A Teacher Resource Guide

• Core Curriculum Standards
• Introduction
• Who's Who in the Production
• Plot Description
• Character Profiles
• Glossary of Terms

• Playwright Bio: All About Mee
• Mee on Stage: A Production History
• Talking with Charles L. Mee
• Inspiration for Wintertime
• Notes on a Manifesto by Charles L. Mee
• Quotes on Love by Charles L. Mee
• With Love from Mee to You
• Director Bio - David Schweizer
• Talking with David Schweizer
• Spotlight on Scenic Design

• Drama in the Classroom
• Pre-Show Questions
• After the Show
• Enhance the Performance
• Related Materials

The Visual and Performing Arts are considered Core Curriculum areas for the New Jersey State Department of Education. This production of Wintertime is designed to give your students exposure to the specific Core Curriculum Standards listed below.

Wintertime and Curriculum Standards

This production of Wintertime and related study materials will provide students with specific knowledge and skills to address the following Core Curriculum Content Standards in the Arts:

1.1	All students will acquire knowledge and skills that increase aesthetic awareness in dance, music, theatre, and visual arts.
1.3	All students will utilize arts elements and arts media to produce artistic products and performances.
1.4	All students will demonstrate knowledge of the process of critique.
1.5	All students will identify the various historical, social, and cultural influences and traditions which have generated artistic accomplishments throughout the ages and which continue to shape contemporary arts.

Wintertime is also designed to address the following Core Curriculum Standards in Language Arts Literacy and Social Studies:

3.2	All students will listen actively in a variety of situations to information from a variety of sources.
3.3	All students will write in clear, concise, organized language that varies in content and form for different audiences and purposes.
3.4	All students will read various materials and texts with comprehension and critical analysis.
6.2	All students will learn democratic citizenship through the humanities, by studying literature, art, history and philosophy, and related fields.
6.7	All students will acquire geographical understanding by studying the world in spatial terms.

Wintertime is a new American play that received its world premiere at California's La Jolla Playhouse in the summer of 2002. It is the recipient of eight San Diego Critics Circle awards including 'Outstanding New Play.' It has already seen stagings across the country at ACT Theatre in Seattle, Minneapolis' Guthrie Theatre and the Long Wharf in New Haven, CT. McCarter's production, co-produced with New York's Second Stage Theatre, will move to New York after its Princeton run.

A theatrical carnival of romance, recrimination and cross-purposes, Wintertime is an energetic comedy about the miracle of love. Suffused with intellectual debates that tickle the aesthetic sensibility and romantic encounters that educate and surprise, Mee's cacophonic comedy celebrates love in all its foolish, absurd, and infinitely delightful varieties.

Throughout this Guide you will find suggested topics for class discussion as well as in-class activities and study questions to consider both before and after you see the production. These questions are collected at the end of the Resource Guide.

**A note to teachers: Wintertime contains adult language and situations. Please feel free to contact the Education Department for its appropriateness in regards to your students at (609) 258-8288. Thank you.

During a late December snowfall, Jonathan and Ariel, a young couple in love, arrive at Jonathan's family summer house for a romantic getaway. Ready to propose marriage, Jonathan is interrupted by his mother Maria and her lover Francois, who have also decided to use the house for the weekend. This unexpected turn of events is followed by the arrival of Jonathan's father Frank and his father's lover Edmund who have also shown up for a romantic weekend. As pleasantries snowball out of control, Bertha, an elderly woman, bursts in and explains that her lover Hilda has fallen through a hole in the ice and is drowning. As the group frantically runs around gathering rescue equipment, Hilda enters alive and soaking wet. It does not take long for suspicions and jealousies to resurface, and soon all of the lovers demonstrate their frustration in a performance that is both operatic and farcical.

Wintertime was produced last fall at the Guthrie Theatre Lab in Minneapolis. During the rehearsal process, Charles L. Mee spoke about his play and his desire to 'strip his audience down to their bare core, and show them all in all of their glory what it means for them to be human and alive.' The following are excerpts from an interview conducted on October 10, 2002 by Guthrie literary manager Michael Bigelow Dixon.

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We'll begin with an open-ended question: Wintertime, why?

Charles L. Mee: I wrote this play called Summertime, which was done at the Magic Theatre. There's this director named Kenn Watt in San Francisco who did my Orestes in San Francisco six or seven years ago, which is a very nasty, twisted play and he called me and said, "Would you write something for me to do at the Magic?" And I said, "Sure!" 'cause I thought that would be cool 'cause I don't have any friends in San Francisco so I can do any kind of nasty crazy thing I want without feeling embarrassed. So I started out to write this piece for him, and I thought this could be as foul and twisted and nasty as anything I'd ever done. And out came this kind of frothy romantic comedy about a dysfunctional family in a summer house and a young couple trying to get together. And so my friend took it into a workshop at the Magic Theatre and since he didn't believe I wrote frothy romantic comedies, he dug into all the subtext of all the pain and anguish that's naturally there in any little romantic love story. And I went to see it and it was just awful. And I said to him, "You know; I don't think you can load King Lear and Macbeth on top of this fragile nothing little structure of froth, because it just caves in. And he said, "Oh, I think you're right." So he just turned it upside down. It was really quite amazing, I mean I think he was fabulous to do it. And the actors, they just went "flip" and out came this frothy romantic comedy. But I looked at it and thought, I could do that in the writing; I could go into all the pain and anguish and suffering with the same people in the same summer house, put it in the middle of winter instead of the middle of summer and call it Wintertime. And I will write this dark, anguished, tragic play. So I sat down to write that and out came this frothy romantic comedy. And so I've quit trying to write the dark anguished play with these people. So that's it, and it came out of an impulse to write something... I guess what I found out was, if I just did whatever I felt like doing without even thinking about it, then it turns out that I'm just a frothy romantic person.

Here's a dramaturgical question. The characters in Wintertime articulate their feelings and negotiate relationships and hear a lot of other viewpoints on those subjects. Do they make progress in anyway?

CLM: Well let me see. Two couples break up and one couple gets together and another couple confirms the relationship they're in. I mean, the two women who are together, they maybe don't confirm too much. They just had a little stumbling block. Frank and Maria break up and she goes off with Francois. And Frank and Edward break up, I suppose forever. And the young couple, by going through this experience, find each other. I mean, the funny thing about the play, I think, is that on different nights you could think it's about different things. Some nights, I mean every night I guess, it's about the struggles and difficulties and joy of love. But on some nights you sort of sit back and look at it even more abstractly and it seems to be about the way in which love is almost the best revelation of character there is. You see if people are generous, passionate, steadfast, fickle and selfish and grasping or careless. All aspects of characters are revealed in the relationship of two people falling in love and staying in love. So I think a love story is the best way...I'm a big believer in Aristotle's idea that human beings are social animals. That people don't exist except in relationship to other people. The Greeks believed that if you were a hermit, you weren't a human being. If you weren't in a relationship, you weren't fully human. And of all human relationships, the one in which you see most clearly to the bottom of somebody's soul is in the relationship of love, and you found out what is possible for a human being to be. So that's what I think.

And within the context of all the issues it's playing with, why all the violence? Why the rending of clothes, the running into trees, the throwing of plates?

CLM: 'Cause you got to have fun.

On stage, physical violence is fun?

CLM: If you go to the theatre, you got to have fun. I mean, I just love it. I love it, I think for three reasons or maybe four or seventeen reasons. The first is because I'm not a very mobile person. I walk with crutches. If I'm going to have vicarious pleasure, the vicarious pleasure for me is to write a play in which people jump up and down and run and throw things and smash stuff up and dance. So this is sort of what comes out of my soul, this fantasy of physical virtuosity. That's the true answer to the question. I think the other answer is: I love theatre that's not just text-based, not just the staging of a text, but really is an event in which text occurs along with music and movement. So, I think the plays that I write, in some form are almost like musical comedies. It's the same elements as musical comedy - song and dance and people talking - but more scrambled as it comes out than it would be in a normal musical comedy.

What associations does wintertime, the season, have for you?

CLM: The dead of winter, nothing growing, the opposite of springtime.

What are the advantages of working in series: your love trilogy - Big Love, True Love, First Love, -and your Wintertime / Summertime seasonal duet, to name two examples from your cannon?

CLM: There's no advantage and I didn't mean to do it. I didn't set out to do it. I don't think about it when I'm doing it. But I think that I work and I think that I think more like a painter than a playwright. Playwrights, every time they write a play, it's expected that they will write a great big new play about some subject they've absolutely never written about before. And there'll be different people in a different setting, talking about different stuff, living different lives. Whereas, painters, you expect they do landscapes. Indeed, they even do sunflowers. They do sunflowers in the early morning. They do sunflowers in the afternoon. They do sunflowers in the fading light. And then after a while, they're not doing sunflowers anymore, they're doing seascapes. And so, I think, like painters, I get caught up in some theme and I enjoy it and I like looking at it from different angles and in different light in different contexts with different characters in different places and I sort of love that.

Can you talk about the works you've sampled - the texts and the people - who make it into this play?

CLM: Most of my plays are filled with appropriated, sampled material. I mean, that's what I love to do, that's what I do. My original dramaturg is Max Ernst, who more or less invented the modern collage back in the time of World War I. And what I think he did was, he took material form the real world and rendered it as an hallucination. And that's sort of my model. And so I like to think that I sample stuff from the real world and I re-enter it as a work of imagination, hallucination, dream. But in Wintertime I did what most playwrights do, which is I didn't steal this from places like Soap Opera Digest and The National Inquirer and the seven o'clock news on NBC. I stole it from the lives of my family and friends, and so this is what you call an original play, 'cause it's stolen from your friends. The only thing I think that I actually stole from what we say is a source is a book by Anne Carson called Eros: The Bittersweet. There's a bit in the play about eros and what eros is. It's the desire for something you lack. So that's the one from Anne Carson. Just 'cause I love her and I've read her a lot. I've read almost everything she's ever written, and I wanted to put her in the middle of this play about love, because I think she writes about it so beautifully. And then the other thing that's in the play is a chunk of theology out of medieval heresy trial that was written about by this Italian historian named Carlo Ginzberg called The Worm in the Cheese. It's this great book about this guy who was tried for heresy because he believed that the angels were like worms that come from the cheese and the earth was spontaneously generated like fruit flies. I don't remember if they burned him for that or not.

Charles L. Mee often uses other writers' texts as found material for his theatrical collages. His palette incorporates everything from philosophy to pop culture. "My plays are containers in which I put the stuff of my life; my relationships, what I've seen on television, what people have said to me on the street," Mee writes. "There is no such thing as an original play. None of the classical Greek plays were original: they were all taken from earlier plays or poems or myths. And none of Shakespeare's plays were original: they were all taken from earlier work. Sometimes playwrights steal stories and conversations and dreams and intimate revelations from their friends and lovers and call this original."

Mee's hope for the theater is that it "returns to the immense energies that were in the Greek and Shakespearean theater, theater that includes not just text but also spectacle, music, dance, physical performance, color, noise and fabulous events."

The structure of this ebullient comedy blends together the absurdity of farce, references to Greek Drama, and coincidences crucial in Shakespeare's A Winter's Tale.

Teachers and Students, note the inspiration from the Greeks and Shakespeare and look for these references while enjoying the performance.

Charles Mee's writing takes an original look at contemporary theatre by using different tactics in his playwriting. In the following manifesto, Charles discusses his principles, policies, and intentions that helped form what he believes to be the role of a playwright.

If Aristotle was right
that human beings are social animals
that we create ourselves in our relationships to others,
and if theatre
is the art form that deals above all others in human relationships,
then theatre is the art form, par excellence,
in which we discover what it is to be human
and what it is possible for humans to be.

Whatever else it may do,
a play embodies a playwright's beliefs about how it is to be alive today,
and what it is to be a human being -
so that what a play is about,
what people say and how things look onstage,
and, even more deeply than that,
how a play is structured,
contain a vision of what it is to have a life on earth.

If things happen suddenly and inexplicably,
it's because a playwright believes that's how life is.
if things unfold gradually and logically,
that's an idea bout how the world works.
if characters are motivated by psychological impulses
that were planted early in a character's life in her childhood home,
it's because a playwright believes
that's what causes people to do things they do the way they do them.
Or,
if a character is motivated by other things, in addition,
or even primarily motivated by other things -
by the cumulative impact of culture and history,
by politics and economics,
by gender and genetics and rational thought and whim,
informed by books and by the National Enquirer,
given to responses that are tragic and hilarious,
conscious and unconscious, ignorant and informed at the same time -
it's because the playwright believes
this complex of things is what makes human history happen.
Most of the plays I grew up seeing didn't feel like my life.
They were such well-made things,
so nicely crafted, so perfectly functioning in their plots and actions and endings,
so clear and clearly understood,
so rational in their structures,
in their psychological explanations of the causes of things.

And my life hadn't been like that.
When I had polio as a boy, my life changed in an instant and forever.
my life was not shaped by Freudian psychology;
it was shaped by a virus.
and it was no longer well made.
it seemed far more complex a project than any of the plays I was seeing.

And so,
in my own work,
I've stepped somewhat outside
the traditions of American theatre in which I grew up
to find a kind of dramaturgy that feels like my life.
And I've been inspired a lot by the Greeks.
I love the Greeks
because their plays so often begin with matricide and fratricide,
with a man murdering his nephews and serving the boys to their father for
     dinner. That is to say, the Greeks take no easy problems,
no little misunderstanding that is going to be resolved
before the final commercial break at the top of the hour,
no tragedy that will be resolved with good will,
acceptance of a childhood hurt,
and a little bit of healing.
They take deep anguish and hatred and disability
and rage and homicidal mania and confusion and aspiration
and a longing for the purest beauty
and they say:
Here is not an easy problem;
take all this and make a civilization of it.

And the forms in which they cast their theatre were not simple.
Unlike Western theatre since Ibsen,
which has been essentially a theatre of staged texts,
the Greeks employed spectacle,
music, and dance or physical movement,
into which text was placed
as one of the elements of theatre.
The complexity and richness of form
reflected a complexity and richness of understanding
of human character and human history.

The Greeks and Shakespeare and Brecht
understood human character
within a rich context of history and culture.

This is my model.

In 1906/07, Picasso stumbled upon cubism as a possible form.
Immediately, he made three pencil sketches
of a man,
of a newspaper and a couple of other items on a table,
and of Sacre Coeur -
that is, of the three classic subjects of art:
portraiture, still life, and landscape.
And he proved, to his satisfaction, therefore,
that cubism "worked."

My ambition is to do the same for a new form of theatre,
composed of music and movements as well as text
like the theatre of the Greeks
and of American musical comedy
and of Shakespeare and Brecht
and of Anne Bogart and Robert Woodruff
and of Robert Le Page and Simon McBurney
and of Sasha Waltz and Jan Lauwers and Alain Platel
and of Pina Bausch and Ivo van Hove
and of others working in Europe today
and of the theatre traditions in most of the world forever.

-Charles L. Mee, 2002

by Liz Engelman

What do the Greeks, Moliere, Chekhov, French farce and Fellini have in common? They are all elements of Charles L. Mee's kaleidoscopic collage Wintertime, which has the universality of Greek drama, the romantic interludes of Moliere, the honesty of Chekhov, the outrageousness of Fellini - and a door slam worthy of a Feydeau farce! Mee's cacophonic comedy of amorous deliberations, farcical anguish and philosophical soul-searching celebrates love in all its foolish, absurd, and infinitely delightful varieties.

Inspired by the collage techniques of Max Ernst and Robert Rauschenberg, whose visual art often derived from found, broken, rejected objects or junk left on the street, Mee often uses other writers' texts as found material for his theatrical collages. His palette incorporates everything from philosophy to pop culture; in his plays you're as likely to stumble upon an excerpt from Soap Opera Digest or Vogue as you are to spot a storyline sampled from Greek tragedy. "My plays are containers in which I put the stuff of my life; my relationships, what I've seen on television, what people have said to me on the street," Mee writes. Just as he samples from the Greeks, so Mee returns his own work to the public domain; he posts his plays on his website (www.panix.com/~meejr), and urges others to use for popular consumption - and reconstruction. Mee first began writing plays in the 60s after graduating from Harvard University. He left Cambridge for New York City, but the hot political climate at the time of anti-Vietnam and Watergate struggles took Mee on a detour away from his playwriting career, a detour that was to last for the next two decades, working as an editor and a historian. His early plays such as Orestes, The Bacchae, and Agamemnon incorporate reflect the sensibility of a historian, examining politics, history, and the history of drama, revisiting a story to rewrite it, understand it, and then reflect it back to us through a modern lens. In Mee's more recent work, a cycle of plays that includes Summertime, True Love, First Love, and Big Love, and A Summer Evening in Des Moines, he has focused his lens further inward, delving into the personal as well as political, the private as much as the public aspects of human relationships. He has emerged from this love cycle celebrating the joys of life, even as he grazes its darker underside.

A typical snow drift

Wintertime emerged from Mee's attempt to write what he called "a dark, anguished play" full of pain and suffering. He had had the same goal with the play's predecessor, Summertime, but instead found that he had written a "frothy romantic comedy." So he made the attempt again, only to again discover he had written a comedy, antic as well as romantic. In the first ten pages of Mee's hysterical holiday from hell, a romantic tryst has been interrupted, suspicions are ignited, someone has gone missing, and everyone has stormed offstage. By the final ten pages of the play, two couples break up, another gets together, and a third re-affirms the love they share. The lessons learned in the course of the play's tempestuous voyage into the human heart are ultimately life-affirming, despite the rising tide of real and imagined betrayals.

Most of Mee's revelations appear in the form of surprises, interruptions, sudden shifts. "My own plays are broken, jagged, filled with sharp edges, filled with things that take sudden turns, careen into each other, smash up, veer off into sickening turns," Mee writes. "That feels good to me. It feels like my life." Like the Greek writers before him, Mee embraces the passions, jealousies, and losses that come with being human. "The Greek tragic playwrights understood that human beings are not simply motivated by the dynamics of their childhood or domestic life but by history, culture, genetics, economics, gender and so many other forces," says Mee. "It's a grand conception of life on earth, and it makes most other dramatic forms seem timid."

The same could be said about Mee's own work; it is definitely not timid. Mee does not write plays as much as he creates theatrical events. His plays are chaotic collisions of text, movement and music, a collage of ideas, emotions, pleasures and pain. Director Matthew Wilder has hailed Mee's plays as "fantasias" which "carry the form of an anxious twirl of the radio dial powered by a late night coffee jag." Indeed, Mee's work is fragmented (and surely caffeinated!); his texts are built from the shattered shards of smashed classics that he reconstructs with the glue of his own sensibility.

But right now, for Mee, what it boils down to at the end of the day is love, in its simplest and most complicated of forms. "For most of us," Mee states, "if we're lucky, the most intense relationship we have with other people is not being massacred by them or being bombed by them but finding deep and intimate relationships. The most wonderful one is the one of love... That's where we find out whether we're focused, generous, attentive, flexible, caring, thoughtful and compassionate. Or we find out, on the other hand, we're careless, cruel, inattentive, and self-consumed. That's how we know what it is to be a human being." This is what Mee does best; he - literally - strips us down to our bare core, and shows us in all our glory what it means for us to be human and alive.

Before the first rehearsal of Wintertime, Steven Michaels, Education Associate at the McCarter Theatre, had the opportunity to talk to David Schweizer about his collaborations with Charles Mee, his approach to directing this play, and his thoughts on love.

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You have directed works of Charles L. Mee's before, including ORESTES and the world premiere of THE INVESTIGATION OF THE WAR IN EL SALVADOR. What is it that attracts you to his writing?

David Schweizer: Chuck adores the theater's capacity for surprise and wondrous, rapturous events. He is a thrill seeker, but also oddly meditative. It's a beguiling combo. He and I both think of theater as a kind of "special event" in the culture, I think - rarified in the best way. It's an opportunity for an audience to have a rare, memorable experience. For a director he provides delicious blueprints for invention. And as a collaborator he loves to just step aside and let you go...so that he can be surprised!

Charles Mee talks about WINTERTIME having elements of a musical comedy. He says that as the play builds, moments find their best expression in movement and music. As a director how do you plan to attack these high-emotion moments with this feeling of a musical?

DS: The musical comparison is apt, not just because there is a lot of operatic scoring indicated in the script, but because the buoyancy of the series of events and the juxtaposition of verbal scenes with special non-verbal events does seem to resemble musical theater in the way it tells its story with different kinetic elements. But then I think that all of Chuck's plays are like that and actually all of the plays I really enjoy directing are like that. I approach every play differently from every other. I have directed zillions of plays for many, many years now, so of course I know certain things, but it always seems to me as if I have never really done anything before the one I am doing - I get kind of lost in each one.

The writing of WINTERTIME includes some farcical and off-the-wall actions as well as beautiful poetic moments. How do you use these opposing elements to tell the story?

DS: Different kinds of moments set each other up. The plays of Chekhov, Shakespeare, Moliere, Strindberg, even Neil Simon contain amusing as well as sad moments. The variance of mood and tone is the essence of theater because of the live wire act in experiencing live performance in real time. I know this one is more extreme... My job is to give the evening an overall "tone" or to create a world in which it seems logical for there to be extreme shifts of mood and they can all be relished by an audience rather than scare that audience away. The quality of the writing and of the actors in this case are a big help. In the best case, an extremely zany comical moment can come to seem like the only logical prelude to something heart-wrenching. In our new world that we are building on stage, we make the new rules.

This outrageous comedy is filled with unruly truths, as people young and old, straight and gay, battle with the ideals of love and the realities of desire. What viewpoints of love do you want the audience to take away with them? What do you think Charles Mee is saying about love and relationships?

DS: This is the big, big question. The main thing that is being said is that love is a shapeshifter - utterly mysterious and yet utterly material. Love is the essence of a contradiction and all forms of it are OKAY. Chuck Mee, by writing Wintertime, is urging people to take the risk of throwing themselves into loving. Because I think he ultimately feels that it is what makes life worth living. But he also knows that it's wildly precarious and it's the precarious nature of it that makes for the shape-shifting, unpredictable landscape of the play.

While reading the script, I noticed that the stage directions talk about the furniture being covered in snow and that there are non-existent walls. What do you envision the set to look like? Is there a non-realistic feel that this play should have?

DS: The set has to look very, very beautiful and romantic in a mildly disconcerting way. It needs to be an arena in which fabulous and sometimes scary events can transpire with ease. The idea of contrasts is there too: a summerhouse in the wintertime, the outdoors and the indoors blending, trees growing inside of rooms with no walls, rooms filled with snowdrifts and fireplaces and glistening icelights. Here's the thing- the people in the play must behave as though they are in an utterly "familiar" place. But the fun is that to the audience, it looks like no place "we" have ever seen.

What associations does wintertime, the season, have for you?

DS: Now that I think of it, I actually have had more intense love affairs in the winter than in the summer. Is it the retreating indoors and tearing clothes off that's more exciting than in the summer when the clothes are sort of already off?? Wintertime encourages people to steal moments together and warm themselves up - close to each other. Our heat plays off the cold. Contrast again. Summer is sexy, yes, but winter is romantic...

While the actors and production staff members were gathering to begin their first rehearsal in the Second Stage rehearsal room, set designer Andrew Lieberman came in carrying two large cardboard boxes. He explained that they were both the set for Wintertime, saying that one of the challenges was being able to design a set for two different theaters. The script calls for a set that has furniture covered in snow and non-existent walls. At this first rehearsal, director David Schweizer discussed what he envisioned the set to look like, and how Andrew Lieberman has helped to achieve this vision.

Schweizer spoke of the set "having to look very, very beautiful and romantic in a mildly disconcerting way. So much happens in this space, it needs to be an arena in which fabulous and sometimes scary events can transpire with ease." Schweizer continued to talk about the idea of contrasts within the text itself and in the set of the production. He used such examples as a summerhouse in the wintertime, the outdoors and the indoors blending, trees growing inside of rooms with no walls, indoor fireplaces and glistening icelights. The set for this play's not just indoors and outdoors, but indoors and outdoors at the same time, occupying the same space. The surrealism of trees growing everywhere further helps to tell the story of this world where anything and everything should seem perfectly normal. Schweizer and Lieberman have agreed upon white fabric covering most of the furniture. This snow-like concept will change through a range of vibrant colors to help set the mood of a specific scene or feeling. Schweizer also assembled about a giant snowdrift on the set and in the living space. This snowdrift's a place for people to "play, dance or tumble." Schweizer concluded his thoughts about the set by stating, "here's the thing - the people in the play must behave as though they are in an utterly 'familiar' place. But the fun is that to the audience, it looks like no place we have ever seen."

This study guide enables leaders to explore drama as a mode of learning. Adding drama to the classroom is an active, process-orientated approach to education, in which the teacher and student interact together.

Drama-in-Education seeks to synthesize the activities of creative drama, arts-based curricula and theatre conventions into experiences aimed at developing imagination, awareness of self and others, aesthetic taste and life skills. Often these goals are achieved through the examination of a particular theme or topic, which contributes to critical thinking about the world in which we live. By providing structures and contexts, which both excite the interest of participants and call for creative problem-solving, Drama-in-Education promotes deeper thinking about a wide variety of issues.

This guide has been designed for teachers to utilize drama methods in an exploration of the themes and situations presented in the play. We encourage you to adapt these lessons and activities to your individual teaching situations, and thereby to discover the importance and power of drama in the classroom.

The following questions and activities are designed to help students anticipate the performance and then to build on their impressions and interpretations after attending the theatre. While most of the exercises provide specific instructions, please feel free to adapt these activities to accommodate your own teaching strategies and curricular needs.

1. Brainstorm a list of ideas and emotions that are associated with the winter season. What thoughts, phrases, or memories are important for you in the winter? Choose one idea or emotion from the list created and write a short passage inspired by that thought. What themes or emotions are highlighted in this passage? What themes or emotions may be brought up in a play titled Wintertime?

2. Three couples, looking for a romantic weekend alone, meet up at the same weekend getaway. What relationships would be dramatic to explore? Have your students write a short story about three different couples meeting at the same place. Remember that dynamic characters and dramatic relationships may make a more interesting story.

3. Examine the Character Profiles in this guide and ask your students how they imagine each character will look, act, speak. Improvise scenes between two characters and explore their different relationships. How would Jonathan react to his mother and her lover, or his father and his lover? Have students write about their experiences playing these characters.

4. To get an idea of the flow of action, read the Plot Description provided in this guide. Then imagine that you are designing the set for this play. What would be your design concept, the visual idea that ties the whole production together? Is there a feeling or emotion that you would want to express through your design of this production? Prepare a design presentation for your class through drawings, visual aides or writing. Be prepared to field your classmates' questions about your design choices.

1. What surprised you the most in your viewing of Wintertime? How did this production compare to your expectations?

2. Charles L. Mee's characters talk a lot about love and their views on love. One character says that you can't love something until it is gone and another says that you cannot fully live unless you are in love. What do you think Mee is saying about love? Do you agree or disagree?

3. Do you feel that there is one main character in Wintertime? If so, who? Is there one character that you relate to and understand the choices they made? Is there one character you did not relate to or questioned their choices? Put yourself inside one of the characters' shoes, what would you have done differently?

4. Consider each character in Wintertime. What are their specific wants at the beginning of the play. Do they achieve these wants by the end of the play? What choices do they make, and tactics do they use to obtain these wants?

5. In Wintertime, Bob states that:

Maybe you don't know what sort of person you are until you do something and then you see what sort of person you are.

Choose one character in the play and discuss an action that they perform that they did not know they were capable of doing. How does this action change their character? Are there actions in your own life that you have achieved, that you thought you would never be able to do?

Drama Praxis

If you would like further information please look through any of the following sources which have been used in preparing this guide.

BOOKS

Mandelle, Jonathan. Falling In, Falling Out. New York: Penguin Publishing, 2001

Mee, Charles L. History Plays. Baltimore, Maryland: John Hopkins University Press, 1998.

Mee, Charles L. A Nearly Normal Life. New York: Little: Brown and Company, 1999.

O'Neill, Cecily. Drama Structures. Portsmouth, New Hampshire: Stanley Thornes Ltd, 1998.

Taylor, Philip. The Drama Classroom. New York: Routledge Falmer Group, 2000.

WEBSITES

A chapter from A Nearly Normal Life.
http://www.twbookmark.com/books/91/0316558362/chapter_excerpt9373.html

The (Re) Making Project, an internet archive created by Charles L. Mee that invites browsers to read, use, and even change his plays at will and free of charge.
http://www.panix.com/~meejr/indexf.html

Photos from: http://www.jalapenocafe.com/images/snow.jpg "Information presented on these pages is considered public information and may be distributed or copied. Use of appropriate byline/photo/image credits is requested."

If, after viewing this study guide, you have further questions or comments about the show feel free to contact Steve Michaels, the education coordinator at (609) 258-8288.