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PRE-SHOW PREPARATION,
QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION,
AND ACTIVITIES
Created by the McCarter Theatre Education Department. 2012.
Pre-Show Materials
PRE-SHOW PREPARATION, QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION, AND ACTIVITIES
Use the following assignments, questions, and activities to introduce your students to Are You There, McPhee?
and its intellectual and artistic origins, context, and themes, as well as to engage their imaginations and creativity
before they see the production.
ARE YOU THERE, MCPHEE?: WEB SITE BASICS.
Explore the following informational offerings on McCarter’s Are You There, McPhee? web site with your
students:
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Artistic Director Emily Mann’s letter to patrons about John Guare and the McCarter world premiere of
Are You There, McPhee?
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An interview with playwright Guare and director Sam Buntrock conducted by McCarter Literary
Director Carrie Hughes
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Brief professional biographies on Guare, Buntrock, and the McPhee? cast and creative team
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A glossary of pop cultural references significant to the story told in Are You There, McPhee?
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Brief video clips featuring director Sam Buntrock and the cast talking about the dramatic and
theatrical character and idiosyncrasy of Are You There, McPhee and its celebrated playwright
Investigating these various resources will not only pique student interest, but may also spark and fuel fullclass and small-group discussion before coming to the theater.
ON JOHN GUARE.
Share with your students—by having them read aloud—the following quotations by various professional
theater practitioners on the artistry and influence of Are You There, McPhee? playwright John Guare as well
as those by Guare himself on his own dramatic influences and interests:
His plays have consistently demonstrated an extraordinary facility with language and an
unmatched imaginative quality, and I consider him to be one of the greatest American
playwrights living today.
—McCarter Artistic Director and Resident Playwright Emily Mann
I have three [playwriting] gods. One is John Guare, the second is Maria Irene Fornes and the
third is Caryl Churchill. They’ve transformed the possibilities, the vocabulary. I wouldn’t be
able to exist without them.
—Playwright Paula Vogel, from an interview with David Savran (October 1998) in
The American Theatre Reader (TCG, 2009)
How many of the playwrights you admire process this “setting out to parts unknown” energy?
Think of Edward Albee, Maria Irene Fornes, Suzan-Lori Parks, Paula Vogel, Mac Wellman,
August Wilson, John Guare, for example. Each of their plays is its own animal; each teaches
us anew how to follow its tracks. American playwrights don’t understand structure? They
understand it enough to know that they have to discover it.
—New Dramatists Artistic Director Todd London, from “The Shape of Plays to
Come (November 2002) in The American Theatre Reader (TCG, 2009).
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Created by the McCarter Theatre Education Department. 2012.
Pre-Show Materials
Very early in John’s career, he grew dissatisfied with the theater’s reliance on realism. He
roundly rejected the idea that everything on stage must imitate real life. Rather, John found
that the outer realities of people’s lives are often simply a construct, hiding deeper, often more
interesting inner realities. He created new storytelling conventions that have deeply affected
audiences, and with Are You There, McPhee? he continues to break new ground.
—McCarter Artistic Director and Resident Playwright Emily Mann
In 1952 I saw—why I wanted to see it I still don’t know—Tyrone Guthrie’s production of
Marlowe’s Tamburlaine the Great. Life [magazine] must have shown pictures of it. I badgered
my parents to take me. Tamburlaine stood on the stage of the Winter Garden Theatre,
unrolled an enormous map of the world, and strode across it. That one image so
overwhelmed me that I could no longer watch TV miniatures…set in living rooms like mine. I
despised plays with people sitting at kitchen tables pouring their hearts out and the people in
the audience oohing when the people in the play turned on the faucet and real water came
out. That kitchen sink. That was what I hated most.
—John Guare, from the preface to John Guare, Volume 1: The War Against the
Kitchen Sink (Smith and Kraus, 1996)
I love actors who are performers, who are clowns—meaning they are willing to make fools of
themselves, to stride that brink of panic. I feel that Stanislavsky—at least the way he’s been
interpreted through the Method in America—has been the enemy of performance, I’m not
interested in that style of naturalism. How we escape naturalism always seems to be the key.
Naturalism is great for television and the small screen. Theatrical reality happens on a much
higher plane. People on a stage are enormous, there to drive us crazy. I love actors who can
do that.
I think [the main obligation of the playwright is] to break the domination of naturalism and get
the theatre back to being a place of poetry, a place where language can reign...It’s about
finding truth on the large scale with the recognition of the actor as performer. In real life we’re
all such performers. Naturalism wants to reduce us. Naturalism always seems to be the most
unnatural thing.
Each play is a part of the one long play that is a playwright’s life. I know the way each play
come out of the previous play. People don’t have radical shifts of consciousness in the course
of their lifetimes. I can look at a play I wrote at 2:00 A.M. in 1963 the night before I went into
the Air Force—The Loveliest Afternoon of the Year—and say, isn’t that funny. I’m still dealing
with the issues in that play—identity, faith, the desperation it takes people to get through their
lives, the lunatic order we try to put on the chaos of life, and, technically, how to get the play
out of the kitchen sink and hurl it into the Niagara Falls of life.
—John Guare, The Art of Theatre No. 9, in The Paris Review (Winter 1992: 125)
Then engage students in a discussion of what’s offered in the quotations. Questions might include:
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What words or ideas pop or stand out to you from these quotations about and by Guare regarding his
influence and artistic interests and agenda? What about them strikes you?
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From reading these quotations alone, what expectations might you have about a John Guare play in
performance?
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What is your own personal opinion about naturalism as it pertains to theater? Is naturalism more
suited to one form of narrative entertainment, for example television as Guare suggests, than another?
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What do you think Guare means by “Theatrical reality happens on a much higher plane?” How is
Guare’s experience of seeing Tamburlaine the Great as a teenager an example of “theatrical reality”
on a “much higher plane?”
Created by the McCarter Theatre Education Department. 2012.
Pre-Show Materials
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What experiences have you had with plays that present their characters and stories in a nonnaturalistic/anti-realistic “theatrical reality?” How did these productions impact you? Did any of them
strike you as your own personal “Tamburlaine the Great moment?”
[The full text of the wonderful and in-depth interview The Art of the Theatre No. 9 is available online at
www.theparisreview.org and in Playwrights at Work, edited by George Plimpton (New York: The Modern
Library, 2000.).]
AND QUESTIONS AT PLAY IN ARE YOU THERE, MCPHEE?
OH GROW UP!: THE END OF CHILDHOOD
In the course of Are You There, McPhee? there are many textual and visual references to childhood and
classic children’s literature, and at the heart of the story is the theme “the end of childhood.” Ask your
students to contemplate this theme through a discussion of the following questions:
THEMES
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What are some of your favorite stories/books from your childhood and why are/were they your favorites?
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What are some reoccurring themes that pop up in children’s literature? (Some answers might include: Coming of age/growing up; conquering fears, monsters; the inevitability of and how to cope
with death, loss, and loneliness; the powers of friendship, love, perseverance; the evils of prejudice;
the importance of empathy.) Which are your favorite themes and why?
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What are the characteristics of childhood/children? How do (or should) children behave? What is
childlike or childish behavior?
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When did you stop reading children’s books—have you stopped? What made you move on?
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When do you think childhood ends? What age or stage of life?
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When and how does someone grow up? Is it circumstantial? Is growing up an organic process or is
it something imposed or thrust upon a person?
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Is there a difference between the end of childhood and the beginning of adulthood? Do they happen
at the same time?
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What is it that makes an adult an adult?
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What are the characteristics of adulthood/adults? How do (or should) adults behave? What is adult
or mature behavior?
IN WHAT STORY ARE YOU LIVING?
Share the following thoughts playwright John Guare has for the audience of Are You There, McPhee?
with your students and allow them to contemplate and personalize their meaning:
I would like audiences to be aware of the story that they live in. Are they comfortable in the story
of their lives? And another level, what is a love story? It’s two people sharing the same story, two
people sharing the same narrative. And what is a divorce? When you realize that your partner is
in a completely different story than you are, and you don’t choose to be in that person’s story anymore. You want to move on to a new chapter. We talk about lives in literary terms, “I want to
move in to a new chapter.” I would like audiences to look at the story that they’re in. Sometimes
it’s so much easier to look to other people’s stories and completely ignore our own story, [not ask]
if our story is giving us nourishment, if we’re interested in our own story. Horror of horrors, when
we live in a story that we [realize], is not the story we intended to be in. I think, it’s just to be
aware of what narrative we have chosen for our lives, what narrative we have made for our lives
and what narrative we can change in our lives.
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Created by the McCarter Theatre Education Department. 2012.
Pre-Show Materials
Then ask your students to engage personally with Guare’s thoughts and answer the question at the heart
of the quotation: In what story are you living? Urge them to let the quotation and the question take them
wherever it will in the creation of a written response. Other questions they might contemplate in their
response:
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What is the genre of your story? Romance, Horror, Comedy, etc? Why do you characterize your story
in this way? Would you like to alter the genre? If so, to what? If not, why not?
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Is there anyone close to you who seems to be in a completely different story than you are? How is his
or her story different from yours?
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Have you chosen this narrative for your life or has it been thrust upon you? By what or whom?
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Would you like to move in to a new chapter? How would this new chapter be different from your
present chapter?
This exercise may result in deeply personal reflections for some students. You might ask only students
comfortable sharing their responses aloud to the class to do so.
CONTEXTUALIZING ARE YOU THERE, MCPHEE?
To prepare your students for Are You There, McPhee? and to deepen their level of understanding of
Guare’s dramatic style and his play’s idiosyncratic and pop-cultural world, have them research, either in
groups or individually, the following topics:
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Playwright John Guare
 Biography
 Selected Dramatic Works—plays and production history
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Muzeeka
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House of Blue Leaves
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Six Degrees of Separation
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A Free Man of Color
 Press/reviews
Director Sam Buntrock
 Biography/Director’s resume
 Press/reviews
Jaws (book and film)
Jorge Luis Borges/Labyrinths
Magic realism (characteristics)
Jean-Luc Godard/French “New Wave”
Magritte/La Durée Poignardée
Walt Disney/Disneyfication or Disneyization
Students should share their discoveries on each topic with the class using visual aids, such as PowerPoint presentations, film/video clips, collages, storyboards, etc. Following the presentations ask your
students to reflect upon their research process and its joys and challenges.
POP! GOES
THE CULTURE.
Much of the story told in Are You There, McPhee? is set in the year 1975—“the Summer of the Shark,”
that is, the year that the first movie blockbuster Jaws premiered—and is overflowing with a hilarious and
peculiar flood of other popular culture references personally significant to playwright John Guare’s
experience and to his opinionated and inundated protagonist Edmund “Mundie” Gowery.
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Created by the McCarter Theatre Education Department. 2012.
Pre-Show Materials
2010! THE SUMMER OF THE _________________?: A PERSONAL POP CULTURE PRIMER
First, work with your students to create a working definition of “popular culture.” Among other things,
their working definition might include the following categories:
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Film
Actors
Music
Musicians/singers/band
Television
Radio
Books/literature
Authors
Magazines
Visual Art
Fashion
Advertising
Sports
Toys
Comics
Video games
Cyberspace/digital culture
Miscellaneous (e.g., food, beverages, theme parks, celebrities, etc.)
Then ask your students to take a personal inventory of their own pop culture icons/favorites—those
things they loved to love—from the summer of 2010—as well as those things they loved to dislike in
common/mass culture.
Draw 18 boxes on the board and assign a different category to each box. Then ask students to share
their inventory. (If a specific title, person, or thing has already been entered then each subsequent
student who has the same icon/item need only provide a check after said icon/item.)
Consider as a class, whose the Summer of 2010 was.
Next ask your students to consider any counter- or elite-cultural trends, those things or people or ideas
that ran either underground or high above the masses that engaged them.
And finally ask your students to use either their personal inventories or the class’s conclusions as
inspiration for a work of art (e.g. a drawing, painting, collage or sculpture; a poem or short story; a
scene or play; a short film; an original song; or a music video.) Once completed, create a gallery
commemorating the Summer of 2010.
THE MOVIE THAT CHANGED MY LIFE.
Are You There, McPhee? is full of references to movies. According the playwright John Guare and
director Sam Buntrock, respectively:
Movies just get into all the dark corners of our brains…Movies are our family, they’re our past,
they’re our collective memory.
—John Guare
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Pre-Show Materials
…[movies are] a common vocabulary…It’s one of the things we talk about all the time. We
talk about movie because it’s currency; it’s common language. It’s something we’ve share in
the dark together.
—Sam Buntrock
And for most of us, regardless of our age, there is one movie—at least one movie—that has had a great
personal and transformational effect on us.
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Ask your students to consider individually the movie that has made some kind of difference in his or
her life, anything from totally changing it around (This is rare, but it can happen, as when a child falls in
love with dance or a person standing on the outside feels understood for the first time.) to making a
significant difference in his or her thinking or understanding about something or someone.
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Students might need some time to reflect on this topic/idea. This may be something they have never
contemplated before. Compel them to zero in on one significant movie. Offer to them that the movie
that changed their life might not be their favorite movie, per se; this is less about partiality and fondness and more about significance and impact.
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Have students share their responses in the form of a blog or journal entry, that is, a letter to him- or
herself, not a high-toned essay.
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This exercise may result in deeply personal reflections for some students. You might ask only students comfortable sharing their responses aloud to do so.
Created by the McCarter Theatre Education Department. 2012.
Pre-Show Materials
We hope you’ve enjoyed your experience of
Are You There, McPhee? by John Guare,
produced by McCarter Theatre Center.
Have a wonderful
summer
and see you next season!
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Created by the McCarter Theatre Education Department. 2012.