I am always somewhat put off when I hear someone say disdainfully, "I don't watch TV." We all know the tone, and we all know the implication. "I would not deign to sully my mind with the banal . . . ." Well, to my mind, The PBS Newshour is reason enough to have TV. Not only is the news coverage excellent, with its extended conversations with people in the news, but the program has given me a number of ideas that found their way into my teaching.

On June 8 of last year, the Newshour reported on the play Charlie Victor Romeo, by a New York theatrical company called Collective: Unconscious. Charlie VictorRomeo is aviation parlance for the cockpit voice recorder for conversations between the crew flying a plane and the air traffic controllers. The play was a series of skits comprised of edited transcripts of cockpit voice recordings from commercial airliners that crashed. It may sound gruesome, but it is not.

The play begins with a stewardess giving the audience the customary preflight safety instructions. Then we focus on a flight crew sitting at the controls of a plane in flight. We watch as things go awry, turning a normal flight into an emergency. The focus of each skit is not the crash,which the audience never sees, but the drama of the human interactions as each crew reacts to the sequence of events leading up to the crash.

Even watching just small parts of the skits on the Newshour, I could feel the tension. We watch and listen as the measured cadences of professionals performing duties that have become routine, or cockpit banter tinged with sexual overtones, turn to concern and then alarm and at times abject panic as the possibility and then the inevitability of a crash becomes clear to the crew.

The Newshour segment showed us not only the actors transporting us to the extremes of human emotion, but the theater audience feeling the emotional shifts, as well. A pilot who had been a member of the audience for the play spoke on camera at the end of it. He had seen the play before, and he said he was initially curious about it after reading about it in the newspaper.

But he was convinced, he said, that no group of actors (and none of these actors had any flying experience) could be convincing in these scenes. He had never been convinced by such portrayals in films, he added. So, he decided to see for himself, and he said that as he sat in the theater and watched the various situations going sour, he could feel his heart beating faster.

A military academy instructor took his students to the play to give them a sense of the pace and feel of events as things move toward an accident in the air. One of the cadets was struck by the pace of things. They had read transcripts from crashed planes in her class, and she said that process could take hours. She was amazed at how quickly things went from normalcy to disaster in the play.

I taped that Newshour, and I was convinced that somehow I could use Charlie VictorRomeo in school. I didn't know how, but I knew there was something in these mesmerizing skits-this knitting together of actual recordings of human speech-that represented a vein an English teacher could mine.

Now I think I have found a use for this play. I am experimenting with it in my American Literature seminar, an elective class our students may take after the required tenth-grade American Literature class. I began this experiment with Edgar Lee Masters' Spoon River Anthology. Many readers will know this work, which is made up of monologues by some 200 people buried in the Spoon River cemetery.

As one after another of them speaks to us, Masters gradually weaves a tapestry of the town. The dead are free to speak their minds as they could not in life, so we learn a good deal about these people's inner lives. We learn about aspirations, realized or blunted, old grudges and misunderstandings, and fond recollections, and we learn about some of the connections between these former citizens of Spoon River.

Roscoe Purkapile, forexample, tells us of how he tired of his marriage and ran away for a year "on a lark." When he returned, he told his wife he had been captured by pirates on Lake Michigan and kept in chains, so he could not write. Then Mrs. Purkapile tells us that, "he told me the silly story of being kidnapped by pirates on Lake Michigan . . . " but she refused to be drawn into a divorce.

Elsa Wertman came to Spoon River as a peasant girl from Germany and went to work for the Thomas Greene family. One day, Mr. Greene raped her, and Elsa bore him a son. Mrs. Greene said she would make no trouble for Elsa and raised the boy, Hamilton, as her own.

Hamilton Greene grew up to become a judge, a member of Congress, and a leader in the state. Whenwe hear him speak, he thanks his parents for what they imparted to him. From his father he says, he inherited "will, judgment, logic"from his mother, "vivacity, fancy, language." He has no idea of his connection to Elsa Wertman, who used to listen to his public speeches and long to say, "That's my son! That's my son!"

First, I explained the premise of Spoon River to my seminar students, and I read them "The Hill," Masters' prologue to the anthology. Then I handed out various ones of the speeches I had photocopied. From a"script" I had made for myself, I called out the names of the characters, and the kids read the parts out loud. As we heard the various pieces, they began to see how the town accreted and how the connections between characters began to show up and make sense.

Next, I showed the kids the Newshour segment on Charlie Victor Romeo. We talked about the skits and discussed how the cockpit voice recorder transcripts provided the actors with the raw material for "found dramas," not fiction pieces but plays created by editing actual speech. I told them I wanted them to create some found dramas of their own to perform for the class.

To provide them the raw material for their pieces, I gave each a copy of Studs Terkel's Working People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do. This book, published in 1972, is a vast collection of oral histories of Americans doing an astonishing number of different kinds of work. We hear housewives and secretaries, bartenders and musicians,stewardesses and bankers, farmers and prostitutes, talking about their work. Taken together, they form a tapestry of life in America 30 years ago.

I divided my class up into groups of five or six students. Then I had the class meet in these groups for two days. The job of the groups was to read around in Terkel's book to acquaint themselves with anumber of the pieces and then to identify a theme or idea of some kind that could act as a focal point for their found dramas.

I told them to approach this with an open mind to consider a number of ways to link various oral histories. They might decide to link characters doing similar kinds of work. They might find characters in various lines who liked their jobs. They might find a group of characters who hated their jobs. They might focus on what they saw as some sort of social injustice represented bythe disparity between the working conditions and incomes of people in different kinds of jobs.

At the same time, they were to decide on the specific oral histories they would use in their found dramas. The next step would be to edit the pieces (pare them down and tie them together) to a suitable length to construct their plays. I told them they should feel free to intersperse the various characters' speeches. That is, their plays did not necessarily have to be just a series of monologues. They could cut the oral histories up and weave them together, so the various pieces .speak" to each other.

As the final step in the writing (if we can call it that), someone in the group was to write a narrator's part, a voice that would serve to introduce the plays and characters and helpthe audience seethe work as an organic whole.

That is as far as we have progressed with this project. They have just given me their scripts for my reactions. I have only glanced at them so far, but my first impression is that the individual pieces are generally too long. To sustain audience interest and give the plays the sense that the various parts speak to each other, individual speeches need to be relatively short, and they need to intercut.

I will also be interested to see if they have arranged the parts to create some sort of dramatic structure. John Gardner tells us in TheAn of Fiction that stories need to be profluent, to move forward. lam hoping my students can make their found dramas profluent. To do this, they will have to arrange the pieces together in an artful way, so that they somehow build on each other and lead somewhere. At the end, we should have some sense of completion. I haven't talked with the kids about this yet. One step at a time.

The final step in this project will be for the various groups to "perform" their found dramas for the class. I suppose we will do this by having the students sitting at the front of the room in chairs as they recite their pieces for us.

This is where an English teacher could use the help of a drama teacher. I would prefer that our found dramas be performed on a stage with the kids sitting on stools. The stage could be blacked out, and a spotlight could light up each of the characters in turn as she or he spoke.

This kind of project should also work well in other classes. I easily found several oral histories about World War II. Among them are: Japan at War by Haruko Taya Cook, The Good War: An Oral History of World War Two by Studs Terkel, America's Invisible Gulag: A Biography of German American Internment & Exclusion in World War ff by Stephen Fox, and And Justice for All: An Oral History of the Japanese American Detention Camps, edited by John Tateishi. I also found collections of oral histories about the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, immigrants in America, and the AIDS epidemic.

All of these seem to me to offer refreshing research opportunities as an alternative to the dog-eared and dreaded-but frequently required-research paper.

Dudley Barlow teaches English at Plymouth Canton High School, Canton, Michigan. (e-mail: dbarlow@eddigest.com)

Copyright Prakken Publications, Inc. Feb 2001

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