Post-Show Questions for Discussion and Activities

Note to Educators: Use the following assignments, questions, and activities to have students evaluate their experience of the performance of Tartuffe, as well as to encourage their own imaginative and artistic projects through further exploration of the play in production. Consider also that some of the pre-show activities might enhance your students’ experience following the performance.

1. Tartuffe:  A Discussion.  Following their attendance at the performance of Tartuffe, 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

1. What was your overall reaction to Tartuffe?  Did you find the production compelling?  Stimulating?  Intriguing?  Challenging?  Memorable?  Confusing?  Evocative?  Unique?  Delightful?  Meaningful?  Explain your reactions.
   
   
2. Did experiencing the play heighten your awareness or understanding of the play’s themes?  [e.g., familial discord and generational conflicts; thwarted young love; hypocrisy and deception; appearance vs. reality; and the all-consuming and potentially destructive power of extremism in its many forms (i.e., obsession, zealotry or fanaticism)]  What themes were made even more apparent in performance? Explain your responses.
   
   
3. Do you think that the pace and tempo of the production were effective and appropriate? Explain your opinion.

Questions to Ask Your Students About the Characters

1. Did you personally identify with any of the characters in Tartuffe?  Who?  Why?

2. What qualities were revealed by the action and speech of the characters?  Explain your ideas.

3. Did any characters develop or undergo a transformation during the course of the play?  Who?  How?  Why?

4. In what ways did the characters reveal the themes of the play?  Explain your responses.


Questions to Ask Your Students About the Style and Design of the Production

1. Was there a moment in Tartuffe that was so compelling or intriguing that it remains with you in your mind’s eye?  Can you 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.
   
   
2. Did the style and design elements of the production enhance the performance?  Did anything specifically stand out to you?  Explain your reaction.
   
   
3. How did the production style and design reflect the themes of the play?
   
   
4. What mood or atmosphere did the lighting design establish or achieve?  Explain your experience.
   
   
5. How did the sound design enhance your overall experience?
   
   
6. Did the design of the costumes and makeup serve to illuminate the characters, themes, and style of the play?  How?
   

2. Directorial Choices:  Daniel Fish’s Tartuffe.  Director Daniel Fish has garnered international attention, acclaim and occasional controversy for his compelling unconventional productions of classical and contemporary plays, from Shakespeare and Molière to Stoppard and Mee.  Fish excells as an “auteur” director in that, after rigorous textual analysis, he applies his personal creative vision or unique interpretation to a play via thematic emphases and visual and performance styles and draws connections and authors new meanings beyond the playwright’s original intentions.

• If your students have not already read Molière’s classic French comedy Tartuffe, have them do so. (The McCarter production utilizes Richard Wilbur's verse translation.)
  
  
• Then ask them to identify aspects of McCarter’s production that can be attributed to Daniel Fish’s creative vision.  The following questions might be helpful as jumping off points:
  
  
  1. Are there particular themes that Fish emphasizes or initiates? 
  2. Do Fish and his collaborative team of designers employ a particular visual style with the design of the play?  What mood, thoughts or feelings does design aesthetic invoke?
  3. Fish and his ensemble of actors apply a particular performance style to the piece?  If so, how does this style influence your perception or reception of the play?
  4. Are there any particular connections that the director makes that transcend Moliere’s original time and place to speak to a contemporary audience?  Can you attempt to explain how these fit into Daniel Fish’s overall directorial concept?
     
     
• Next ask your students to consider themselves auteurs of their own personal production of Tartuffe.
  
  
  1. What creative vision or interpretation would they pursue as their directorial concept?  What is it that they want to say through their Tartuffe?
  2. What particular themes would they emphasize in or initiate with their production?
  3. What connections would they like to make to historical or contemporary persons, places or events?  Would they change the setting (i.e., time, location) or situation?  Would they alter any of the characterizations to draw important political or social parallels?
  4. What would their design approach be?  What mood, thoughts or feelings would they like to evoke from their audience and how would they go about accomplishing their aesthetic goals?

3. Molière’s Dramatic Art.  The following are questions for discussion and activities that relate specifically to Molière’s work as a playwright:

The Art of Comedy
Molière as a comic playwright was influenced both by traditional French farce (an unscripted popular form of comedy which featured robust attitudes and vulgar ways, and emphasized a strong physical style of performance) and commedia dell’arte (an Italian comedy style that features improvisational skills, highly physical playing, clowning and the use of masks).  Ask your students:

• Where in the course of the play are these influences apparent?  Have your students select scenes to support their opinions. 
• Where else can humor be found in the course of Tartuffe?
• What feature makes it specifically a comedy in the generic sense?

The Art of Suspense, Anticipation and Expectation
Ask your students to consider why Tartuffe, the title character of the play does not appear until the third act.

• Why does Molière delay the entrance of Tartuffe for so long?
• How is Tartuffe’s first entrance anticipated (what are we prepared to think or believe about him) and what is its effect upon the audience?
• Did Tartuffe meet your expectations (as they were set up by the descriptions of him by the other characters in the play and the debates)?

The Art Challenge of the Ending
At the climax of Tartuffe, Orgon and his family are suddenly saved from certain ruin by an outside influence.  This kind of ending in dramaturgical/playwriting terms is called a deus ex machina (or "god from the machine").  In the theatre of the Ancient Greeks, tragedies were often resolved by the entrance of a god who arrived on stage via machinery just in time to save the good or wronged or to punish evil.  Today, the term is used to refer to the resolution of a conflict through the intervention of a person or thing from outside of the dramatic action; it is often used critically to suggest an inorganic/artificial or less than dramatically compelling resolution.  Ask your students to describe the turn of events in Tartuffe that can be categorized as a deus ex machine.

• Do you think it is a compelling or suitable resolution to the action and ending of the play?  Why or why not?
  
  
• Why do you think Molière may have chosen to end the play this way?
  
  
• If it is not already common knowledge, alert your students to the fact that the original production/script of Tartuffe was condemned and censored by religious members of the court.  The version of the play that has survived has a revised ending which was not Molière's original artistic intention.
  
  
• Ask your students to consider a better, perhaps more artful or organic, way of ending Tartuffe.  Have them script their own versions of the play from Act V, scene iv on to the end.  In a subsequent class meeting have them cast their classmates in roles for lively reading of the new endings.  Discuss the joys and challenges of trying to improve upon the great French dramatist's art.

4. "Dear Dad, Have You Gone Mad?!"  Have each of your students take on the persona of either Damis or Mariane to write a letter to his or her father, Orgon.  The letter must be imperative in nature, address the familial discord in the house of late, offer opinion as to the source of the conflict, and attempt to offer remedies or advice on how to resolve the situation and return family to its previous state of harmony.  Students should feel that they have free-reign to update or relocate the dramatic scenario, although they should stay true to general ideas of the world of the play.

Students’ letters may be read aloud for the class and discussed for the merits of their argument, attention to dramatic detail and imagination and originality of their authors.

5.  Imposter Improv.  (Adapted from the National Theatre, UK.)  The following activity is an interesting and revealing experiment in the power of persuasion and deception.  (Some preparation is required.  Blank index cards are required as well as a red marking pen.  Educators should read through the instructions a number of times before conducting the exercise.)
   
   
   • Ask your students to form a circle. Each member of the group should be given an index card with a number written on it—cards should be numbered from 1 to 10 (duplication of numbers will be necessary for larger classes. The class should be told that some of the numbers are written in blue and some in red. Nobody is to see anyone else’s number. )
     
     
   • Each person should prepare themselves to tell the rest of the class some fact about their life. The number one has indicates the importance of the fact to the teller—so if a student has a 1, s/he might tell what s/he had for breakfast, while if s/he has a 10, s/he might relate his or her worst fear or happiest memory. Allow time for thought and preparation here. Questions will be asked about what each person decides to say, so they need to be ready.
     
     
   • Instruct students that if their numbers are blue, their facts must be true. If they are red, then they must tell an untruth.
     
     
   • Make it clear to everyone that no one will be made to tell whether what they say is true or false at any time during the exercise or after it is over.
     
     
   • Now go round the circle and get each student to share their fact or story.
     
     
   • Once everyone has spoken, return to the first person and allow questions from anyone who wants to ask them. The class should work together to decide which stories they believe. Move on to the next person whenever the class seems to reach a consensus or unanimity about each fact/story.
     
     
   • Educators should be sure to guide the class so that no adversarial atmosphere develops. The interest of this experiment lies in why we believe or not. Is it because of the teller’s manner? Our prior knowledge of them? The appropriateness of the purported fact to that particular teller? Preconceptions or prejudices? The class does not necessarily need to come to definite conclusions.
     
     
   • When the exercise appears to be more or less over, reveal to students that all the numbers are actually red (which they should all be). As the realization sinks in that everyone has been lying throughout, revisit those stories which were most readily believed and look again at why
     
     
6. BAT:  Blogging After Tartuffe.  Either as a class or individually, have your students access McCarter's web site (http://www.mccarter.org) to investigate the new McCarter Theatre Blog (http://www.mccarter.org/blog/index.php).  The blog has been designed to connect McCarter Theatre and its staff (production, literary, artistic, education, etc.) with subscribers, students, educators and anyone interested in reading and writing about theater, and it provides an up-to-the-minute forum for news and information on McCarter plays in pre-production, rehearsal, and performance.  Access the blog by creating individual accounts or a classroom account and log in.  Select "Tartuffe" under "Categories" and read archived and recent postings.  Allow your students to post a comment or pose a question based on either previous bloggers' entries or on their own experience of the play in production.
   
   
7. Tartuffe:  The Review.  Have your students take on the role of theater critic by writing a review of McCarter Theatre’s production of Molière's Tartuffe.  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 provide analysis of the theatrical event to provide 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?”  And, 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:

• Theater critics/reviewers always should 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 the 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.