am certainly not in my prime. And except for the fascism. Jean Brody and I are similar in that I have also dedicated my life to this profession. I'm especially fascinated with the ambivalent attitudes toward, I have to remember to point that way, my ambivalent attitude towards educators at all levels. On one hand, they are revered and they are revered and celebrated working as part of the noble profession in the class I just came from as a matter of fact, we were talking about some of the impacts that teachers have had on our lives. But on this, on the other hand, on the other hand. See, you don't name a book failure and expect to be successful. I must find that teachers also bear the brunt of all of the problems of society, they are the ones who are blamed for all of the social ills. They are alternately accused of being lazy, sinister and recently as pernicious groomers. So one of the things that I noticed is that this ambivalence is nowhere as present as it is in the theater. So what I would like to do is just give a brief snapshot of the five content chapters that follow. And the first one, Frank, the clicker is not working. The first chapter looks at the representations of women's teachers and up through the early 20th century, most women teachers were barred from being married and concurrently philosophers and sexologists pointed to spinsters as mannish sexually non conforming and deviant in their apparent refusal to engage in normal heterosexual coupling. And this monstrous and sadistic school marm, for example, was a familiar writer in vaudeville and burlesque sketches through the 1920s. And as a writer in The Free Woman, a feminist publication wrote in 1911, I write of the high priestess of society, not of the mother of sons but of her barren sister, the withered tree, the assiduous vestal under whose pale shadow we chill and whiten of the spinster, I write. So for many teaching was a profession that you did until you were hopefully able to get out of the profession and marry as writer in the New York Times wrote those who can marry those who cannot continue to teach. So on the other hand, the spinster teacher is occasionally pitiable in her solitary professional existence, and heroic in her single minded devotion to her young charges, as in Harry James Smith's, the little teacher and Emily and Williams, the corn is green and there's a photo of Miss Martha I think probably my all time favorite teacher. Other examples in this chapter include Annie Sullivan in The Miracle Worker and Miss Dove and Good Morning Miss Dove and another interesting character that I look at is Rose Mary Sydney from picnic if you're familiar with her. She's the example of she just wants to get married so she can get out of teaching she claims that first that offers her independence but as soon as the chance comes up. She takes it. Okay, sorry. In the second half of the 20th century, more and more women were going into the university still far outnumbered by men and current statistics show that women have a much harder time with tenure and getting promoted. In other places, such as the Heidi Chronicles wit office hour and Confederates, the women teachers are referred to, often explicitly as super women. And in the case of Heidi in the Heidi Chronicles, when a television reporter asks her about her being a superwoman. So you have to keep too many lists to be a super woman. What's also notable about these plays is almost all of, except for one that I think they're single. I would suggest that the woman cannot have it all as a professor and Sandra in Confederates also articulates the particular hardships that African American women face in the university she says it is very very hard to be a woman in academia, a black woman, even harder. In the second chapter. I look at in the interwar years, and at that time more and more students were going into schools and actually staying in schools, more so than before. As the depression war on and another world war loomed, the promise and future of the youth seemed especially important. As a result, the physical and psychological fitness of teachers as role models for their students became a source of scrutiny and panic. In 1929 the Board of Education stated, a teacher has an obligation to look after his own health, not only to increase his efficiency to put, but to set an example of an ideal of healthy adulthood. There are many stories at this time in which teachers were fired for instance for being too heavy. One particularly cruel example was a woman was fired because she was considered a fire hazard and to prove it. The Board of Education conducted a fire drill to show that she was unfit and couldn't move out of the building fast enough. The other major issue was homosexuality, and that was a huge concern. And this played itself out in a lot of the plays of the period. And as Willard Waller wrote, nothing seems more certain than that homosexuality is contagious. And in several of the plays of the interwar period, this is evident. So I look at Trio, which is explores the relationship of a professor and a student and luckily, or I shouldn't say, but for that student, this student is saved by a cisgender white male who's anti-intellectual and takes her out of the clutches of this vampiric lesbian professor. The Rats of Norway is a play that has all kinds of couplings. An interesting thing about the Rats of Norway, it also has a sissy character. And unlike almost all of the plays that deal with homosexuality, that character is not destroyed in the end, which I find kind of interesting. And then of course there's the children's hour. And to go back to this idea of homosexuality as contagious, an interesting side note is that the children's hour is based on an actual school from 1810 Scotland, and there was a homosexual panic. And all of the students were removed from that school. But in an interesting footnote, all but one of those students could not be put into another school, because they were concerned that the students having been exposed to homosexuality would cause another outbreak in another school. Okay, so the next chapter should say this was a sign that I saw in the Graduate Center. Those of you who are at the Graduate Center may have seen similar signs. I noticed there's one today about how teachers and students are being targeted for their outspoken views on what's happening in Israel and Gaza. And it sent chills down my spine because I thought, oh, here we go again, because the chapter I focus on is the, sorry, the fact that in the 1940s and 1950s, colleges, schools and universities were presumed hotbeds of communist activity. And thousands of predominantly male school teachers and professors were interrogated for their political beliefs. And most of those investigated were forced to leave the profession. So you'll see lots of headlines like this about communist activities and oaths of loyalty, which were becoming more and more prevalent in the 1940s and 1950s. Hollywood films, as it has been well documented, shied away from critiquing the red scare. But the theater was not so shy. So there were a number of plays that focused on some of these issues, including the light, very silly, but I think it's probably still revivable, the male animal by James Thurber and Elliot Nugent, the melodrama decision by Edward Chaturroff, and the egghead by Molly Kazan, Aliyah's wife. Moving on, the next chapter looks at the debates around progressive education. And by the 1960s, progressive education had really become a hot topic that there was a demand for back to the basics approaches to teaching and some of the main figures in progressive education, such as John Dewey, who wrote School and Society, Democracy and Education, Experience Education, Experience and Education. It said that the schools should be a rehearsal for democracy. It should be a place to train people for democratic citizenship. A.S. Neil, some say, took Dewey's ideas way too far. A.S. Neil created a school called Summerhill, and this was an experiment that I think actually still goes on. In Summerhill, the students are the ones creating the rules. The students decide what they will learn, when they will learn. Somebody was observing and said he couldn't believe he walked by a classroom and the teacher had her feet up on the desk and the children were chewing bubble gum. And that was the outrage. And then finally, looking at Paulo Freire, whose major contribution to education is the pedagogy of the oppressed. And my book actually riffs on that title, minus the pedagogy of the oppressors. And Paulo Freire had an idea that traditional education treats students as empty vessels in which knowledge is poured into them. The three plays in this chapter. The crime of Miss Jean Brody, Miss Margarita's way and Sister Mary Ignatius explains it all for you. Test and thwart some of those principles of progressive education. They can also be read as allegories for dictator controlled societies and in particular, if you're familiar with Miss Margarita's way, we are, as the audience members, her classroom and she bullies us she calls us faggots and morons and she says that if we behave she'll show us parts of her body. But, and then of course, Sister Mary Ignatius is a pretty fierce none in the course of the place she shoots two of the students. And the last chapter is an exploration of men in drama and theater and Willard Waller described teaching as a failure belt or for a or a profession that was suited for men who could make who could not make it in business and for women who couldn't get married. A further element in the popular prejudice against teachers is that teaching is quite generally regarded as a failure belt. There are some justice in this belief, a popular epigram of a few years ago had had that teaching was the refuge of unsayable men and unmarriageable women. And he goes on to say that it has been said that no woman and no Negro is ever fully admitted to the white man's world. Possibly we should add men teachers to the list of the excluded. So this chapter explores the ingrained idea that men who teach are failed men as members of a woman dominated profession of a woman dominated profession, recipients of comparatively modest salaries and intellectuals in an anti intellectual hypermasculinized society, they supposedly forfeit their masculinity. Many of the teachers that are portrayed, such as the Browning version, but Lee, who's afraid of Virginia Woolf. Child's play quarter means terms, all show men as unhappy, disillute and very often drunk. And it shows the transgressive failure, emasculation and thatcherousness of the male teacher. And then finally, so we can get to the good part conversation with Jordan. I just want to conclude by saying that theater and performance like gifted teachers have the power to reveal to us who we are, what we value, and how we fit in the world. My hope is that this book and that the chapters taken together will provide deeper insights into fraught educational, political and social histories to help us better understand the culture wars that we are currently in. And representation matters. Perhaps deconstructing well worn tropes will encourage educators, artists and scholars to forge new ones. These are the lessons and legacies we can impart to generations of future teachers. And I'll just conclude with the words of Hector from the history boys who says, past the parcel. Sometimes all you can do, take it, feel it and pass it on. Not for me, not for you, but for someone, somewhere, one day, pass it on boys. That's the game I wanted you to learn. Pass it on. Thank you. So thank you Jim this was a great overview and question very beautiful to listen to the watch. So I handed over to both of you. It should be on. Can you test? Hello. Hello, Jordan. I believe we're ready to go. Maybe again. Jim first let me take over what why of all the themes to choose from why did you choose this one. In terms of teachers and theater. As I said, because I love teachers, I come from a long line of teachers. And I'm also fascinated by the way they are presented on stage and whenever having well I should say having been a teacher for now 30 years or so. I look at these plays and I say, that's not my experience that's not what it actually is to be a teacher but it seems like that is the accepted view of teachers. So and I'm also very interested in the history of education and how these plays fit into that history of education. I mean, if I can speak I'll say, sorry, hold on just one second. When I had the pleasure of reading your book over this past week, which I just enjoyed thoroughly. One of the insights that struck me is one of the things that you point out that almost everyone in our society will at some point have a connection to a teacher. We don't experience teachers, but yet, often as students, we only experience them within the rarely, you know the relatively narrow confines of the classroom. So these plays and perhaps our interest in these plays I think you're pointing out is to get almost a behind the scenes look at what the lives of these important people in our lives these influential people in our lives may actually be. These sort of biographies that variety of different lives lived by these characters just really paints a complex portrait of that. Thank you. It's in the previous class as I mentioned just came from class we're talking about bell hooks and one of the things that bell hooks says and I don't know if this quite ties in. And why we have this misconception of teachers is we don't think of them as people in their bodies. We think about them as minds only so that there's this assumption that teachers don't work because they're not using their bodies in their classroom So I think that one of the things that I find interesting about the plays in particular, often as that's the opposite. I mean, in many cases, they're almost pure body. I mean, of course, theaters performing but you think about a character like Blanche Dubois, who was a former teacher. And, and by the way, it's also interesting. She also has a gay panic and she says that that was what caused her to become the abuser that she was. I mean, it's an interesting example like in the book you have so much into insight into a bright variety of plays, which I mean I think the audience here got some sense of from your presentation but I just want to take it further and point out for example, that you deal with some plays that are very much you know in the mainstream in the canon of American theater, others that may be familiar, you know, but not as well known and then some that I feel like you've actually rescued from the shadows of history. One of the most interesting sections to me is actually on the play trio. Because to the best of my knowledge, that's never been published. Is that true. That's true. Yeah. So I'm curious about like your research into this how that process was, if you can talk about that. Well, I spent a lot of time in the archives. And I think rescue might be too strong a word for some of these plays. Some of these plays are just not very good plays I mean they're not doable. But in terms of the process of just reading and play like trio was interesting, because there was so much drama. And I think that's the end of the play had trouble getting to New York and then when it did get a theater the theater was revoked and it closed, but it had nothing to do with the lesbian content as they were continually told. But in terms of the pleasures was finding these plays. Another one is the egghead, the Molly Kazan play, which again is not a very good play but it's a really fascinating play in terms of. How it was reflecting society at that time. Good. And I feel like so often that's, you know, what I appreciated about your insights that you're understanding these plays, whether they are like, you know, considered masterpieces like, you know, speak our name desire who's afraid of Virginia Wolf, or perhaps not so much, but still that you take them seriously in terms of the emblematic nature of what they're reflecting what do these characters tell us about society. I feel I was impressed by your own sense of the depth of knowledge about theater history production so like that you talk about for example the different controversies around particular plays like Sister Mary Ignatius is another one, right. But then also the larger social context like so much of the what you presented with us here today even shows this interest in really a cultural history of education. And what that's been an American society are there things that you sort of like discovered in that that surprised you in terms of like how we have thought about education in the past, or perhaps now. Yes, I mean one of the things that surprised me was, particularly what was going on in the 1940s. I mean, I knew what was going on in terms of there was a huge number of plays that dealt with gaze and lesbian characters. So what surprised me was, what was happening in real life in terms of how teachers were being targeted. And, for instance, there was another case, the board of education went into a school, and will they said he said that out of the 30, I think I'll probably get these numbers because the 36,000 New York City teachers 1600 were either insane or psychologically unfit and he conducted a test and he. At first he went into a classroom and he saw that one teacher had her desk with the foot right up to a boy's eye because she claimed that the other children were looking at her and she wanted she wanted to deflect the attention or another teacher was given the pro the math problem. On Apple costs, 5 cents, how many would 15 cost and he wrote that the teacher said she couldn't figure it out without scratch paper so she filled up two sides of the paper and then finally just had to say, I'm stumped. So lots of cases like that where on teachers were demonized. He said it became a national obsession. And then when we look at what's happening today and I'm sure we'll probably have some time. But what's happening in Florida and what's happening in Texas, for instance that teachers can't be trusted to teach material and that students cannot be exposed to racism and racial histories. I guess the surprises to go back to your original question was how little things have changed that these kind of, I don't know a cyclical cultural panics or cultural wars, and the way that education, and then of course teachers or kind of position within that right. You also talk about different philosophies of education, and the way that the plays represent that. And so I'm curious like are there examples of the teacher characters that you looked at that you feel are emblematic of, should we say the best teachers and the worst teachers. Like, what, how do, how do we know what a good teacher is in this world of the theater. That's a, I would say, and one of the things that I look at it and I look at some psychological theories as well. Somebody like Miss Mothat, I'll just talk about Miss Mothat for a moment. Miss Mothat is complete, she gives herself completely over to this one student and she makes all kinds of sacrifices. And when the student gets a young woman pregnant, she doesn't want his chances to be to be undermined. So she agrees to raise the child. What I love about Miss Mothat though, is it really wasn't for the other student, it was for her she even says, you know, this is what I had envisioned this is what I dreamt of. The end when somebody brings the baby's adoption papers. She says, what's that. Oh, I forgot all about that. I mean she forgot all about this baby that she was just taken on. So even in the best of teachers, we see that the motives are always so pure. Right, so the kind of difference in pedagogy between the teacher who inspires and somehow is almost like self sacrificing for the student, but that in other cases, where they are little classroom dictators, right and it's about enforcing conformity of thought and of behavior, and how that tension seems to be recurring and so much of the work that you're looking at. So I think of a teacher for us to admire Sarah rules play max letters from max a ritual. And in that play. She talks about being a student, as well as being a teacher. So I think that that might be an example of good teaching. Okay, good. Just to know a bit more about your inspiration. You talk about being the child of teachers. But as you were writing this book, did it cause you to reflect on your own practice as a teacher. Well, I should say that as I mentioned, in some ways I identify with Miss Jean roadie as a teacher. First, last and always, as a child. My mother told me that I used to create lesson plans. And, you know, she was impressed with my lesson plans. But that's the surest way to not be a popular kid. In the neighborhood, children would be around. Oh, look, there's Jimmy Wilson. Is that a lesson plan is carrying run. So it did. As I was writing this I was also thinking about me as a teacher about as they say, my love for teachers. And many of these teachers. I felt I knew they could because I had taught high school for a number of years. I've taught college so some of them. I felt that I knew them. And sometimes so myself in them. So I mean, because I feel like one of the things that you point out about these teachers whether they're seen as really noble inspirational figures or whether they're seen as horrific monsters who are ruining children. They're charismatic. They're good characters. And so this kind of sense of this figure that represents so much about what is other right or wrong in our society. Being an object of theatricality. You mentioned briefly the fact that in many of these plays, the audience is cast as students in the theater for this class. There are other ways that you feel like this is inherently a theatrical dynamic because you know we could obviously talk about teachers and cinema and novels and so forth. Can you talk about the specific theatricality of what you were looking at and what you found. Yeah. Well, I think I kind of alluded to it. One of the things that these teachers often bring to mind is the idea of the cult of the teacher. And so somebody like Miss Jean Brody who I keep going back to tonight. I mean, she's a horrifying, scary person, but especially if you've seen Maggie Smith in the movie, I mean, you can't help but fall in love with this woman you know are angry with the assassin. But so I think that's part of it. And I think to your point to I mean teaching is I mean it goes without saying is a performative profession. And so, many of these characters exemplify those qualities of that charismatic teacher as you mentioned. Good I mean as you were talking about Maggie Smith I was thinking about the fact that so many of these roles that they're really like tour de force roles for some great actors so like we got to see you know like Ethel Barrymore thinking of like you know Alan Bates and but Lee. Are there any performances here that you wish you could have seen on stage. Certainly Ethel Barrymore. Okay, certainly Jessica Tandy in streetcar. I did see a stop Parsons and Miss Marguerita's way she did a revival of it in 1990 so I was able to see that performance. I'm trying to think, oh, I, you know, I've never seen Sister Merrick natious on stage. And now I know. So that's what. So we'll have to work on a revival. Cherry Jones you available. We'll contact her. I'm curious. Actually, no, we should open it up to the audience now. Yeah, we know almost one additional question as a German I course I have to ask it if you go look back at the theater as an educational institution the ideas of lessing good to Schiller. Do you see theater as an educational institution is it the teacher of society. It can be the place I'm looking at or not in general. But I do think that first of all I should say for my own experience. All I know comes from the theater. I mean, anything I know about American history for instance is because I saw in musicals or plays. So I do think that yes, if very much serves that purpose. Yeah, maybe you handed over I just want to point out we did an adaptation of the children's our request the court material at the time and the game marriage but was finally allowed officially in the United States and and there was a discussion afterwards in the play and we liked it so much that actually Jim in the play which we printed is a character on stage as a teacher. So you're part of that legacy but let's now go to the audience and I will come and would like to ask you to maybe short introduce yourself and also speak into the mic. Since the evening is recorded on how around and we also would like to welcome all our guests on that national platform that so greatly supports work the seals and other many others. No. Hi, I mean, I was lucky enough to read a bit of your book and it's really wonderful. I was wondering if you could sort of elucidate what you think the role theater has and national conversations of history and politics etc you sort of touched on that but what do you think is the role. I don't know if it has a defined role I think that assume that it takes on a role. I do think that this is a place for us. The theater is a place to test ideas and to show experiences that people don't get to experience so in terms of entering the political discourse I think it has a very important purpose in that regard. Hi, I'm Philip. Oh, that's loud. Um, while you were speaking Jim I was thinking of the play I had seen years and years ago off Broadway and I'm wondering if you touch on it in your book it was called the primary English class with Diane Keaton. Are you drawing a blank. I'm drawing a blank Diane Keaton. Yes, it was that whatever that theater was on McJugos. Does anyone remember that. It was with Diane Keaton. Okay, I don't know. I don't know that play. You stumped me. Hi, my name is Mitch. My sister was a teacher for 30 years, and she retired when she could because she said the role of parents had changed so much over that 30 years. And I know that is touched on in some place like in the children's hour there's that horrible mother. Do you find because I didn't realize you had also taught high school has that it does that affect college professors as well the role of parents of the students or is is that does that sort of stop when when you're My students generally not. Particularly the CUNY students I teach for instance at LaGuardia. Many of them are first generation college students. So parents that the problem is the parents are not involved enough because they don't know how to. I taught my first election my second high school teaching position was that a very suburban very good school. And I used to say that the students weren't the problem. The parents were the problem because if the student got an A minus. The parent would be calling you how much how's my student going to get into Yale or Harvard within a minus. So, I encountered that as a high school teacher. Kevin, when you were doing your research, do you find any teachers who didn't fit neatly into one into one category. Yes, a lot. Actually, and is Asya here. Asya was my graduate student assistant last year and Asya helped me put together a an appendix at the end and they're about 300 plays with teachers in them. Some of the teachers weren't quite honestly very interesting so I didn't pursue those and some just I didn't know how to actually talk about them, or they were repetitive of other teachers. Hi, this is Casey. I have a sort of two questions. The first, I don't know if you touch on this in the book, but several of the performances you've mentioned tonight have become movies and been sort of frozen and I'm thinking of, you know, Children's Hour, Virginia Woolf, things like that. I'm wondering if you find that that portrayal either changes or becomes more fixed like if there are differences there. And then secondly, I'm wondering about teachers in musical theater. I'm thinking about Mrs. Anna but I'm wondering what you found there. Well, I think, as Jordan had mentioned, I mean, part of the pleasure of seeing a lot of these plays about teachers on stage is their life and teachers in real life are, as I've already mentioned, bodies and so even though they may not explicitly break the fourth wall, there is that particular experience. I never saw Vanessa Redgrave or Zoe Caldwell, but I've already mentioned Maggie Smith. I cannot imagine anybody doing that part better than Maggie Smith. In terms of musicals, one of the ones actually you'd mentioned, King and I, but I was thinking about Matilda Matilda is a really interesting show I know it's based on Roald Dahl's novel. But that has a couple of very familiar versions of the teacher. Mrs. Trunchbull or Ms. Trunchbull is the typical spinster, man-ish character. And then you have Miss Honey, who is the very self-sacrificing also unmarried single woman but very motherly. I'll just mention this. I mean, the fact that you do touch on musical theater in the book, but also some things that we didn't get to so far is like you actually take us back even to like Aristophanes and to Shakespeare. And widen the scope even further in terms of like the way that these archetypes are functioning in a variety of different genres and a variety of different arrows. Hi, Professor Wilson. My name is Brittany Vickers, and I was fortunate enough to come from your class today where we were speaking about this and we had a nice warm up. It really was. And I have two questions for you. The first is, we were speaking about the relationship between teachers and students. And I'm curious how that relationship has changed over the course of your 30 years of teaching. And that might be a difficult question, but have you seen a change? And if so, what is that? Very interesting question. Again, because I'm now primarily, right now primarily working with graduate students, it's a very different relationship with students. One of the things that kind of saddens me about where teaching has gone, teachers are terrified of touching a student, for instance. And I remember that when I was in school, sometimes teachers would hug the students. And now, from what I understand, that's not something one does. So I think there's a fear that I could be overstating it, but I think there's more of a fear of the student than there had been for a number of different reasons in terms of the school shootings or accusations, etc. Thank you. That's a wonderful question. I agree. A question for the world. Now, I'm just having a lot of memories as you speak. But the last thing I'm going to ask you, I was thinking about teachers a great deal today that have touched me on an emotional level. I'm curious if you have a lesson that stayed with you from a teacher that you've had. And if so, what is it? I would say, probably the teacher who had the greatest effect on me was Mrs. Albany's in third grade. And first of all, she was just such a warm woman. I just remember her smiling, big laugh. But she also saw me as this kind of kooky kid. I have to say, I was not a very good student. I was just too scattered. But that year in third grade, she directed a production of The Wizard of Oz and cast me as the scarecrow. And so that was one of those, I would say, life changing moments because at that point I could see how theater and school could come together. And then of course theater is why it was something we talked about in class this evening. But theater was my safe space in high school. Hi, Jim. So I'm very interested in the differences you found between depictions of teachers, meaning 12 and K through 12, and professors, especially because for women, as you kind of mentioned, teaching has always been a professional option. In American history, like that's your professional option of teacher and nurse, right? But women breaking into becoming professors is much more recent. And if you saw any vestiges of that or any differences in terms of gender. I'm sorry. In terms of differences between women's school teachers or women professors. Yes. And also male school teachers and male professors in terms of how they're gendered. Well, first of all, I will say that most of the male professors, not all of the male professors are, as I mentioned, not great people. I mean, you think about Virginia Woolf, the male professors in that play. And you think about Butler, for instance, they tend to be drunk. They tend to be just cruel with their students. Women, you get the sense that they have to work even harder. And somebody like Vivian Bering in wit, for instance, in order for her to compete with her male colleagues. She has to pretty much sublimate any of her humanity and any of her personal life. So that's something that I also noticed that a lot of the women professor characters are pretty much defined by their job. As I said, almost all single Heidi does. I know that many feminists were really angry with that play, but Heidi wants to try to have it all by having a baby at the end, but still not, still without a partner. I mean, it's interesting just made the connection between Miss Moffat and Heidi that both of these plays and with the woman holding a baby. Well, Miss Moffat's not holding her baby. She's forgotten about the baby. Oh yeah. But yes, it's true. They both end with the baby. Hi, I'm Erica Lynn. Jim, I'm really struck by how subversive your book actually is compared to how depressing the title is. And I'm wondering if you can speak a little bit in about your process in selecting out of 300 some odd plays in your appendix, the case studies that you ended up focusing on, and then whether you went in with a lens that was intending to be so well, I called it subversive, but it's also it's a deeply feminist, right, and deeply, you know, a homophilic reading and also attentive I saw from some of your examples to issues of race. So did you go in with a lens? And was that part of your selection principle? And did that result in failure and fascism? And was that an unexpected outcome of the choices that you made? Interesting. In terms of the choices, I, because of my own background in gender and sexuality studies, I went into it actually the first chapter that I wrote was the queer chapter focusing on those characters. And one of the, I think what actually oftentimes happened was, I started looking at one play. So for instance, Children's Hour. And then as I was looking at Children's Hour, I said, Oh, this has a connection to girls in uniform. So oftentimes those connections revealed themselves to me. The other choice that I often made, as I said, I'm also very interested in education history and one of the books that I had read recently is Jackie Blount's book about women in the profession. So oftentimes I would read the theory and I was able to see how it relates to a particular place. So oftentimes the plays found me through the theories or through the histories. Thank you. Hi, I'm Tori. I also just came from Professor Melsen's class. Something I noticed throughout the time periods is the sexualization of teachers from either like the sexless spinster or the over sexualized like seducer of students. So I'm curious how this image of the teacher and how we sexualize specifically women teachers. How do you think that ties into some of the fear and panic that's going on today, perhaps with queer women teachers or being an example, an adult example of some sort of perverse sexuality. And I think you're absolutely right that that is an issue that pervades a lot of the plays. And I think that the plays reflect that cultural both the fetishization of teachers, but also the fear of teachers. I think that one of the things that runs through history is the fact that, as I mentioned in my presentation, parents were giving their children to the teachers. So there was a great deal of fear that with that closeness. They could use, they could groom to use an awful term that we have now. So I think that closeness is a particular fear even I mentioned David Mamet was a pig. He had said last year that men teachers are drawn to teaching because they're naturally pedophiles. So and Randy Winegarten really gave it to him. But yeah, and I think not only in terms of sexualization, but also ideology. So that's another reason why the fear of the communist infiltration that because the teacher has so much power, they can influence the child. I appreciate that question so much because I think it does bring us to the contemporary right that if you just even put the word teachers into the New York Times search you will get article after article about a teacher being fired or being disciplined for teaching about gender and sexuality for teaching about race, or even just still like being morally unfit that teachers can still be dismissed from this in certain cases in institutions and so it seemed to me that your book is also quite timely. That reflects on a history that we are still living in the reverberations of and so I'm curious to hold this beautiful book in your hand now and see okay here we are now in November of 2023. So probably you could not have predicted while writing the book. Right. Is there anything that has struck you particularly about where we are now. I'm upset. I mean I think that it's very difficult to be a teacher at this time I mean teachers are quite literally under attack when we see that the nation is doing nothing about these continued mass shootings. Also, teachers are being attacked, because they're foisting books on children that deal with sexuality that they parents don't think that they should be reading. But as I said also, I'm also very concerned about the political time period and I think that if the presidency changes next year, one of the first places that we'll see it affecting is education. So we are already seeing what DeSantis is doing in Florida, for instance with new college. So, sorry to end it on this down or no, but sorry but I want to take that from Matilda. But to take that to the up note the fact that you have found, you know, so much richness in this material from history that really does make us reflect on our society and to me that book does make a statement and it's a powerful statement and that to me is a beautiful thing to celebrate. Thank you. So thank you and I hope you can all stay for a little celebration we have some drinks and some libations and something to each so again thank you Jim and thank you Jordan.