Pentagon Bans Books from Base Schools

 

[The Pentagon has attempted to ban books from schools on military bases, citing concerns over “divisive concepts” and “gender ideology,” leading to the removal of titles about race, gender, and LGBTQ+ issues.  A federal judge ordered these books to be returned to the shelves, however, ruling that the removals were not based on pedagogical concerns but on improper partisan motivation, National Public Radio reports.  The affected schools serve the children of military personnel, and the initial bans impacted a wide range of materials, from children’s books to Advanced Placement psychology texts, according to the American Civil Liberties Union.] 

“PENTAGON’S ATTEMPT TO BAN BOOKS FROM BASE SCHOOLS
FACES BACKLASH FROM MILITARY FAMILIES”
by Nick Schifrin, Dan Sagalyn, and Morgan Till

[On 6 February 2025, the Department of Defense Education Activity (DoDEA, the Pentagon agency responsible for planning, directing, coordinating, and managing pre-kindergarten through 12th-grade educational programs), announced it would remove books related to “gender ideology or discriminatory equity ideology topics” from its schools.

[The DoD stated that the books were “incompatible with the department’s core mission” and cited the need to remove “divisive concepts.”  The order affected more than 100 schools serving children of active-duty and civilian military personnel, reports the ACLU.  (The action was a direct result of the overarching Pentagon directive to eliminate materials related to diversity, equity, and inclusion [DEI], as were earlier operations in the libraries of the service academies.)  The approximately 596 books and 41 curricular materials removed included books with “left-leaning ideology” on topics like racism, gender identity, LGBTQ+ history, and even some civics and historical texts. 

[Titles removed included Julián Is a Mermaid by Jessica Love, Alice Oseman’s graphic novel series Heartstopper, Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You by Jason Reynolds, as well as such well-known and award-winning titles as Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury, The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini, Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, and Maya Angelou’s autobiographical I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.

[The policy also resulted in the cancellation of cultural observances like Black History Month and Pride Month events, and the removal of posters of historical figures like Mexican artist Frida Kahlo and First Lady Michelle Obama.  The effort faced significant backlash from military families, free speech advocates, and organizations like PEN America, who characterized the actions as sweeping and ideologically driven censorship.

[The ACLU filed a lawsuit on behalf of students in DoDEA schools, reports Virginia Mercury, an independent, nonprofit online news organization covering Virginia state government and policy.

[On 20 October 2025, a federal judge in the Eastern District of Virginia in Alexandria ruled in favor of the students, ordering the immediate return of the removed books and materials.  In the “Memorandum Opinion,” the judge wrote that DoD “violated Plaintiffs’ First Amendment rights by removing library books at DoDEA schools and making changes to curricular material in implementation of various Presidential Executive Orders.”  The judge stated the removals were not for pedagogical concerns but were motivated by “improper partisan motivation.”  As a result of the ruling, the books are being returned to the school libraries.

[(Here I remind readers that on numerous occasions, both on Rick On Theater and elsewhere, I’ve acknowledged that I am as near a First Amendment absolutist as you can get.  I hold with the character Stephen Hopkins, the irascible delegate to the Continental Congress from Connecticut in the musical 1776, who says: “Well, I’ll tell y’—in all my years I never heard, seen, nor smelled an issue that was so dangerous it couldn’t be talked about. . . .  Hell yes, I’m for debatin’ anything . . . !”)

[The federal judge’s preliminary injunction is limited only to the five schools on U.S. military bases in Virginia, Kentucky, Italy, and Japan attended by the plaintiffs in the lawsuit.  This decision was based on a recent Supreme Court ruling that limits the ability of lower courts to issue nationwide injunctions.  The ACLU is exploring options to expand the scope of the injunction to all 161 DoDEA schools worldwide.

[The preliminary injunction is not the final ruling on the entire case; a hearing on the full merits of the lawsuit will follow.  DoDEA and the Department of Defense are still involved in the active litigation and have generally declined to comment on specifics while the case is pending.

[The transcript below is from the PBS News Hour segment on 23 October 2025.]

Geoff Bennett [Co-anchor of “PBS News Hour”]: The Trump administration made it clear from its earliest days this year that it wanted to change the culture of the U.S. military. One effort targeted books about race, gender and sexuality in the libraries of military-based schools that service members’ children attend.

But, this week, a federal judge ruled that the books taken off the shelves had to be returned and the curriculum of the military changed had to be restored.

Before the ruling, Nick Schifrin and producer Dan Sagalyn traveled outside Fort Campbell, Kentucky, to speak to military families that fought through the courts for our series Art in Action, exploring the intersection of art and democracy, part of our Canvas coverage.

Jessica Henninger, Military Spouse [in a park with her children]: I can read to you while you eat your snackie.

Nick Schifrin: For Jessica Henninger, reading is fundamental.

Jessica Henninger [reading]: “A perfect plan, you say? A perfect way to spend the day?” [From Mac and Cheese and the Perfect Plan by Sarah Weeks (Harper, 2012).]

Nick Schifrin: And she’s tried to spend her days reading with her kids to help them better understand the world.

Jessica Henninger: Mac says: “I will get some milk for you.” Cheese says: “Let’s take some crackers too.”

Girl [Henninger’s daughter]: Yes, that’s what we have.

Jessica Henninger: You do have crackers.

I remember as a child growing up in a very small community. Books were really the only opportunity that I had to open up my world to different ideas and things outside of what I understood.

Nick Schifrin: Henninger is a soldier’s spouse and the parent of five . . .

Jessica Henninger: If it gets scary, let me know.

Nick Schifrin:  . . . who let us visit her family near Fort Campbell recently as long as we kept the kids anonymous. She supported her five children through play and education.

All of them are attending or graduating from Defense Department elementary and high schools, no matter where they have been based, from Kentucky to Vicenza, Italy.

Jessica Henninger: Our kids have consistently gotten a fantastic education, no matter where we have been stationed. And to just really be immersed in that diversity, I think, is a wonderful strength of what we have in the military.

Man [at a graduation ceremony]: I now declare you graduates of Fort Campbell High School.

Nick Schifrin: The Defense Department runs 161 schools across 10 time zones, with 67,000 children of service members and civilian department employees. Classes run from pre-K through 12th grade.

Man: The military may choose where we go, but we choose what we do to make our lives meaningful. [He was off camera, but sounded like a young man, probably a graduating senior addressing his classmates.]

Jessica Henninger: I always vetted out the education systems when we would move places to make sure that my children had a top-notch education and that they were going to be set up for success later on in life. And so that is part of the reason why I got involved in this lawsuit.

Nick Schifrin: In April, Henninger and five other military families serving on three continents filed a lawsuit against the Department of Defense’s Education Activity, or DoDEA, for — quote — “quarantining library books and whitewashing curricula,” calling it — quote — “systemwide censorship.”

Among 596 books the schools removed, Ta-Nehisi Coates’s “Between the World and Me,” Isabel Wilkerson’s “Caste,” and the AP psychology textbook, which has a gender and sex module, also removed, “A Queer History of the United States for Young People” [Michael Bronski], “When a Bully is President: Truth and Creativity for Oppressive Times” [Maya Christina Gonzalez], and “You-Ology: A Puberty Guide for EVERY Body” [Melisa Holmes].

The schools also removed portions of the middle school sex education course.

Jessica Henninger: The determination about what is appropriate for our children to consume in the libraries and the curriculum has always been left up to the experts, the people in the school who cultivate the libraries and the curriculum.

And I think that’s where it should be. Teaching an awareness of where we came from and making sure that we don’t make those same mistakes again, that’s not political. That’s education.

Nick Schifrin:  At this point, are you considering removing your kids from DoDEA or have you heard of any cases of families thinking, you know what, we want out of the system?

Jessica Henninger: I had a very serious conversation with my husband where I told him that if our children’s education seemed like it was going to be hijacked by political ideation, that I would not feel comfortable keeping our children in the DoDEA system.

That’s a heavy conversation to have to have with your significant other who is in the military and doesn’t have a choice in where they go. Potentially talking about splitting up your family, it’s heavy.

Donald Trump, President of the United States [video clip of a speech at the Congressional Institute]: It will stop our service members from being indoctrinated with radical left ideologies [House Republican Conference, 27 January 2025].

Nick Schifrin: The changes come from a series of January executive orders that targeted — quote — “un-American, divisive, discriminatory, radical, extremist and irrational theories, divisive concepts that American founding documents are racist or sexist and gender ideology.”

And in a court filing, the administration wrote: “The curriculum and book reviews were undertaken to implement DoDEA’s current pedagogical approach to teaching schoolchildren regarding gender and sexuality and to better promote an inclusive environment” and — quote — “Curating a library collection or developing a teaching curriculum is an act of government speech. It is therefore not subject to rigorous scrutiny under the First Amendment’s free speech clause.”

Corey Shapiro, Legal Director, ACLU of Kentucky: This is a public school. They are entitled to the same First Amendment rights as any student in any public school in this country. It’s always important to shine a light on what the government is doing.

Nick Schifrin: Corey Shapiro is the American Civil Liberty Union’s Kentucky legal director and one of the lawyers who sued DoDEA and Secretary Pete Hegseth.

Their focus is what they call war fighting. Their focus is on removing what they see as an ideology. If that’s how they think, don’t they have the right to say, well, we believe that this is a threat to our kids and we’re in charge of the system, so therefore we can change it?

Corey Shapiro: What they don’t necessarily have the right to do and the First Amendment protects is a student’s ability to access that information. And in the library in particular, the idea that the government can somehow determine what ideas can and cannot be even just accessed by students, that’s where the First Amendment steps in and protects those kids’ ability to access that information.

Nick Schifrin: This week, the court agreed, writing — quote — “The implementation process of book removals appears to this court to be inconsistent, unstructured and nontransparent.”

The judge ordered the books returned and the curricula restored, but only in the five schools listed in the lawsuit. It’s not clear yet if the administration will appeal, but this is a larger fight for Secretary Pete Hegseth.

Pete Hegseth, U.S. Defense Secretary: I remember coming home from public school in like 10th grade and saying: “Dad, why is Ronald Reagan always the bad guy in the textbooks?” [On an episode of the Shawn Ryan Show, 7 November 2024. The Shawn Ryan Show is a podcast that features interviews with military personnel and veterans.]

Nick Schifrin: Long before he became secretary, Hegseth criticized government education as too liberal.

Pete Hegseth: I grew up in a conservative, God-fearing regular old small-town America Minnesota, because the textbooks are written by lefties in New York City. Get your kids out of government school systems right now, if you can, if you have any way. Save money, move, get a second job, don’t take the vacation, sell the boat, whatever, drive for Uber.

Figure out what you need to do to get your kid out of the government school system because it’s about saving your kid right now.

Nick Schifrin: For Henninger and her family, they have to believe in government schools because it comes with their choice to serve the country. After graduating from a DoDEA school, their oldest daughter joined the military.

Jessica Henninger: My children have the same rights to freedom of education as every other student in this country. Just because their father is in the military doesn’t make their rights any less important.

Nick Schifrin: For the “PBS News Hour,” I’m Nick Schifrin in Clarksville, Tennessee [home of Fort Campbell].

[Nick Schifrin is PBS News Hour’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Correspondent. He leads News Hour’s daily foreign coverage, including multiple trips to Ukraine since the full-scale invasion, and has created weeklong series for the News Hour from nearly a dozen countries.

[The PBS News Hour series “Inside Putin’s Russia” won a 2017 Peabody Award and the National Press Club’s Edwin M. Hood Award for Diplomatic Correspondence. In 2020 Schifrin received the American Academy of Diplomacy’s Arthur Ross Media Award for Distinguished Reporting and Analysis of Foreign Affairs. He was a member of the News Hour teams awarded a 2021 Peabody for coverage of COVID-19, and a 2023 duPont Columbia Award for coverage of Afghanistan and Ukraine.

[Prior to PBS News Hour, Schifrin was Al Jazeera America’s Middle East correspondent. He led the channel’s coverage of the 2014 war in Gaza; reported on the Syrian war from Syria’s Turkish, Lebanese and Jordanian borders; and covered the annexation of Crimea. He won an Overseas Press Club award for his Gaza coverage and a National Headliners Award for his Ukraine coverage.

[From 2008-2012, Schifrin served as the ABC News correspondent in Afghanistan and Pakistan. In 2011 he was one of the first journalists to arrive in Abbottabad, Pakistan, after Osama bin Laden’s death and delivered one of the year’s biggest exclusives: the first video from inside bin Laden’s compound. His reporting helped ABC News win an Edward R. Murrow award for its bin Laden coverage.

[Schifrin is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and a board member of the Overseas Press Club Foundation. He has a Bachelor’s degree from Columbia University and a Master of International Public Policy degree from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS).

[As the deputy senior producer for foreign affairs and defense at the PBS News Hour, Dan Sagalyn plays a key role in helping oversee and produce the program’s foreign affairs and defense stories. His pieces have broken new ground on an array of military issues, exposing debates simmering outside the public eye.

[Morgan Till is the Senior Producer for Foreign Affairs and Defense (Foreign Editor) at the PBS News Hour, a position he has held since late 2015. He was for many years the lead foreign affairs producer for the program, traveling frequently to report on war, revolution, natural disasters and overseas politics. During his seven years in that position he reported from—among other places—Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria, Lebanon, Turkey, Egypt, Israel, Palestine, Ukraine, Russia, Georgia, Haiti, South Korea, Brazil, Mexico, Canada and widely throughout Europe.]

"Are the Arts a Luxury?"

by K.C. Boyle

[Once again I find myself republishing an article from the magazine of the musician’s union. Local 802’s Allegro has so often shared my views lately, on a number of topics related to the arts and culture, that it’s become something of a surprise when an issue arrives without an article that I want to reuse. Last September, K. C. Boyle, the Public Relations and Political Director of Local 802, expressed the union’s position on the war on culture in the city budget arena and its unpleasant repercussions for the arts in our schools. ROT readers will know that this is subject about which I have strong feelings. (See my own “Degrading the Arts,” 13 August 2009; and “Disappearing Theater,” 19 July 2010; as well as Bob Youngblood’s “The Theater Problem in Education,” 21 November 2011; and "The Arts Are Under Attack (Again!)" by Paul Molloy (also from Allegro), 22 May 2011. ~Rick]

Of course not – but it's time the city woke up and realized it.

When times are bad, teachers and the arts make easy targets. True to form, New York City has indeed cut spending on education during this recession. However, this has not gone down without a fight. There have been fierce battles between concerned teachers, parents and elected officials.

In the end, the city’s budget cuts did not produce teacher layoffs but still resulted in a 2.4 percent average cut to the city’s schools.

Although it is not entirely clear which programs each individual school will cut right now, watchdog groups such as the Center for Arts Education have concluded that art and music education are the most likely to see a decrease in funding. Furthermore, in June, the center released a study that indicates arts education has become a clear target for spending cuts at the Department of Education.

According to the study, funds for musical instruments and arts supplies have dropped by nearly 80 percent or $8.4 million over the last four years. In addition, the study also found that 23 percent of New York City public schools have no full or part-time licensed art teachers.

"Schools are really disinvesting in a well-rounded rich curriculum that provides students with less of an opportunity to develop innovative and critical thinking skills," said Doug Israel, the director of research and policy at the Center for Arts Education. Israel also pointed out "New York City Public Schools are only spending on average $2 per student on art supplies and musical instruments. So the question is, what can you really buy with $2? A pack of guitar strings or a box of crayons?"

In the city that many consider to be the art and music capital of the world, there is no shortage of advocates speaking out against the city’s current educational policies.

Some critics insist that teachers and principals have been forced to focus more on standardized test scores than on a well-rounded liberal arts education that emphasizes the importance of fine arts and music in addition to standard disciplines such as math and science.

"When principals are being evaluated on performance, the first place people are going to cut are art and music, things they may think are not a part of standard education," said New York City Council member Robert Jackson, who also serves as the chair of the Education Committee.

Despite the decline in arts education spending, Mayor Bloomberg often cites graduation rates – which have risen over 40 percent since 2005 – as an indicator that public schools are heading in the right direction.

Critics believe the majority of the 1.1 million New York City students are unprepared for college. "While we may be moving more students out of high school, they may not necessarily be prepared for that next level of work," said the Center for Arts Education’s Doug Israel.

In June, Mayor Bloomberg himself announced that although graduation rates are on the rise, close to 65 percent of students are still not prepared for college. His conclusion was based on criteria established by the New York State Regents Board which requires students to achieve a score of 80 or above on state exams.

While much can be said about the subjectivity of test scores and statistics, many education advocates point out that students and parents feel that arts education is an essential component to a rich liberal arts education.

"Parents who know about art, know that a well-rounded education is best for students," said Council member Jackson. City officials also acknowledge an uphill battle with funding art education as the nation emerges from a deep recession. With another rocky budget season on the horizon next year, Jackson urges arts advocates to keep the pressure on in an effort to avoid catastrophic cuts next year.

To get involved in these efforts, contact my office at Kboyle@Local802afm.org or (212) 245-4802, ext. 176.

[This story originally appeared in the September 2011 issue of Allegro (111.9), the magazine of the New York City musicians’ union (AFM Local 802). For reprint requests, send an e-mail to editor Mikael Elsila at Allegro@Local802afm.org.]

Max and Gertrud Bondy

[Radical educational reform and experimentation has a mixed history in this country, especially at the liberal end of the spectrum. John Dewey (1859-1952), the American philosopher and psychologist, has arguably had the most influence on progressive theories of teaching and scholastic organization in the United States. His ideas, however, if carried too far or applied injudiciously, can descend into Auntie Mame travesties of self-indulgence or formlessness. As sociologist, poet, writer, and public intellectual Paul Goodman (1911-72) writes: “On the whole, the history of progressive education has not been a cheerful one. Its ideas and methods have been stolen and bastardized precisely to strengthen the dominant system of society rather than to change it.” A few attempts at a new paradigm for educating young people have appeared on the scene from time to time, though most didn’t last very long despite impressive successes in the fields of teaching and learning (usually for reasons more connected to administrative or financial problems, or both). Goodman and, especially, Dewey both were often associated with these schools, one of which, the New School for Social Research in New York City, founded in 1919 (and renamed the New School University in 1997 and then simply the New School in 2005), is still operating successfully. Its more radical cousin, Black Mountain College in Asheville, North Carolina, lasted only 24 years, from 1933 to 1957. Black Mountain was virtually an open educational system where the faculty and students worked in partnership more like masters and apprentices and the teachers were not only educators but often prominent practitioners in their fields, especially in the arts and letters. Black Mountain became a center for arts training during its short existence, but the near absence of an administration, which the founders saw as an impediment to learning and open inquiry, eventually led the school to descend, as historian, essayist, and playwright Martin Duberman described in his study of the experiment, into “little more than a group of squabbling prima donnas.”

[Strangely, though, another, very similar experiment unfolded in the Berkshire Mountains of Massachusetts, directed in this instance at teenagers. The Windsor Mountain School also lasted only a short time, from 1939 to 1975, but it followed many of the same practices as Black Mountain (from which, perhaps not coincidentally, some of the faculty came), with, perhaps, a little more structure and formality—though not much. The founders of the unusual prep school were Max and Gertrud Bondy, World War II refugees from Germany by way of Switzerland, who’d developed their philosophy of education beginning in 1919 in Europe as a response to the growing authoritarianism they saw developing in German society following World War I. I learned of the Bondys and their school when I began doing research into the life and career of Leonardo Shapiro, the innovative stage director I knew in the 1980s and ’90s and about whom I’ve written many times now on ROT. Independent of Leo’s connection to the Bondys and the influence he felt Windsor Mountain, from which he’d graduated in 1963, had had on him, the story of Max and Gertrud Bondy is fascinating and worthy of note. I hope ROT readers will agree. ~Rick]

When Max Bondy (1892-1951), a former art historian, returned to Hamburg in November 1918 after service as an artillery officer with the German Reichsheer in World War I, he saw that his countrymen had become accustomed to cruel behavior toward one another and, especially, to prisoners of war. He decided that this situation had arisen because, as children, the Germans hadn’t been taught “decency and love” but “only to obey.” Bondy saw the German public schools of the day as focusing almost exclusively on obedience and stern discipline. Germany had raised a generation of bullies, cruel to anyone weaker than they. The only way to change this, Bondy decided, was to change the way children were educated. Before the war, Bondy had observed that the young men at universities habitually tormented their younger schoolmates and that their social organizations promoted drinking and found great honor in dueling and bearing scars. Parents treated their sons with extreme strictness but didn’t teach them respect for others. Bondy organized a club in which the aggressive impulses of the members were spent in debating, animated discussion, sports, and mountain climbing. In fact, mountain climbing, an activity which required skill, courage, and daring, but which pitted the men not against one another but against the mountain, served as a metaphor for the kind of non-competitive pursuit the Bondys encouraged.

In 1923, Max Bondy and his Prague-born bride, the former Gertrud Wiener (1889-1977), one of the first female physicians in Germany whom Max had married while she was still in medical school, founded a school, initially in Gandersheim, Lower Saxony, and then in 1929 in Marienau, south of Hamburg, as an alternative to the public schools. Their goal, pursuant to a dream Max Bondy had formed with friends who hadn’t survived the war, was to educate a new kind of German, with a “sense of responsibility, self-respect and the desire to be a new person.” Schule Marienau became one of the first in Germany to establish a student government as the Bondys endeavored to develop an atmosphere of mutual trust and reliance instead of discipline and punishment. “We wanted the students to feel that they could be leaders and be responsible for themselves,” Gertrud Bondy said, “building up a life in the school.” Self-government for the Bondys wasn’t merely meant as a way to inculcate democracy; more importantly for their epistemology, it was intended to direct the students’ energies to productive and beneficial activities. “We have often seen that the most aggressive young person has become the most energetic leader of the group,” explained Max Bondy.

Small at the start, Schule Marienau was organized into groups with each group functioning as a community, the members of which did everything together, for and with one another. Each group of eight to ten students had a teacher as an adviser and an elected student as a peer leader. If two groups developed a dispute, they’d stage mock combat “in the spirit of sportsmanship,” fighting for treehouses which they’d built. Whereas traditional German boarding schools had strict discipline similar to U.S. military schools, reinforcing the sense that there was an authority over the students, Schule Marienau wanted the adolescents to feel they could become leaders and, as Max Bondy phrased it, “self-sufficient people who will take their responsible place in future life.”

In 1931, on the cusp of the National Socialist’s take-over of the German government, Max Bondy said: “We see the standard of the German youth continually declining. His way of thinking gets more and more dependent. One rarely meets a critical, well-educated individual anymore.” Independent thinking and judgment, the Bondys believed, can defeat the mob mentality of suppressive authority, but it should also benefit society by leading its members towards the common good. The educational reformers saw teaching cooperation as “the real antithesis” to Social Darwinism: instead of the notion that “the basis of education is competition,” schools should promote the maxim, “The group that is best able to cooperate and live together has the best right and chance for survival.” A student who didn’t learn the basic lessons of the Bondys’ new community quickly either changed under their guidance or was dismissed from the school.

(I haven’t been able to confirm this, but it sounds as if one of the Bondys' inspirations was Prince Pyotr Alekseyevich Kropotkin, a Russian aristocrat who grew disillusioned with life at the imperial court. Kropotkin, 1842-1921, author of Mutual Aid, insisted that cooperation and mutual assistance are the standard in both nature and human society, attacking Social Darwinists for their view that the world is essentially competitive. Windsor Mountain alumnus Leonardo Shapiro cited Kropotkin as a personal inspiration and I believe that he learned of the Russian anarchist’s philosophy and possibly read Mutual Aid while he was at the school. I don’t know whether the book would have been assigned reading or if precocious students like Shapiro were just encouraged to read such challenging fare. In any case, Kropotkin’s philosophy dovetails with the Bondys’ pedagogical principles.)

When the Nazis came to power in Germany in 1933, the public schools soon began teaching ideas that contradicted what the Bondys believed. The reformers “saw at once that the drive to hurt, both physically and mentally, to indulge people in the wildest cruelty and meanness, all those ‘uneducated’ drives, revealed themselves in the majority of German adults.” Teachers in the state schools, the Bondys believed, ignored the truths established by modern psychology indicating that these kinds of impulses were part of the human constitution—Hitler, explained Max Bondy, hadn’t created these drives—and can’t be eliminated—but they can be “educated.” “Too late for the world it was discovered that . . . if they are not educated,” insisted the Bondys, “they will break through in some way that may damage the world terribly.” Perhaps most significantly to their agenda, the Bondys concluded, “It was not the neurotic or psychopathic; it was the average German whose drives were uneducated.” Max Bondy pointed out that “Hitlerism, Chauvinism, anti-Semitism, freshman hazing, groping, etc., apply to normal average people and not to sick people.”

They saw the enactment of the Nuremberg Laws which discriminated against all kinds of minorities, particularly Jews, and “sanctioned the open display of sadistic drives.” (The Bondys were Jewish by heritage, though they had been baptized as Lutherans in 1924.) The establishment of the concentration camps and the horrors that took place there following on the seizures of the possessions and murders with impunity of members of the outcast groups were anathema to the Bondys and their followers. The Marienau students were shocked at what they saw happening around them and the Bondys saw more clearly the need for education. A few years earlier, Max Bondy noted: “We are observing with fear the decline of the thinking and acting of the majority of the German students into the thinking and acting of mobs. The present public school system seems to be unable to counteract the mob spirit efficiently.” In 1936, Gertrud Bondy, who’d also studied psychoanalysis with Sigmund Freud in Vienna, took as many students as wanted to go and moved them to Gland, Switzerland, on the northwestern shore of Lake Geneva. (Coincidentally, Gland, 17 miles north of Geneva, is only about 11 miles from the town where I went to school one year myself more than 25 years later.) Max stayed in Germany under the impression that the Nazi philosophy couldn’t sustain itself. When he realized he was wrong, he joined his wife in Switzerland in 1937 and they built a new school founded on their old principles.

In 1939, the Bondys emigrated to Windsor, Vermont, and established the Windsor Mountain School based on these same principles the following year. After moving briefly to Manchester, Vermont, the school settled in its final location in Lenox, Massachusetts, in 1943. Upon Max Bondy’s death in 1951, Heinz Bondy (b. 1924) assumed the headmastership of the school, which closed in 1975. (Heinz Bondy’s older sister, Annemarie Roeper, b. 1918, married a man who’d been a student at her parents’ school and came to the U.S. with her husband in advance of the Bondys. The Roepers moved to Detroit where they founded a school dedicated to the education of gifted students. The Roeper School is still operating.) Shapiro described Heinz Bondy as “the voice of leadership, of experience and doubt—tempered idealism.” (Gertrud Bondy, then already over 70, was “the soul of the school.”)

Among the fundamentals of their philosophy was the establishment of a “friendly school”—a description Max Bondy preferred over “progressive school,” which he felt sanctioned the indulgence of a student’s “individual leanings” without considering others’ needs and rights—which fosters an atmosphere of trust among the students and between the students and the adults. This friendliness, the Bondys argue, isn’t mere “practical politeness to keep outside friction to a minimum.” Max Bondy explained:

If the aggressions of a young person express themselves in a wrong way, it is because he feels constantly attacked and his attacks in turn are his self-defense. If this is so, we have to create a community life in which his fears and anxieties are not confirmed by reality. Therefore we try to create an atmosphere which is more friendly than usual in the ordinary life period. We explain to our colleagues why they must really listen when a child talks to them, not only that they must show patience but that they must honestly take the child seriously.

The Bondys’ goal was the development of “mutual recognition, respect, and, if possible, friendship” among everyone in the group and beyond it. They also advocated the “education of the emotions,” a psychologically-based form of instruction aimed at redirecting the aggressiveness that they believed was innate and ineradicable in humans but could be put into constructive efforts. Max Bondy conceded that the existing schools did well enough with the “education for knowledge,” though some could criticize the material taught, he acknowledged. They also succeeded in the “education of behavior,” what we’d call socialization and good citizenship; and there was sufficient “training for acceptance of outside control, punctuality, and tidiness.” (Max Bondy made these claims in Europe in the 1930s; I wonder if he’d still make them today in this country, given the problems identified with the consequences of our public education.) But the Bondys found that “most educators have not even devoted time to a discussion of methods” for training the emotions, which he termed “the main task of education.” “That is a deeper reason for the idea of our self-government,” explained Max Bondy. Having concluded that the German people’s aggressiveness under the Nazis was in part the consequence of the lack of any emotional training, leaving them unable to resist the pull of authoritarianism, the Bondys insisted, “We want to give the young people the possibilities for working out their aggressions in a positive way.”

The “anti” feelings the Bondys saw exercised around them, the prejudices, bigotry, and hatreds of one group for another, they contended were not the result of improper understanding or an intellectual failing of some kind, but the lack of emotional training that impelled the haters and bigots to direct their own fears and anxieties into aggressiveness and violence. The domestic counterparts of this aggression included the tyranny of a parent over the family or the rejection of a child or spouse. The educators also recognized it in less-destructive behavior such as rudeness, hurting others clandestinely, and engaging in gossip and slander. As Max Bondy asserted:

We do not need to believe fatalistically and pessimistically in the hopelessness of human nature when we see these drives which are destructive and a handicap to happiness and joy. We know today that all these drives of hatred and aggression can be tamed through our knowledge of modern psychology. Psychological insight gives a new opportunity for the betterment of education.

The Bondys believed that all children face “disappointments, lack of security, lack of guidance” which “make a child feel lonely, weak, and lost.” As a consequence, the children develop “anxiety, insecurity, and inferiority feelings” which put them “on the defensive,” generating “feelings of hatred and jealousy” so that they act out aggressively by breaking things or hurting animals and other people. As we grow up, most of us learn to suppress the destructive behavior, but the impulse is still there in our psychology, hidden behind the veneer of politeness and socialization.

The friendly atmosphere established at Schule Marienau and later at Windsor Mountain was the key to the emotional training that would assuage those fears and obviate the impulse to violence. What Max Bondy called “the main idea of our school” was to generate an atmosphere where people don’t feel isolated, where they don’t need to defend themselves because no one’s attacking them. If you don’t feel afraid, the reformers believed, you don’t lash out. This is what Max Bondy called the “atmosphere of general friendliness,” the environment that makes “‘laws’ and ‘limitations’ bearable and livable,” referring to the rules the community sets, first, “to transform the child into a well-adjusted social being, and secondly, to enable him to get as much as possible out of life.” The students are also shown that those who are older or stronger, including the teachers and other adults, don’t get more rights or privileges than anyone else; bullying the younger or weaker gains nothing. Even though it seems that this setting doesn’t exist outside of the schools’ campuses or that “hard reality forces feelings of distrust and anxiety,” the Bondys insisted that the practice was still both valid and effective. Max Bondy did grant that the emotional education he advocated was easier to accomplish in small groups like boarding schools of limited size, where an adolescent can get a complete view of the entire community, than in a family, where the family dynamics make it difficult, or large schools, where a less-personal atmosphere exists and the potential for loneliness is greater. He also emphasized that the national, ethnic, and religious mix of the school community like Windsor Mountain was an important element in the emotional training. The reformers asserted that, though it can take years, they had proved in practice that young people will gradually feel less hostile and insecure as they find that others, including adults and even strangers, listen to them and take them seriously.

The education offered at the Bondys’ schools, as well as other forms of instruction, was accomplished as much outside as inside the classroom, in conversations with the adults which were often initiated by everyday events. The idea that adults listen to the children and pay attention to their questions and concerns, whether in class, in formal conferences or meetings, or in casual conversations on the school grounds, was part of the way the friendly campus enables the emotional training. The teachers and other staff of the schools had to learn to listen carefully because the students’ real concern might be disguised as an innocent and even frivolous question or passing remark. Furthermore, the adults were admonished sometimes to come at an issue obliquely, by “philosophizing” with the student or offering academic help and easing into the more fundamental matter. (We can see here the influence of Gertrud Bondy, who we should remember was a trained psychoanalyst.) Teaching at Windsor Mountain (and, I would surmise, at Schule Marienau as well) wasn’t easy, as the faculty had to expose themselves freely to the students’ scrutiny and demonstrate clearly that they aren’t hypocrites who use the students for their own ego-enhancement. The student units were also meant to offer support and attention to anyone feeling adrift. And although students who engaged in selfish or aggressive behavior were left to suffer the unpleasant consequences of their actions, punishment, which the Bondys believed led to resentment and anger, was rare. The important aspect of the mutual respect and friendliness was that the adolescents weren’t left alone with their problems but were allowed to speak their minds and voice their concerns in an environment where they’d get sympathy and understanding. This, the Bondys affirmed, was how confidence was built and, therefore, a sense of personal security fostered.

This isn’t to say that there weren’t incidents of bad conduct at the Bondy schools. There were occasional occurrences of everything from laziness and gossiping all the way up to making hostile ethnic or racial remarks about another member of the community. In addition to dealing with the immediate transgression itself, as well as its consequences, the schools turned these incidents into “teachable moments,” as we call them today. “We do this by encouraging lively discussions,” explained Gertrud Bondy, “giving people the opportunity of letting out their aggressions in words, proving their points and understanding the opposite opinions. This is a much more positive life.”

The Bondys continued their emphasis on student government as a way to teach the students leadership responsibilities and their encouragement of independent thinking and individuality in service to the larger community. Members of the unit were assigned responsibilities to increase their interest in the welfare of the entire group. In response, of course, the older students and the group leaders approached the younger and newer members with the friendliness fostered by the schools’ philosophy. The Bondys recognized two kinds of ambition: one, the drive for renown and power; the other, the desire to do the right thing. It was this second kind of ambition that the Bondys intended to instill in their students. Students who weren’t leaders were expected to try to become what they wanted to be. Being a leader in the Bondys’ epistemology meant seeing that life was enjoyable and satisfying for everyone in the community. Being disruptive or selfish was clearly not the way to accomplish that. If students were interested in becoming part of the student government, they would have to work to develop the leadership qualities that would take them to that goal.

The Bondys established an atmosphere in Lenox where adolescents were encouraged to “find their own voice” and engage in “radical political thought” as well as “self-motivated artistic endeavors.” The Windsor Mountain School, in the words of former student Steven Court, specialized in educating “kids who were the black sheeps of their family” in an environment free of rules and administrative repression. (Court, whom I interviewed in 1997 by phone in Iowa City where he was a grad student at the University of Iowa, was a student at Windsor Mountain from 1970-73.) An earlier alumnus, Jeffrey Horowitz (class of ‘64), founder of New York’s Theater for a New Audience, observed that the student body included “a number” of “misfits” and that the school encouraged and supported them. The freedoms—intellectual, social, political, sexual—offered by Windsor Mountain School all had profound repercussions on its students in their adult years.

Max and Gertrud Bondy saw “formal” education, by which they meant conventional schooling, as a way to teach people “to present only a smooth uniform exterior” while suppressing their individuality and independence of mind. “We consider [the formal school’s] method of education ‘non-educating’ or ‘mis-educating,’” declared Max Bondy. “The formal school only knows a uniform education, it does not recognize the importance of individual education.” With a student body of about 250 and a student-to-faculty ratio of seven to one, Windsor Mountain nurtured a “friendly atmosphere” that fostered mutual trust and respect in which student-teacher relationships were “close and informal.” One senior student, extolling the faculty members’ interests in non-academic pursuits like motorcycles and photography, acknowledged, “I relate to teachers like friends and equals, not like teachers.” As Paul Goodman called for in The Community of Scholars, Windsor Mountain strove to prepare its students for life beyond the campus without smothering their “creative impulse and attitude for change” by encouraging independent thinking and individual creativity in service to the community. Their educational philosophy, as we’ve heard, stressed individuality and independent thinking, but they were not unbridled libertarians. Uncircumscribed freedom is merely selfishness, they taught, but independence in service to the community is leadership.

One of the principal goals of education, the Bondys affirmed, is to make the student a member of society. “He cannot live as a hermit, and he will not wish to live [as] a hermit if he is not a psychopath,” said Max Bondy. “Through small but necessary restrictions he will learn to curb his own impulses and desires.” The Bondy schools’ aim wasn’t to create conformists, but to make everyone feel they are part of a group. While their students were expected to question authority and “test whatever is offered to them,” each was expected to bring his skills and talents to the service of the community, “to sublimate his ego to the superego represented by the group.” The Bondys not only taught their students to question whatever dicta are handed down to them, but emphasized that, even as adolescents, they are responsible for themselves and that others did not have power over them. “Wake up,” Gertrud Bondy admonished her students, “—not only to criticize but to criticize constructively, and to put your good ideas across to people.” Those with superior educations mustn’t remove themselves from society but participate in it, the Bondys taught. Max Bondy told a reunion of Marienau alumni:It would indeed be bad if the former members of our school community would live in seclusion, despise the way of life of the “others” and only look forward to the time when they can again be together for some days . . . among like-minded people.

No, you . . . must integrate into the community of the nation. You must not show yourselves to be better than the others, only better educated.

An example of putting this belief into practice could be seen in a tradition common in the ‘60s at Windsor Mountain, according to Jeff Horowitz. The school had little endowment but strove to maintain a scholarship program for deserving students, including many from Africa. Scholarship funds were raised by students who voluntarily worked in the Lenox community by performing services like painting residents’ houses. Besides benefitting the future scholarship students and Windsor Mountain, this practice was also an example of the Bondys' oft-stated precept that helping the community in which you live is a “positive action.”

(Once again I find myself wondering about Windsor Mountain reading assignments. I know that Leo Shapiro was introduced to the German novelist Hermann Hesse, 1877-1962, while he was a student there, and one of the books Shapiro later cited as an inspiration was Magister Ludi—also known as The Glass Bead Game—in which Hesse holds that humanity’s truest calling is the commitment to others rather than cloistered, solipsistic contemplation. I can’t help but see the parallels between the 1943 novel, the author’s last, and one of the Bondys' firmest tenets. Could it have been a book much read on the campuses of Schule Marienau and Windsor Mountain because of the stark similarities between the two philosophies? Could that be why Shapiro felt strongly enough about the book to talk to me about it specifically?)

The textbooks used at Windsor Mountain were conventional, but college-level. Students as young as 13 or 14 (Windsor Mountain started with seventh grade), however, were already reading authors like Goethe, Proust, Dostoyevsky, Nikos Kazantzakis, William Faulkner, Kenneth Fearing, William Golding—authors and works I didn’t read until college (if then)—and Sartre’s Nausea, Hesse’s Siddhartha and Journey to the East, and René Daumal’s Mount Analogue were the elective choices of some. The school’s theater program staged European drama like Max Frisch’s Biedermann and the Firebugs, Maeterlinck’s Pélléas and Mélisande, Giraudoux’s The Enchanted, Chekhov’s The Seagull, Strindberg’s Ghost Sonata, and Yeats’s Purgatory; and many of the Windsor Mountain students “seemed already to be professional artists” in poetry, painting, and theater. (Camp Windsor, a theater camp conducted on the campus, offered continued immersion in the arts during the summer.) Alumnus Shapiro, already a theater enthusiast and occasional visitor to Greenwich Village as a high-schooler, characterized the young artists as Village denizens, only younger.

Windsor Mountain, while offering traditional college-preparatory academics, took a liberal approach to regulating its students’ lives. Heinz Bondy, the headmaster, insisted that the “purpose of a school is not to run smoothly,” but to keep changing and adjusting to find answers. There was no dress code, no rules for leaving campus, no censorship of student publications. Students and faculty alike were subject to the same standards of conduct and there were no restrictions on political activity. The students themselves could suggest courses for the curriculum on the theory that adolescents were responsible, intelligent individuals capable of making reasonable choices about their lives. Teachers there were free to “experiment, improvise, and develop their own styles” and “teach pretty much what they want in any way they wish without interference from the administration.” The faculty even included several professional artists-in-residence, a rarity even now for secondary schools. Like a Black Mountain College for teenagers, the goal of the Windsor Mountain School, which didn’t demand its graduates go on to higher education as long as they pursued goals that made them happy, was to create a community that blurred the boundaries between students and adults and between classroom and life. Two late alumni invoked the name of a famous British experimental school, Summerhill, whose founder declared he’d rather the school “produced a happy street cleaner than a neurotic scholar," as a kind of paradigm. Windsor Mountain shared this philosophy: Horowitz put it this way: “If you were a happy secretary, that was just fine” and Court stated the school philosophy as: “Live what you’re for, stop fighting what you’re against.”

Windsor Mountain was one of the few private prep schools where the student government had more than an advisory function. The student court had sole authority over suspensions and expulsions and the student council made all the non-academic rules. In the 1969, for instance, the student council voted to allow students to visit the dorms of the opposite gender during the day and early evening. In addition to the sciences, arts, and literature, students in Lenox were also taught about political dissent, Horowitz asserted. Among his schoolmates at Windsor Mountain were several whose parents had suffered the effects of the probes by the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC), losing jobs and seeing their lives destroyed. The HUAC legacy was a topic of conversation on the campus which, Horowitz attested, “had a strong socialist element.” Far from suppressing social engagement or political activity by its students, Windsor Mountain encouraged it and students were free to participate in political activity if they wished. In the 1960s, the school hosted concerts by such counterculture icons as Pete Seeger, whose daughter Tinya was a student at Windsor Mountain, and Joan Baez. Other prominent parents who sent their children to Windsor Mountain, which was coeducational and had a religiously and racially integrated student body and faculty before the civil rights activism of the ‘60s, included singer Harry Belafonte, jazz musicians Thelonious Monk and Randy Weston, singer-actor Judy Garland, actor Henry Fonda, and civil rights lawyer Clifford Durr and his wife, activist Virginia Foster Durr.

It can’t be denied that, described this way—and much of what I presented here is either directly from the Bondys’ speeches or closely paraphrased from them—the Bondy philosophy sounds more than a little socialistic, utopian, and flower-childlike. If Schule Marienau (which still operates in Dahlem, Lower Saxony) and later Windsor Mountain didn’t slip into Auntie Mame caricature, there’s something of Peter Pan’s “Think lovely thoughts” floating around the Bondy epistemology. Still, there’s also a lot of truth embedded in it: prejudice is, indeed, often based on fear—though ignorance isn’t absent as Max Bondy seemed to believe. And while it might be possible to create a truly friendly atmosphere in a small community such as a boarding school of fewer than 300 students with a low student-faculty ratio, in the larger, more open society at large, or even just a medium-sized public school, the kind of control and intellectual discipline necessary to maintain one would be impossible to attain. Finally, the notion of teaching a young adult “to sublimate his ego to the superego represented by the group” would fly in the face of the ingrained American ideal of “rugged individualism” that has permeated our culture since long before there was the concept of the “Me Generation.” I don’t know how the European schools actually worked, but by the time the reformers got to Lenox, they seem to have succumbed to some practicality. I’m afraid the closest we’re likely to come to the Bondy ideal is the way John Lennon saw it: “Imagine.”

[Many of the facts and quotations from the Bondys in this article are drawn from various speeches of the Bondys published on a website that’s no longer on line (and which I corrected here for obvious spelling or typing mistakes). (The site was maintained by a descendent of Max Bondy’s brother and contained other material, such as genealogical information.) Some of the speeches, translated into English, may have been taken from a German-language book, Max Bondy: Reden an jungen Deutsche (1926-1947) [Speeches to young Germans] (Marienau, Ger.: Schülern der Schule Marienau, 1998), published by the school originally founded by the Bondys. The principal sources, however, were speeches entitled “Philosophy of the School” and “The Objectives of the School and Their Origins.” The first was delivered by Max Bondy clearly at Windsor Mountain (although I can’t tell which campus) and the second by Gertrud, obviously after her husband’s death.]

The Relation of Theater to Other Disciplines

Anyone who’s taught arts classes in primary or secondary schools will have encountered the question of what value teaching theater, visual art, music, or dance has in a modern education. If it doesn’t come from a parent, it might come from another teacher—probably one who teaches math or history. Sometimes it even comes from a student. Why bother to teach a subject that seems so impractical in the crowded and cash-starved curriculum of an American elementary or high school? A very small number of people will actually make their lives in the arts; for the rest of us, they are little more than a pastime or relaxation (and, many questioners will add, if only to themselves, mostly for the so-called elite). Why spend the time and money, devote the faculty and the class hours to something like that.

About a year ago, I argued that the arts are a vital part of a liberal arts education and that a liberal arts education is a value all its own (see my argument on ROT, “Liberal Arts in the Real World,” 24 July 2010). I also made an argument for the importance of the arts in society (“Degrading the Arts,” 13 August 2009). However related, those are different issues. And as for the sense that the arts are somehow a province of the leisure classes and the highly educated . . . well, if that’s what you think, then I probably can’t address you here. It’s not really relevant here anyway, since I’m going to talk about arts in the schools where they touch students of all economic strata and backgrounds. I’m going to look at the educational worth of arts classes, not so much their social value—though, I’m sure you can see, those do overlap. What I’m going to propose is how teaching the arts, specifically theater in this instance, benefits the learning of other subjects with arguably more practical usefulness. Here’s my premise: Theater has a relation to other academic disciplines such that theater can be used to inform and enhance the learning of those other subjects. They are cognate fields, the way language and history can be: the study of, say French language and literature can inform the study of history in many ways beyond simply understanding some words and terms like entente or coup d’état.

I think it’s pretty clear that theater, like sports, teaches several beneficial skills with which young people would be well armed as they move into the general society. I’m considering now not so much the classroom teaching of theater as the producing of plays in schools with student casts and crews. In whatever part of the production students are involved, they learn how to work in concert with others to accomplish a great task, one that no single student could achieve alone. The company learns to interpret and follow instructions, some very precise and others more general, that require them to bring to bear their own understanding and knowledge and seek the necessary resources, both intellectual and concrete, to resolve. Producing a play requires the practical application—and often the adaptation—of knowledge and skills gained in other fields and even at the greatest level of experience, student theater participants must learn to meet new challenges and expand their skills and talents to solve new problems. In my companies, at least, the student artists and technicians were often called upon to research previously unexplored fields of knowledge or to apply logic and imagination to an alien situation in order to understand what they were doing or what it meant in the context of the production. Though I never made it a criterion that the plays I directed in schools be great literature, I did demand that the scripts be good theater—so the students were exposed to pieces of dramatic literature that they probably hadn’t encountered before but were worth knowing, introducing them often not just to unknown plays but unfamiliar writers. (I also tried to introduce my students to different forms of theater so that they weren’t stuck in the impression that all plays take place in that peculiar room with fixed seats at one end and an empty space raised up on a platform at the other, with a huge hole in between the two. That lesson, however, is meta-theatrical, I suppose.) Finally came the wonderful lesson of learning what it’s like to work very hard over a long time, sometimes suffering hardships, small failures, or disappointments, to experience the sense of success, both communal and individual, at the end. These lessons don’t so much dovetail with other disciplines as underpin or enable better learning across the curriculum.

The most obvious confluence of disciplines with theater occurs in the other arts, so let’s address those first. Of course, if there’s a question about the point of teaching theater and the arts in schools, then the question logically extends to dance, visual art (including, among others, painting, sculpture, graphics, and photography), and music, too. Still, let’s have a look at how the arts all support one another, at least pedagogically. First, as we’ll encounter in other disciplines, too, the various fields of artistic endeavor serve as subject matter for lots of plays, like Art and the recent Red, two plays about painting. In Tennessee Williams’s In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel, a character much like Jackson Pollock, a friend of the playwright’s, has a scene in which he discusses the color theory of painter and art teacher Hans Hofmann (another friend of Williams’s, and of Pollock’s). In another Williams play, Will Mr. Merriweather Return from Memphis?, two women talk at length about “plastic space,” also a concept borrowed from Hofmann. Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s Sunday in the Park with George explores the artistic impulse in two painters across a century: the (fictionalized) French Impressionist Georges Seurat in the 1880s and his great-grandson, George, an American artist, in the 1980s. In his paired one-acts The Stendhal Syndrome, playwright Terrence McNally wrote about Michelangelo’s David in Full Frontal Nudity and a Bernstein-like conductor in Prelude & Liebestod. In Edward Albee’s Occupant, a reporter interviews sculptor Louise Nevelson; Robert Lepage and Ex Machina’s Geometry of Miracles focuses on architect Frank Lloyd Wright; and another McNally play, Master Class, presents opera star Maria Callas (conducting the titular master voice class) as its subject. The most famous play about dance and dancers is, of course, A Chorus Line. (Just as there are many movies about movie-making, there are scores of plays about life in the theater.)

More significantly, I think, the same basic principles of aesthetics apply to all the arts in one way or another. This isn’t the place to go into a discussion of aesthetic theory, which is far too complex to address here anyway, but I think it’s self-evident that concepts of beauty in, say, painting, are true in theater as well, if in no other application than scene painting and costume decoration. Sculpture (and architecture, too, often) is evident in the set design and even scenery construction and just as sculptors have to consider the play of light on their creations, the lighting designer has to make the same adjustments in the concept from the reverse perspective. By the same token the techniques of artistic creativity transfer from the other arts to theater pretty directly in most cases. The music for a theater performance may have different requirements than compositions for a concert or a pop tune, but the way the artist creates the piece is a parallel process. Art movements and schools, such as Surrealism or Expressionism, have their parallels in theatrical production, both in playwriting and in production. (It may be hard to contemplate, but along with Dada painting and sculpture, there are Dada plays, too. Consider, for instance, The Gas Heart by Tristan Tzara, one of the founders of the movement: it was conceived, in perfectly Dadaistic fashion, to be impossible to stage!)

The various arts had parallel historical development, too, of course. Painted scenery evolved the same way and at the same time as perspective in painting did, for instance. At various times in theater history, the same artists who were making innovations in painting and sculpture were also applying their new ideas to the stage (and to theater posters and handbills as well). If fashion design can be called an art—it’s certainly a craft, in any case—theater history records that the progress of costume design parallels the development of clothing design. Moreover, the various arts frequently interact in a theatrical production which incorporates many individual artistic genres and forms even under the simplest and most traditional practice. If we start to examine the later and more innovative presentations, the expansion of the arts and the variation in their uses can seem endless. Computer graphics and CGI; projections, holograms, and video; electronic and digital sound and music are all appearing on stages around the world and the palette from which writers and theater-makers are drawing is virtually boundless. Tennessee Williams envisioned a plastic theater where dramatists construct plays using all the arts of the stage together, relying not just on words as the foundation of the performance text with sound, lighting, and design as enhancements to the text, but a collaboration among the arts which the playwright, as a kind of multimedia conductor, uses to make his or her images. Today, that kind of plasticity has extended beyond the traditional stage arts to which Williams referred to incorporate all the arts and even the technology contemporary artists are also using to push the boundaries of their fields.

Perhaps the next-easiest fields with which the study of theater can coincide are history/social studies and the social sciences. History, of course, is the subject of a huge portion of dramatic literature starting with The Persians of Aeschylus, the first known history play (472 B.C.E). We should acknowledge that some history and documentary plays are more faithful to reality than others—Schiller’s Mary Stuart shows Queens Mary of Scotland and Elizabeth of England meeting at Fotheringhay Castle though in truth the two cousins never met—but they all can be ways of launching a discussion of the events, personalities, and ideas depicted. Searching out the differences between the historical record and the presentation in the play can be an excuse for research (an invaluable skill every student should learn and practice as often as possible), and even plays with mixed fictional and factual elements, such as Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, can throw light on or elucidate what otherwise might seem dry, dead details. (One wonderful play that’s a mash-up of historical, literary, and imaginary characters and situations is Tom Stoppard’s Travesties which places James Joyce; Lenin; Tristan Tzara, the founder of Dadaism; and an actual minor British diplomat, Henry Carr, in Zurich at the same time in 1917—where, in fact, they all were—along with Gwendolyn—as in Fairfax—and Cecily—as in Cardew—during the preparation of an amateur production of The Importance of Being Earnest: literature, politics, art, history, and theater all twisted together!) We may disagree mightily with Rolf Hochhuth’s contention in The Deputy that Pope Pius XII was complicit in the extermination of Europe’s Jews, but examining the play permits the class to look at a still-heated (because Pius is on track for sainthood) aspect of World War II. (That Hochhuth’s text is drawn from historical documents, which he may or may not have unfairly manipulated, only makes The Deputy an even better platform for historical research.)

There is also another way that theater can throw light on the study of history—by examining a play in its historical context. For instance, Anouilh’s Antigone, which on its face is a retelling, with some 20th-century anachronisms, of the Greek myth of the daughter of Oedipus and Jocasta defying her uncle, Creon, the successor to the throne of Thebes, as previously told by Sophocles. But if we consider that Anouilh wrote the play in 1943, while France was under Nazi occupation during World War II, and we know that the playwright was making a statement to his countrymen, the play is a metaphor for the political situation at the time, with Antigone representing the French who resisted the German domination and Creon as the representative of the Third Reich and Polynices, the dead brother Antigone wants to bury, representing the resistance fighters and partisans actively opposing the occupation. Teachers of history can take a similar approach to Miller’s The Crucible, written in 1953: it’s either just an account of the 17th-century Salem witch trials and a study in community hysteria, or it’s a comment on McCarthyism and the House Committee on Un-American Activities of the 1950s by a playwright who was a bitter opponent to any infringement on free expression and free speech. Both plays are comments on history without actually being accounts of it.

The very impetus for the modern history play and, indeed, stage Realism as a theatrical style beginning in the late 19th century was the attempt to portray the way other peoples and cultures live and behave, the essence of sociology. We can learn something of the way certain Irishmen live from reading John Millington Synge’s plays, the thinking of some Germans by reading Schiller’s The Robbers or Intrigue and Love, or Frenchmen of the 17th century by reading almost any of Molière’s comedies. Aside from the fact that those writers were depicting milieux they were themselves observing in real time, plays, more than almost any other form of representation, distill human behavior and thought so that it communicates—that’s what theater does best, after all—directly, straightforwardly, and in a human voice. Last March in Brooklyn, the Iranian Theater Festival presented plays by writers both living in Iran and in exile, plus plays from Iranian-Americans. Iranian culture, the writers lament, has been overshadowed by the political and ideological conflict between their country and ours, so the festival was an attempt to overcome the stereotypes and preconceptions by bringing Iranian and Iranian-American voices directly to American audiences. The world learned more about conditions in communist Eastern Europe or apartheid South Africa from the plays of Vaclav Havel, Janusz Glowacki, Athol Fugard, and Mbongeni Ngema than all the essays, news reports, and lectures combined, I believe—at least we learned it more pointedly and more earnestly. I’ll never forget the experience I had watching The Square by Eimuntas Nekrosius, a Lithuanian writer and director, in 1991, just after the disintegration of the Soviet empire. The play’s the story of a former political prisoner who literally dies because he doesn’t know how to be free. Freedom, Nekrosius said, cannot merely be legislated or declared, it must also be learned and prepared for—but he said it through the medium of a play and made it more palpable than any political essayist could have. Drama from outside the U.S., especially from outside the West, presents differing views of the world from those to which we’re accustomed; the works of Wole Soyinka, Nobel laureate in literature from Nigeria; Derek Walcott, poet and playwright from St. Lucia; or Naguib Mahfouz of Egypt, another Nobel winner, for instance, show us not only some of their worlds, but ours as well—albeit from an uncommon perspective. On this continent, there’s a growing body of work by Native American playwrights and performing troupes like Hanay Geiogamah and the Native American Theatre Ensemble that have adapted our European theater forms—most American Indian cultures had no innate theater tradition; the artists have incorporated Indian music, singing, dance, and imagery to fashion a Native American theater—to depict the world as they see it.

The dramatists I’ve mentioned above were mostly dissenters and social critics, but plays can reflect a specific society’s prevailing values, too. The Eisenhower years in the Mid-West are evoked with tenderness and care in almost all of William Inge’s plays, some sad and sweet, like Picnic, and others not as pleasant, as in Dark at the Top of the Stairs. Clifford Odets’s Waiting for Lefty is an opening to talk about the labor movement of the 1930s in the United States and Awake and Sing speaks to the fears and concerns of the urban poor during the Depression. Plays like these sketch a whole universe that’s gone from us now, captured, perhaps more like an impressionistic photo, at the moment of its most deeply felt presence. Good artists have a greater sensitivity than we ordinary folks; great ones can make the rest of us feel some of what they felt. History books and social studies texts can’t do that most of the time. Want your students to feel some of what it was like living in the Jim Crow North? Have them read Hansberry’s Raisin in the Sun. The Jim Crow South? How about Alice Childress’s Wedding Band or Alfred Uhry’s Driving Miss Daisy? Want to tackle the Evolution-Creationism split (if you dare)? What’s a better start than reading Inherit the Wind? On other shores, students can see some of what the Thatcherite ‘80s was like in rust-belt Britain from Jim Cartwright’s Road or an aspect of imperial China in Lao She’s Teahouse. This list is endless—but it is important to note that the plays of an era and a place are often among the best windows into that society. I can tell you from personal application that as an actor preparing a role, I often found my best input in the plays of the time and place about which I’m trying to learn.

The social sciences such as psychology, anthropology, sociology, political science, and economics offer a similar opportunity for theatrical application. Plays based on psychology—almost any thriller or murder mystery, for instance (consider Gaslight/Angel Street)—are among the most common stage entertainments. (One humorous take on the field of psychoanalysis, dating from 1915 when the practice was new and faddishly popular, is Susan Glaspell’s one-act satire Suppressed Desires.) Almost all drama after the late 19th century, with the advent of Realism, is constructed on the basis of what are or were believed to be psychological truths. Even plays founded on what we now believe is an erroneous understanding of the emotions and the mind can be a useful window in the history of the field. Take, for instance, A Doll House by Henrik Ibsen, who subscribed to some mistaken ideas of human science. Written in 1879, the play requires Nora to abandon her children when she leaves her home because she’s afraid they will inherit her moral sin, a belief considered scientific at the time. (Krogstad has a similar tale of moral turpitude having consequences in a loved one.) In a similar vein, Dr. Rank is suffering from “tuberculosis of the spine,” the consequence of a dissolute life. Medical scientists of the day believed that there was a connection between moral failing and physical illness, the latter being a manifestation of the former. (In Ghosts, 1881, we learn that Oswald Alving has inherited syphilis from his father, though we now know that that is medically unlikely, but it can be seen as a physical inheritance of his father’s moral corruption.) So not only do we see that Ibsen was basing his plots on what was understood at the time to be scientific fact, however mistaken, we also see how the field has developed over the ensuing decades.

The whole of Konstantin Stanislavsky’s acting theory, the basis for much of 20th-century western acting including the famous Method, is founded on his understanding of psychology (Stanislavsky studied the work of Pavlov and French psychologist Théophile Ribot). Neither modern drama nor modern performance could exist without some application of psychology. Anthropology, a field that really began in the mid-19th century and became almost a public obsession in the early years of the 20th century, as photography and motion pictures made it possible to see what distant cultures actually looked like, fed the impulse toward Realism and Naturalism as well as antiquarian and culturally accurate sets and costumes. So did sociology, its companion study. Even plays dating back before Realism were staged with what was considered historical accuracy, such as the 1801 production of Schiller’s Maid of Orleans staged by Augustus Wilhelm Iffland at the Berlin National Theater, one of the first known to attempt historically accurate sets and costumes. Moreover, just as the political history of humankind is a dominant subject for drama, the history of humans themselves is also at the base of much modern drama. (In a tongue-in-cheek application of this, Thornton Wilder’s The Skin of Our Teeth purports to trace the development of humans from the invention of the wheel to the eve of World War II, with some references to Genesis and the phylogeny of mammals. The central family in Wilder’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play is named Antrobus, from the Greek word for ‘human’: anthropos, the same word from which ‘anthropology’ is derived.) Studying the theatre of a particular culture or historical period is a vivid way to determine the socioeconomic status of the population, political attitudes, and lifestyles of distant peoples.

Political science and economics are less common among subjects for drama, especially the second. There are, of course, quite a few plays about politics and politicians (Fiorello!, 1776, The Best Man, plus any number of mono-dramas from Lyndon to the recent Thurgood), and it’s hard to argue against the contention that politics informs almost all modern plays (and not a few classics) in some way or another. Even a play as old as Born Yesterday can be a primer for civics and the process of government (as well as a sometimes backhanded vocabulary lesson); in fact, the play’s plot, even 65 years later, is a surprisingly (and dishearteningly) accurate treatise on political corruption. Most history plays are also political plays, and so are plays like Waiting for Lefty, The Cradle Will Rock, Execution of Justice, The Crucible, and even Macbeth or Henry VIII. Economics as a academic discipline may be hard to find on stage, but everyday economics are at the foundation of most modern drama. If power and control (a form of politics) are not at the center of the play, then money probably is. And if the question of money or power aren’t the main concern of the playwright, then they will be of one or more of the characters—something with which the actors will have to contend. Beyond the use of politics or economics as subject matter or the source of characters, almost all Western drama is about human interaction in search of a goal, the fundamental definition of politics: Oedipus’s goal in Oedipus Rex is to find the murderer of King Laius, his predecessor, and that hunt drives the action of the play as Oedipus “interacts” with the other characters; Hamlet must prove that Claudius murdered Hamlet’s father and in his search he enlists Horatio, Gertrude, Leontes, Ophelia, Polonius, Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, and the Players. And just as the play revolves around the pursuit of a goal, each character, as any actor or acting student will tell you, must also pursue an objective which will make her or him interact with others. (I shouldn’t overlook the fact that economics has a great deal to do with the production of a play, but practical play production is not the main topic of my current discussion. We also should acknowledge that politics, both subtle and overt, is and has been a factor in the presentation of theater throughout history, from the closing of the theaters in 17th-century England under Puritanism to the current focus on plays concerning wars in the Mid-East and Asia, the restriction of civil and human rights, the treatment of prisoners and suspects, and other topics or events happening around us now. Consider how political questions effect what plays can be presented and what plays people will attend even when official censorship isn’t an issue.)

With respect to English classes, the most obvious correlation is that theater offers a canon of great literature to complement the non-dramatic works, both fiction and non-fiction, the students read. Almost every middle and high school English curriculum includes a Shakespeare play, and many incorporate other plays as well. (In the ninth-grade English classes I taught, for example, we read Raisin and Inherit the Wind as well as Romeo and Juliet.) Another aspect of English classes in primary and secondary schools is writing or composition, and play scripts are an alternative form of writing students can benefit from exploring. Engaging in creative, descriptive, and analytical writing about theater experiences and the processes used to create them engages students’ imaginations as well as their various compositional skills. Writing a play itself, as distinguished from writing a short story or an essay, has different requirements and obligations for the writer; the discipline isn’t the same. (As evidence, I offer the fact that some of the best writers and poets have turned out to be terrible playwrights. Consider Mark Twain, for instance, who was enamored of theater but never wrote a successful play. In late-19th-century France, a selection of the country’s most famous and respected writers formed what they called the Group of Hissed Authors because they had all failed as dramatists: Gustave Flaubert, Alphonse Daudet, Ivan Turgeniev, Émile Zola, and Edmond de Goncourt.) Though the creative principles are similar, even analogous, the practices are different. The differences include the necessity to tell the whole story and lay out the entire theme in speech and action. A story writer can rely on narration and exposition; the whole piece can take place inside someone’s head, but a playwright has to reject that device (though it has been used on stage, it’s inherently undramatic) in favor of more direct development. Further, a novel can be experienced through the eyes of one character, but a play is experienced through the eyes of each spectator. Poetry and some novels and stories can be written in formal or imprecise language, but modern scripts are conversational; even the prose of Tennessee Williams or August Wilson, though it’s often lofty and lyrical, sounds like ordinary speech.

A portion of dramatic literature comprises adaptation of prose literature and comparing the differences can be revealing. Sometimes the changes from literary form to stage text make it easier to see the main points, since drama often distills them into a more direct form, and sometimes those changes alter the way the material is received; both results can be revealing to students of literature. What did John Steinbeck or Carson McCullers do to transform their novels Of Mice and Men and Member of the Wedding into successful stage plays? Another pedagogical approach is to assign the students to make a stage adaptation of some non-dramatic material—a poem (The Wild Party—either version or both), a short story (The Good Doctor), a newspaper report (Equus), a cartoon (Feiffer’s People), a comic strip (You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown)—to discover how both forms work.

Just as the language of a play script must be speakable, the actions the writer devises must be performable. Certainly there are technical devices that can help create magic on stage, but unlike movies, the stage has certain limitations of human capability and gravity. Whatever a playwright creates, an actor will have to embody it. We don’t have to obey the Three Unities anymore, but the confines of the theater building and the performance space limit what can be accomplished before a live audience—some of the difficulties Julie Taymor had with Spider-Man came from trying to turn the playhouse into a movie screen and a concert arena—and the practicalities put a burden on the writer. So does the conventional length of a play at two hours or so. (One-acts can be anywhere up to 90 minutes generally.) A novel can go on as long as the writer wants, theoretically, but it’s a rare play that keeps an audience engaged for much longer than Shakespeare’s “two hours’ traffic of our stage.”

Stageable plays also have to be active. Prose can be ruminative, descriptive, stream-of-consciousness, but a play has to move (though the movement can be internal). This and the other limitations on a playwright’s free expression are why every writer isn’t a playwright, and the investigation of the genre can be both enlightening and practical for writing students. When I taught theater to middle-schoolers, a fourth-grade teacher asked my boss to lend me out so I could oversee a writing project in her English lessons. Her students had been exploring various writing forms, including poetry (haiku) and narrative, and she wanted to introduce them to playwriting. I devised a program by which the 10-year-olds formed teams to compose one-act plays which were then staged first for each other, then the other fourth-grade classes, and finally in the school theater for the whole primary school and it turned out to be one of the most exciting and enjoyable experiences of my teaching career. After introducing the program and modeling it in a one-class session, I offered only technical assistance and advice and didn’t interfere with the students’ imaginative and creative flights. Imagine: when you’ve written a poem or a short story, all you get to do in the end is read it (or hear it read) aloud, but when you write a play, it can be performed! Schoolwork plus playacting—how can you beat that combination?

Drama in or translated from foreign languages, whether classics from Greek or Latin literature or more recent plays from modern languages, clearly have the same attributes as those I mentioned in connection with sociology and anthropology: the study of the world from someone else’s perspective. In the original languages, obviously, plays provide practice in reading a form of the language meant to be spoken aloud. Even the classic plays provide opportunities to encounter French, German, or Spanish even in a literary form—but one intended to be spoken rather than read. (What better way to develop an accent than reading scenes in class?) Comparing the original with an English translation can highlight how speakers of the two languages sometimes think differently in subtle ways and how the languages themselves differ. As an actor or director, I always tried to get the original text of a play on which I was working to see if there was information or clues in the original that was lost, as it were, in translation. A subtle but, I think, illuminating example is the title of Samuel Beckett’s famous play, Waiting for Godot. In French, the language in which Beckett originally wrote the play (which he subsequently rewrote—he didn’t translate it from French—in English), the title is En attendant Godot, which means “while waiting for Godot.” The play isn’t about waiting; it’s about what Vladimir and Estragon do while they’re waiting. In acting terms, the first is a state of being—that is, inactive—and the second is about action. In another French play, I discovered that a whole scene is intended to be funny because of a pun that doesn’t translate into English. (It had to do with the fact that in French, the same word, fond, means ‘fund’ of money and ‘heart’ of an artichoke.) There was no way to get the joke back into the English dialogue, but at least we knew the scene was light and silly in mood—something that wasn’t obvious in the translation. When I was doing a production of Chekhov’s The Wood Demon I learned that in the Russian text, the various ways one character addresses or refers to others were very revealing about the relationships, and none of that was in the English version because we don’t have the levels of address Russians do. It turned out to be very useful for the actors to know when they were developing their inter-character interactions on stage. For the language student or the student of a foreign culture, these are telling subtleties.

For language classes themselves, it can be a useful and enjoyable exercise to assign the students to write dialogues or even short playlets—and then perform them. When I was a high school theater teacher, the German teacher, when she learned that I speak German, asked me to come to one of her classes to help with just such a project. Not only did it get the students thinking (and writing) in conversational German, rather than the more formal style of the text books and literature they were otherwise using, but it was clearly a fun experience for them. A spoonful of sugar, as Mary Poppins might have sung, helps the learning go down. (I also remember when I was a Russian language student myself and we had to do a project that culminated in a public presentation. A classmate and I decided to write a scene of the “as if” type: as if Lenin and Marx had met. After researching some of the men’s writings for topics they had in common, we assembled the dialogue. We rehearsed it like one of Steve Allen’s Meeting of Minds TV shows—which hadn’t actually come along yet—and read it to the rest of the class. Now, I loved studying languages in those days—but this was among the most fun I ever had in a language class: the research, the writing, the rehearsing, and finally the performance.)

Two other popular fields for dramatic source material are philosophy and its allied discipline, religion. Just as theater is affected by art movements, literary and philosophical developments also turn up in dramatic literature. Many of Stoppard’s plays, for instance, focus on the questions ‘What do we know?’ and ‘How do we know it?’ (they are the main focus of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead), but for a comic romp with specific philosophical underpinnings, there’s Jumpers, one of whose central characters is a professor of moral philosophy preparing a lecture on “Man—good, bad or indifferent.” Plays based on philosophical tenets can demonstrate different ways of expressing ideas, examining subjects, or seeing the world. Sartre’s No Exit, for example, is the epitome of Existentialist writing (which can also be seen in the works of Albert Camus and Jean Genet). All of Beckett’s Absurdist plays are salted with philosophical notions and tenets, but Waiting for Godot is especially rife; it would be a wonderful exercise in the history of philosophy to try to pick out the statements in the play that correspond with the philosophical movements from Heraclitus of Ephasus (530-470 B.C.E.) to Existentialism and Soren Kierkegaard (1813-1855). A play that deals with both philosophy and religion is David Ives’s New Jerusalem, which depicts the contention among the Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza, the Jewish community in Amsterdam, and the Dutch Christian leadership of the town. Many scenes are debates following some of Spinoza’s then-controversial ideas for which he was excommunicated by his synagogue’s elders.

The principals of philosophy, however, are also an analytical tool for examining dramas. This is especially true of logic, the application of which discipline can promote precise thinking and rigorous critical analysis. Godot not only contains specific statements of some of the philosophies to which Beckett subscribed, but the play can be discussed in terms of many of those beliefs—and it has also been analyzed for its implications about Christianity, especially Catholicism, the faith in which Beckett was raised. (There is even a specifically religion-oriented essay, Charles S. McCoy’s “Waiting for Godot: A Biblical Appraisal.”) Tennessee Williams, who was raised Presbyterian—his grandfather Walter Dakin, on whom the playwright doted and in whose home he spent his childhood, was a prominent minister—but converted briefly to Catholicism, was often the target of disapproval of the Catholic Church for the violence and sexuality in his plays and films. In 1960, Williams’s brother, Dakin Williams, a devout Catholic, wrote an exegesis of his brother’s work in “Is Tennessee Williams a ‘Catholic’ Playwright?” in response to his church’s rejection of his famous brother’s writing. Other forms of philosophy, including logic, are indispensable tools for examining the plots and structures of many plays—including, unsurprisingly, most murder mystery plays. (The clues in Agatha Christie’s Witness for the Prosecution, for instance, can be assembled using logic and reason. Tom Stoppard, however, likes to feed us clues that add up to the wrong conclusions, a plot factor in Arcadia.)

Plays that touch on religion or use it as a theme, though they are often controversial, can provide topics for discussion and examination. Terrence McNally’s Corpus Christi and Behzti (‘dishonor’ in Punjabi), a British play by Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti, a Sikh woman, are politically-infused examples; both have been suppressed and precipitated violence among protestors. The new Tony Award-winning musical, The Book of Mormon, considers the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in a light-hearted and irreverent, but not disparaging, way (unlike, say, A Very Merry Unauthorized Children's Scientology Pageant from 2003, which was unapologetically critical). There are, of course, many religious plays, in the sense that the plays were written expressly for teaching or demonstrating aspects of a particular faith, much the way Brecht wrote his Lehrstücke as instructional tracts for young communists; Purim plays and Christmas pageants are examples of this kind of theater, as are medieval passion, mystery, and miracle plays. There are also dramas on religious themes and with religious subjects that are meant for the general public expressing an argument (or, sometimes, a counterargument). In the wake of The Deputy came two Catholic plays which purported to be responses to Hochhuth’s allegations against Pope Pius: God’s Deputy (El Vicario de Dios) by Spanish playwright Juan Antonio de Laiglesia and Rev. Edward A. Molloy’s The Comforter, an American reaction. In fact, examining all three plays together, along with their critical and popular reception (digging up reviews is a research project), would be a fascinating basis for discussion of religion, faith, and religious institutions.

The most difficult discipline with which to find parallels with drama are the natural (or “hard”) sciences and math, but there are connections. (Not a small amount of both math and technology, an attribute of science, plays an important part in theatrical production, of course. Designing and constructing sets, laying out a floor plan, making scale models, designing and hanging lights, installing sound equipment, and many other backstage tasks all require mathematical knowledge and precision and a practical familiarity with principals of physics. Using rulers and compasses to measure and divide space, reinforcing concepts of measurement, fractions, and proportion as a preliminary to building sets or models is not only a practical method of getting students to use and practice math skills, but it’s a good deal more fun to do than plain old exercises from a textbook.) There are, first, quite a few plays that use science and math as a subject, such as Complicite’s recent Disappearing Number, about the pure mathematical theories of Srinivasa Ramanujan and G. H. Hardy in the years around World War I, and Proof by David Auburn is about the legacy of a mathematician to his daughter. The new play by Richard Bean, The Heretic, centers on a university lecturer in earth sciences who’s skeptical about climate change, a scientific topic that’s also political. Another politico-scientific play is Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen, which relates the fictionalized inside story of the mysterious meeting in 1941 at which the two great physicists Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg discussed the possibility of a German atomic bomb. (Copenhagen is also an argument play, so it bears on logic as well as nuclear physics.) A recent hit at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival (that’s also played Off-Broadway in New York) is Baba Brinkman’s hip-hop performance, Rap Guide to Evolution, conceived originally for the 2009 bicentennial of Charles Darwin’s birth.

Science creeps into many plays that aren’t ostensibly about science or technology. I return to The Skin of Our Teeth, for example, which makes frequent references to the phylogenic relationships among mammals and the ontogeny of humans. Some numbers theory appears, to comic effect, in Jumpers as well—corresponding, coincidentally, to the serious applications of the same concepts in Disappearing Number. (The late Michael Kirby, a professor of mine at NYU, was a Structuralist who wrote plays that conformed to predetermined patterns, some of which were numerical. I don’t believe his plays are published, however.) Examining these plays and analyzing the texts is an exercise in precision thinking and a method of reasoning conceptually and abstractly.

A field that combines the social and natural sciences is the somewhat controversial discipline of sociobiology and its ally, evolutionary psychology. I won’t get into the debate concerning the validity of these concepts, which posit that social behavior, both human and animal, is genetic and hereditary rather than totally learned and cultural in origin. (Evolutionary psychology makes the parallel claim about psychological traits like language, memory, and perception.) As genetic traits, social behavior is affected by natural selection. Dramatically, we can find examples of this belief in plays that juxtapose animal behavior with human, or primitive human socialization with modern society. (We can also find a simpler application of these concepts in the acting technique of finding animal traits in human characters. An actor might, for instance, play Stanley Kowalski as a bear-like man or Hedda Gabler as a lioness.)

In literature, the notion of a parallel between animal and human behavior is as old as Western civilization, of course. Fabulists from Aesop to La Fontaine to James Thurber have used animal characters to make sometimes unsubtle comments on human foibles. Rajiv Joseph’s current Broadway offering, Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo, uses the figure of a tiger to comment on the actions of the humans caught up in the aftermath of war. A play that draws on the idea that human social interaction has evolutionary origins to which we might return if the social compact were abrogated, on the model, say, of Lord of the Flies, is John Bowen’s After the Rain, a play that depicts the remnants of modern society after a Bible-like flood. Bowen shows us a micro-society reforming around a charismatic leader as the fundaments of human behavior reassert themselves after centuries of accumulated socialization are suddenly stripped away. A little of this kind of examination is also seen in Skin of Our Teeth, especially in Act Two when the Ancient and Honorable Order of Mammals convenes in Atlantic City. Wilder is implicitly linking the behaviors of other animals with those of humans by assembling the Subdivision Humans with the other mammals and noting some of the biological, that is, genetic, commonalities.

Now, I’m not saying that drama is the only art form that has connections to other academic disciplines; of course it isn’t. Prose literature has many of the same relationships to math, science, philosophy, or visual art. And I’m not saying that teachers shouldn’t supplement instruction from textbooks and labs with other sources than theater. I’ve found useful support in my English classes from music and, in a reverse of the principle I’m promoting here, I’ve used television sitcoms to demonstrate some structural points in theater classes. Of course, we’re talking here only about the texts and artifacts; with theater, there’s also the work of producing, acting, designing, and building the production which expands its usefulness as an adjunct to so many additional fields. In the spirit that whatever works best for the students is worth pursuing, I urge teachers and administrators to find the wherewithal in whatever corner of human experience they can. But theater and drama is arguably the most versatile, the most applicable, and the most malleable of the pertinent human endeavors for this effort. (And, on a practical level, the most convenient: a play is conceived to run about two hours or less; a novel, for example, can go on for hundreds of pages. In the classroom, that’s a significant consideration.) We should take note that one of humanity’s earliest impulses was to communicate, to teach or explain events of import to the community. That impulse predates written language so it was channeled into two other outlets: art and performance. The first theatrical performances must have occurred the first time a Neanderthal hunting party danced around the campfire to replay for the rest of the clan the day’s success. This surely led ultimately to modern theater, and, eventually, film, television, and even YouTube, but acting out stories, both actual and made-up, is one of our oldest tools for building a society. That suggests to me, at least, that there’s value in using that performative impulse to teach and learn about human endeavors of all kinds. It must have worked pretty well for all those eons—after all, we’re still doing it one way or another today.