Download post-show discussion questions and activities

POST-SHOW
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
AND ACTIVITIES
Created by the McCarter Theatre Education Department. 2012.
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Created by the McCarter Theatre Education Department. 2012.
Post-Show Activities
TRAVESTIES: PERFORMANCE REFLECTION AND DISCUSSION:
Following their attendance at the performance of Travesties, ask your students to reflect on the questions
below. You might choose to have them answer each individually or you may divide students into groups for
round-table discussions. Have them consider each question, record their answers and then share their
responses with the rest of the class.
QUESTIONS TO ASK YOUR STUDENTS ABOUT THE PLAY IN PRODUCTION
 What was your overall reaction to Travesties? Did you find the production
compelling? Stimulating? Intriguing? Challenging? Memorable? Confusing? Evocative?
Unique? Delightful? Meaningful? Explain your reactions.

What were the most compelling characters or themes in the play and why did you find them
compelling?

Did experiencing Tom Stoppard’s clever, intellectually-rigorous, and farcical play in
performance heighten your awareness of, interest in, or connection to its themes [e.g.,
revolution and its resulting chaos and opportunity; art, the artist, and the role of art in
society (i.e., the artist as a “special” kind of human being and “art for art’s sake;” art for
social purpose, such as social critique; the reconstruction/reconstitution and renaming of
art; and “anti-art”); and the subjectivity, imperfection and permutations of memory.] What
themes were made even more apparent or especially provocative in production/
performance? Explain your responses.

What overall effect did Stoppard’s style (a farcical fragmented amalgamation of word-play,
parody, documentary, poetry/literature, nonsense dialogue, and music/songs) and structure
(Henry Carr misremembering his past through borrowed plot points and devices from Oscar
Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest)—have on you? Did you find this to be an effective
and compelling way to be educated and entertained?

Do you think that the pace and tempo of the storytelling were effective and appropriate?
Explain your opinion.

If you were asked to describe Travesties to a friend who didn’t see the play using only one
sentence, what would that sentence be?
QUESTIONS TO ASK YOUR STUDENTS ABOUT THE CHARACTERS
 Which characters were you most drawn to in Travesties and why?
 What qualities of character were revealed by their action and speech?
 Was there a character to whose personality or ideas you most related?
 In what ways did the characters reveal the themes of the play? Explain your responses.
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Created by the McCarter Theatre Education Department. 2012.
Post-Show Activities
QUESTIONS TO ASK YOUR STUDENTS ABOUT THE STYLE AND DESIGN OF THE PRODUCTION
 Was there a moment in Travesties that was so compelling, intriguing, or humorous that it
remains with you in your mind’s eye and/or ear? Write a vivid description of that
moment. As you write your description, pretend that you are writing about the moment for
someone who was unable to experience the performance.

Did you find the style and design elements of the production, unified under the directorial
vision of Sam Buntrock effective and compelling? Did anything specifically stand out to
you? Explain your reactions.

Did the overall production style and design reflect the central themes of Stoppard’s
Travesties? Explain your response.

What did you notice about David Farley’s set design? Did it provide an evocative and
effective setting/location for Travesties? How and why, or why not?

What did you notice about the costumes (also designed by David Farley) and worn by the
actors? What artistic and practical decisions do you think went into the conception of the
costumes?

What mood or atmosphere did David Weiner’s lighting design establish or achieve? Explain
your experience.

How would you describe sound designer Fritz Patton’s soundscape and David Shire’s music
for Travesties? How did these production elements serve in creating or enhancing the world
of the play? Were there any musical moments or elements of the soundscape that were
especially evocative to you?

What about the farcical human physicality of the play developed with the actors by director
Sam Buntrock and movement consultant Daniel Stein? Did you find anything particularly
notable about the physical theatricality of the play in performance?
TRAVESTIES AS A MEMORY PLAY
What’s in a Memory?
Share the following quotations on memory with your students:
We are all looking for something of extraordinary importance whose nature we have
forgotten; I am writing the memoirs of a man who has lost his memory.
—Eugene Ionesco, Present Past/Past Present: A Personal Memoir
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Created by the McCarter Theatre Education Department. 2012.
Post-Show Activities
If any one faculty of our nature may be called more wonderful than the rest, I do think it is
memory. There seems something more speakingly incomprehensible in the powers, the failures,
the inequalities of memory, than in any other of our intelligences. The memory is sometimes so
retentive, so serviceable, so obedient; at others, so bewildered and so weak; and at others
again, so tyrannic, so beyond control! We are, to be sure, a miracle every way; but our powers
of recollecting and of forgetting do seem peculiarly past finding out.
—Jane Austen, Mansfield Park
Remembering. I am half-smiling at ridiculous situations, crazy people and strange places, all
with the benefit of hindsight. I admit I am choosing my memories selectively. I am quickening
time, losing years and even improving my looks. I have never included the bad side which, I
know, is an integral part of one's memories. That was not for me.
—John Kemp, A Sticky Wicket
Lead a discussion with your students on memory and their experiences with it in their own lives,
as well as in the drama, literature, films, and television they have consumed. Questions for discussion may include:
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How would you define memory? Let’s create our own working definition of the concept/phenomenon. What comes to mind when you think of memory?
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Do you consider yourself to have good memory or a bad memory?
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What are the joys and challenges of having a good memory? A bad memory?

Prior to your experience of Travesties, have you read any books or plays or seen any films
or television or plays that have been about memory or have used memory as an approach to telling a story? How was memory depicted or portrayed?

What are the essential differences in plays and films and/or literature between a
flashback and a memory? [Flashback tends to be a moment-to-moment depiction of a
past, literal experience; it gives us objective information about the way something “really
happened” and is not skewed by any character’s personal point of view. Memory often
depicts the subjective past as perceived by a specific character; it can be affected by the
character’s senses, thoughts, fears, emotions, and free associations and may incorporate
non-realistic ingredients.]
Created by the McCarter Theatre Education Department. 2012.
Post-Show Activities
Go beyond the discussion:

Have your students write out an experience from their past as a flashback. Their accounts
should take the form of narratives in the third person. Ask them to tell the story of the
event as objectively as possible. They can utilize dialogue if the event featured spoken
words.

Have students create short memory plays of their narrative accounts in which they
choose one of their characters’ memories/points of view from which to show that
character’s perception of what happened. Plays should be in dialogue, but may include
moments of monologue/direct address and stage directions. Students should be
encouraged to be as creative as they can to play with the idea that memory is constructed
and mutable/ inconsistent and often exaggerated and/or distorted.

Once the memory plays are completed, scripts can be read aloud or lightly staged and
performed by members of the class for the enjoyment of all.
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After readings or performances of their memory plays, students should reflect on the joy
and challenges of writing from the perspective of memory as opposed to flashback.
HENRY CARR AS AN UNRELIABLE NARRATOR IN A “WILDE-LY”
IMAGINATIVE AND THEATRICAL PLAY
Lead a discussion with your students about Travesties as a memory play. Questions for discussion
may include:
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How would you describe Henry Carr’s powers of memory as portrayed in Travesties?

What are the idiosyncratic and peculiar things that you noticed about Carr’s memories as they played
out on stage?

From what material or constituent elements are Carr’s memories constructed? [Responses might
include: His observations and encounters as a resident of Zurich and in the war, his experience in
performing the play The Importance of Being Earnest, as well as all of the books and newspapers that he’s
read.]

How would you describe “Old” Carr, the narrator of Travesties? What did you notice about him as a
character?

How consistently or inconsistently does Carr remember himself in 1917? What aspects of his
personality, opinions, and attitudes remain relatively consistent throughout the memory sequences?
What aspects of his personality, opinions, and attitudes become unstable or fluctuate in the course of
memory sequences? What do you make of these inconsistencies? What do you think they say about
Carr?
Created by the McCarter Theatre Education Department. 2012.
Post-Show Activities

What did you make of those memories that Carr remembers and then reremembers/replays? Can you enumerate them as a class? What did you notice about
the various replayed moments? Were there “rules” to them? Why do you think
Stoppard plays with these “time slips,” as the playwright calls them? What affect did
they have on you as an audience member? What were the joys of the “time slips?”
What were the challenges, if any?

What about Carr’s memories of James Joyce, Tristan Tzara, Vladimir Ilyich Ulyaniv
(Lenin), and Bennett? How would you describe their characters as constructed
through Carr’s memory? What particular idiosyncrasies and peculiarities do you
notice about each character? How did Carr’s opinions and attitudes about each of
these characters come out in the way his memory portrays them?

What about the women of Travesties? What did you notice about the
characterizations of Gwendolyn, Cecily, and Nadya? Was there a difference in their
characterizations as compared to them? From where does Carr’s memory of them
come?

What do you think this play says about memory?
Next lead a discussion about Carr’s memories as they were theatrically and imaginatively
staged in McCarter Theatre’s production.

What did you notice about director Sam Buntrock’s and his design team’s
imaginative approach to staging Carr’s memories in Travesties? What popped for you
in your memory of Carr’s memories in performance in terms of:

scenic elements

lighting

costume

sound/music
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Movement
ART FOR WHAT’S/WHO’S SAKE?
In writing Travesties, Tom Stoppard chose as his purpose to “marry the play of ideas to farce.” A play of
ideas is a play which takes as its theme a social or philosophical issue or problem. One issue that takes
and retakes the stage, via the multi-opinionated memories of Henry Carr as shaped and challenged by a
major revolutionary period in world history, is the role of art and the artist in society. Perhaps it is not
surprising that Stoppard is as multi-opinionated as his protagonist Carr when it comes to the purpose of
art and artists:
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Created by the McCarter Theatre Education Department. 2012.
Post-Show Activities
In Travesties I found that various voices of my own which were on a collision course made
up whole scenes of Travesties for me, if you like. Henry Carr’s skepticism about the
valuation which artists put on themselves is very much my own skepticism. But then Joyce’s
defense of art is mine, too. I mean, one doesn’t think, as it were, with one mind on these
matters. One has two or three minds battling with each other. And even in the case of Tristan Tszara [sic. Ed.] in that play, who had to put the case for his particular form of antiart, I went into that having as I thought to create his arguments from nothing since I had
no sympathy with them to start with. He wasn’t speaking for me at all. But in the event I
found some of the things Tszara had to say quite persuasive.
—Tom Stoppard, quoted in T. Bareham’s Tom Stoppard: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, Jumpers, Travesties: A Casebook
(Macmillan, 1990), 161.

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Share the above quotation by Tom Stoppard with your students, then lead a discussion on
the role of art and the artist in society—both as fiercely and farcically debated issue in Travesties and in relation to the students own thoughts and opinions. Questions for discussion may include:
 Which characters in Travesties are artists? What are the occupations or interests of
the other characters in the play that are not artists?

What are the various opinions presented about art, artists and the role of artists, and
who offers these opinions? [Responses might include: the artist as a special being,
someone gifted in doing something others cannot; a lucky person who doesn’t actually toil; a self-observed person; a person removed from or who forsakes the political;
a social critic; anyone who “does” art.]

What are the various opinions presented in the course of the play about the role of
art in society and who offers these opinions? [Responses might include: “It is the
duty of the artist to beautify;” “art for art’s sake;” art as social critique or an educational/transformational tool (i.e., art not as an individualistic pursuit or free expression, but as a tool of and for the people to reform society).]

Is there any voice on art that spoke more loudly than all of the other voices? Did any
specific voice win you over? Whose? Why?

Who or what do you think an artist is?
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What do you think is art’s greatest power?
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Consider the art that most appeals to you most—in terms of visual, literary, performing (i.e., music, theatre, and dance), and filmic arts—and share what purpose it plays
in your life?

What do you think the role of art in society is or should be?
Created by the McCarter Theatre Education Department. 2012.
Post-Show Activities
Going beyond the discussion:
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Use the last five questions above a springboard for creating art or artist manifestos.
Have students precede their individual or group manifesto creation by doing a little
research on artistic manifestos.
Encourage students to be as creative as they would like in expressing their views on
art and artists.
Allow students to share their manifestos with their classmates and to communicate
their thoughts what most intrigued them about their manifesto writing experience.
CREATING YOUR OWN TRAVESTY
Travesties is a work of fiction which makes use, and misuse, of history. Scenes which are
self-evidently documentary mingle with others which are just as evidently fantastical. People
who were hardly aware of each other's existence are made to collide; real people and imaginary people are brought together without ceremony; and events which took place months,
and even years, apart are presented as synchronous.
—Tom Stoppard, Program Note from the original Royal Shakespeare Company production (1974)
Tom Stoppard saw great dramatic possibilities in the historical fact that master of literary modernism James
Joyce, Dadaist poet and performance artist Tristan Tzara, and Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (Lenin), the leader of
the Bolshevik Revolution, were all in Zurich at the same time during World War I. And this fact—along
with an anecdotal mention of an obscure British diplomatic counsel who acted in a production of The Importance of Being Earnest produced by James Joyce—became his inspirational basis for his “use, and misuse,”
of both history and Wilde’s play.
Have your students—either individually or in creative teams—create their own travesty of history by bringing together a historical or contemporary political figure, literary luminary, and another famous person
than they choose themselves or from the lists below:
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POLITICAL FIGURES
LITERARY LUMINARIES
OTHER FAMOUS PERSONS
Ronald Reagan
Hillary Clinton
Thomas Jefferson
Barack Obama
John F. Kennedy
Franklin D. Roosevelt
Martin Luther King Jr.
Benjamin Franklin
Eleanor Roosevelt
Abraham Lincoln
Flannery O’Connor
Mark Twain
John Steinbeck
Emily Dickinson
Toni Morrison
Ernest Hemingway
Ralph Ellison
Arthur Miller
Jack Kerouac
Margaret Atwood
Bob Dylan
Rachel Carson
Margaret Mead
Steve Jobs
Andy Warhol
Margaret Mead
Walt Disney
Oprah Winfrey
Muhammad Ali
Lady Gaga
Created by the McCarter Theatre Education Department. 2012.
Post-Show Activities
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If any of the above names are not familiar to students then some time should be allotted for
character research and selection.

If students would like to also include an additional anchor character, such as themselves, in
their scene, they should be encouraged to do so.

Once characters are selected, students should research their characters to understand the
lives, interest, and personal philosophies. Students should look for documentary evidence
(i.e., speeches, quotations, autobiographies, letters, artistic output, etc.) from which to draw.

Next, they should consider a setting/location in which the characters might meet and entwine. Share with them the idea that plays typically feature the extraordinary day in the life
of a character when he or she is unexpectedly confronted by someone or something or when
a character decides to suddenly act on a deep need or want and then must face obstacles.

Students should be encouraged to use any dramatic conventions (e.g., direct address, memories, flashbacks, Stoppardian “time slips,” dream sequences) or elements of production (e.g.,
sound or special effects, projections, lighting effects) that might help them in the writing of
their scripts and theatrical envisioning of their stories.

Once the scenes are completed then scripts can be read aloud or lightly staged and performed by members of the class for the enjoyment of all.

After readings or performances, students should reflect on what inspired them to write their
travesties as well as the joy and challenges of the writing process.
TRAVESTIES: THE REVIEW
Have your students take on the role of theater critic by writing a review of the McCarter Theatre production
of Travesties. A theater critic or reviewer is essentially a “professional audience member,” whose job is to
provide reportage of a play’s production and performance through active and descriptive language for a target audience of readers (e.g., their peers, their community, or those interested in the arts). Critics/reviewers
analyze the theatrical event to provide a clearer understanding of the artistic ambitions and intentions of a
play and its production; reviewers often ask themselves, “What is the playwright and this production attempting to do?” Finally, the critic offers personal judgment as to whether the artistic intentions of a production were achieved, effective and worthwhile. Things to consider before writing:
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Theater critics/reviewers should always back up their opinions with reasons, evidence and
details.
The elements of production that can be discussed in a theatrical review are the play text or
script (and its themes, plot, characters, etc.), scenic elements, costumes, lighting, sound, music, acting and direction (i.e., how all of these elements are put together). (See Theater Reviewer’s Checklist.)
Educators may want to provide their students with sample theater reviews from a variety of
newspapers.
Encourage your students to submit their reviews to the school newspaper for publication.
Created by the McCarter Theatre Education Department. 2012.
Post-Show Activities
We hope you’ve enjoyed your experience of
Travesties by Tom Stoppard,
produced by McCarter Theatre Center.
See you next time!
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Created by the McCarter Theatre Education Department. 2012.