Goodman Theatre Student Subscription Series

2006/2007 Season

Teacher Guide

RABBIT HOLE By David Lindsay-Abaire

Directed by Steve Scott

Teacher Guide written and designed by Jessica Hutchinson, Education and Community Programs Coordinator

Edited and published by Goodman Theatre Jessica Hutchinson, Education and Community Programs Coordinator Sarah Baughman, Education and Community Programs Consultant

KRAFT FOODS is the Principal Sponsor of the 2006/2007 free Student Subscription Series

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The Goodman is grateful to the following donors for their generous support of Education and Community Programs:

Principal Sponsor of the Student Subscription Series Susan and James Annable Anonymous Christine and John Bakalar Stephen and Elizabeth Ballis Mary Jo and Doug Basler Maria Bechily and Scott Hodes Deborah A. Bricker Maureen and Scott Byron Carson Family Foundation Chicago Public Schools CNA Financial Corporation Code Family Foundation Carol and Douglas Cohen The Crown Family Patrick and Anna M. Cudahy Fund Mr. and Mrs. James W. DeYoung The Gaylord and Dorothy Donnelley Family Foundation Sidney and Sondra Berman Epstein Lloyd A. Fry Foundation Elizabeth Guenzel HSBC North American Holdings Harry and Marcy Harczak Irving and Joan W. Harris Loretta and Allan Kaplan Sheila and Mike Kurzman James Kyser and Jo Polich Cole and Margaret Lundquist Bob Mayo The Elizabeth Morse Charitable Trust Northern Trust Peoples Energy Polk Bros. Foundation Alice Rapoport and Michael Sachs Ronald McDonald House Charities The Sheridan Foundation Mr. and Mrs. Michael J. Silverstein The Siragusa Foundation Carl W. Stern and Holly Hayes Colleen H. Sullivan Bruce Taylor Carl and Marilynn Thoma UBS

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Guide for implementing activities in your classroom 4 Additional Resources 6 Exploring the Production 7 Original Impression – The New York Times reviews Rabbit Hole 8 An Interview with David Lindsay-Abaire 10 Consider the Source: examining Rabbit Hole in context 12 Finding Pleasure in Pain: the allure of tragedy 13 Actors React: the cast of Rabbit Hole reflects on the play 16 Exploring the Text 17 Engaging with the Test 18 Text Questions 19 Essay and Discussion Questions 21 From the Author: thoughts on performing this play 25 Exploring the Context 27 Talking About Grief in the Classroom 28 Clinical Grief 29 Researching Grief: news from the front 31 The Universality of Grief 33 The Comforts of the Faithful 35 An Enlightened Grief? – searching for perspective 37 Grieving Responsibly 38 Poetic Grief 39 Literary Grief 40 Musical Grief 43 Visual Grief 44 Parents and Grief: Surviving the Unthinkable 46 What You Have Instead of Your Child 49 Waging the Mommy Wars 52 American Royalty – Examining the Kennedy family 54 The Kennedy Way of Grief 56 Beyond Alice – Real Physics and Theoretical Rabbit Holes 59 Personal Perspective – using physics to cope with grief 62 Master Class – Acting 101 for the Classroom 63 Warm It Up – exercises to get you on your feet 64 How to Read a Play – the actor’s perspective 66 Subtext & Intention – conveying what you’re not saying 67 Creating a Character 68 Goal, Obstacles, & Tactics 71 Exploring Objectives & Relationships 73 Textercises! 75 Additional Resources 77 Teacher Resources 99 Teacher Response Form 107

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GUIDE FOR IMPLEMENTING ACTIVITIES IN YOUR CLASSROOM For ease of implementation, all work in the Student and Teacher Guides contains the following designations (which are noted on the page in the Teacher Guide but not in the Student Guide):

For overall lesson identification and where it falls, we are using a bull’s-eye target.

Core Ideas and Essential Understandings

The center of the target. All students should have clear understanding of these lessons.

Important Elements to Explore The middle of the target. All students should have basic understanding of most of these lessons.

Worth Being Familiar With The outside of the target. All students should have been exposed to at least some of these lessons.

To determine which activities are most appropriate for your students’ ability level, all exercises will be identified as:

REMEDIAL GENERAL ADVANCED

We hope that using this set of designations both on the table of activities and within the Teacher Guide will help you structure your unit on this play in a manner best suited to the needs of your students.

By the Standards – How our activities integrate into the curriculum Some activities listed as appropriate for All ability levels feature layers within a single activity – beginning with a portion appropriate for remedial students to which is added a portion making the activity appropriate for general students, and then another for advanced students. Those activities are indicated as All-layers under the ability heading. Also, please keep in mind that most activities can be adapted to suit any ability level.

Guide Page Target Ability Activity Name or Description When Category State Standard Student 7 Core A Getting Toned Up Anytime Fine Arts Drama: Goal 25A

Student 7 Core G Think About It: Tone Anytime Fine Arts English/LA

Drama: Goal 25A Goal 2, CAS A

Student 8 Outer G Think About It: Casting Anytime English/LA Goal 1, CAS A Student 9 Middle R But How Do They Know? Pre-Show English/LA Art: Goal 26B Student 12 Core G Perceptions Pre-Show English/LA Goal 1, CAS A Student 12 Middle A I Second That Emotion Pre-Show Fine Arts Drama: Goal 26B Student 13 Middle R Sentence Structure Pre-Show English/LA Goal 1, CAS B Student 14 Core G Write About It: Tension/Conflict Anytime English/LA Goal 2, CAS A Student 14 Middle G Conflict Resolution Scenes Anytime Fine Arts Drama: Goal 26B Student 15 Middle R Think About It: Embellishment Anytime English/LA Goal 1, CAS A, D Student 15 Middle G, A A Tall Tale Anytime English/LA Goal 4, CAS C Student 18 Core G Talk About It: Grief Pre-Show English/LA Goal 1, CAS D Student 18 Core G Think About It: Grief Pre-Show English/LA Goal 1, CAS A, D

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Guide Page Target Ability Activity Name or Description When Category State Standard Student 18 Outer All Art and Grief Pre-Show Fine Arts Art: Goal 26B Student 20 Core G Talk About It: Dealing with Grief Pre-Show English/LA Goal 1, CAS D Student 20 Core A The Great Debate Anytime English/LA Goal 4, CAS A, B Student 21 Core G Talk About It: Coping Skills Pre-Show English/LA Goal 1, CAS D Student 23 Core G, A Talk About It:Kennedys Anytime English/LA Goal 1, CAS D Student 23 Outer G Think About It: Kennedys Anytime English/LA Goal 1, CAS A

Student 23 Core All Relating to the Kennedys Anytime English/LA Goal 4, CAS C Goal 2, CAS B

Student 24 Core A Talk About It: Alternate Reality Anytime English/LA Goal 1, CAS D Student 24 Middle G, A Two Realities Anytime English/LA Goal 3, CAS A, B Student 24 Outer G Movies Anytime Fine Arts Drama: Goal 26A Student 26 Outer R Think About It: Empathy Pre-Show English/LA Goal 1, CAS A, D Student 26 Middle R Talk About It: Empathy Pre-Show English/LA Goal 1, CAS B, D Student 26 Core A The Sculptures Anytime Fine Arts Drama: Goal 26B

Student 26 Core G Empathy, Conflict, and You Anytime Fine Arts English/LA

Drama: Goal 26B Goal 3, CAS B

Student 27 Core R Talk About It: Guilt Anytime English/LA Goal 1, CAS D Student 27 Core R Talk About It: Blame Anytime English/LA Goal 1, CAS D Student 27 Middle A Win, Lose, or Draw Anytime Fine Arts Art: Goal 26B Student 30 Core All Your Student Response Letter Post-Show English/LA Goal 3, CAS A, B Student 31 Core All Study Guide Questions Anytime English/LA Goal 1, CAS A Teacher 9 Outer All Talk About It - Critics Anytime Fine Arts Drama: Goal 25A

Teacher 15 Core All - layers Talk About It - Speaking of Tragedy Pre-Show English/LA Goal 4, CAS A Goal 1, CAS D

Teacher 15 Core All Sappy Log Anytime English/LA Goal 2, CAS B Teacher 18 Core All - layers Engaging With the Text Pre-Show English/LA Goal 1, CAS A Teacher 19 Core All Text Questions Pre-Show English/LA Goal 1, CAS A Teacher 22 Core All Essay & Discussion Questions Anytime English/LA Goal 1, CAS D Teacher 25 Core All Think About It - Author's Intent Pre-Show English/LA Goal 1, CAS C Teacher 25 Core All Set the Tone Anytime English/LA Goal 3, CAS C Teacher 34 Middle All Identifying Grief - Master Grief Log Anytime English/LA Goal 3, CAS B Teacher 36 Middle R, G Think About It - Faith & Tone Anytime English/LA Goal 1, CAS C Teacher 36 Middle A Write About It - Faith & Tone Anytime English/LA Goal 3, CAS B Teacher 37 Middle G, A Keeping the Faith Anytime English/LA Goal 5, CAS A

Teacher 38 Core All Talk About It - Greiving Responsibly Pre-Show Social Science

Goal 16, CAS D

Teacher 39 Middle All - layers Coaxing the Muse Anytime English/LA Goal 3, CAS C Teacher 42 Middle All - layers Writing from Pictures Anytime English/LA Goal 3, CAS A Teacher 43 Middle R Something to Sing About Anytime English/LA Goal 4, CAS B

Teacher 44 Middle All Expressing Grief Visually Anytime Fine Arts Art: Goal 25A Goal 26B

Teacher 47 Core All Think About It: Mother's Grief Pre-Show English/LA Goal 1, CAS D

Teacher 48 Core All - layers Think About It: Father's Grief Pre-Show English/LA Goal 1, CAS D Goal 5, CAS A

Teacher 51 Middle G, A Think About It: Nat's Perspective Pre-Show English/LA Goal 1, CAS D Teacher 53 Outer R Becca's Pros & Cons Anytime English/LA Goal 3, CAS B

Teacher 58 Outer All Cult of Celebrity Anytime English/LA Fine Arts

Goal 4, CAS C Art: Goal 26B

Teacher 61 Outer All Thinking Theoretically Anytime English/LA Fine Arts

Goal 5, CAS A Art: Goal 26B

Teacher 63-75 Outer All Master Class: Acting 101 Anytime Fine Arts English/LA

Drama: Goal 25A, 26A, 26B, Goal 3, CAS C

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ADDITIONAL RESOURCES Here is a list of resources we’ve found that may be of use to you and your students as you study Rabbit Hole. Feel free to encourage students to look up these resources – or others – on their own time and report back to the class. Or you can use these as a starting point for more activities and assignments tailored to your specific student population. Regardless, we hope this list proves helpful in your further exploration of the play in your classroom. On Grief and the Process of Grieving After the Death of a Child by Anne K. Finkbeiner: (from the publisher) A book that explores our own resilience in the midst of one of the most distressful forms of human suffering, the death of a child. Because children aren't supposed to die, the loss is not only painful but profoundly disorienting. Finkbeiner, whose only child died in 1987, refers to her own experience and the experience of others to show that while bereaved parents can never really let go, they can and do recover, often developing a new appreciation for their own lives. Says one parent: "You just don't treat life as lightly, and if you don't treat things lightly, they do become richer." The Worst Loss: How Families Heal from the Death of a Child by Barbara D. Rosof: (from the publisher) Here, Rosof, a California psychotherapist who works with bereaved families, offers compassionate advice to help parents cope. After describing the many ways children (including adult children) die, she explains why grieving is crucial to recovery, how the partners' relationship may be affected and the ways surviving siblings grieve. She also shows parents how to break down psychological barriers that hinder necessary grief work and prevent full recovery. In perhaps the most enlightening-as well as painful-part, families tell of their children's deaths and their aftermath. On Grief and Grieving by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross: (from the publisher) On Death and Dying began as a theoretical book, an interdisciplinary study of our fear of death and our inevitable acceptance of it. It introduced the world to the now-famous five stages: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. On Grief and Grieving applies these stages to the process of grieving and weaves together theory, inspiration, and practical advice, all based on Kübler-Ross's and Kessler's professional and personal experiences, and is filled with brief, topic-driven stories. It includes sections on sadness, hauntings, dreams, coping, children, healing, isolation, and even the subject of sex during grief. This American Life Episode 117 (12.11.98) www.thislife.org: In this show’s third act, author Dave Eggers shares a piece from his book, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. The death of his parents forced him into the role of caregiver for his 8-year-old brother. He describes a typical dinner in their newly jarred home. On Alternate Realities / Parallel Dimensions Imagining the Tenth Dimension www.tenthdimension.com: This website features a flash-based video that explains the concepts of thinking through 10 dimensions, even when we’re only used to thinking in three. Your brain might hurt the first time through; it’s a lot clearer on second viewing and helps to wrap your mind around the concept of alternate realities and parallel dimensions. Being John Malkovich directed by Spike Jonze: In this film, there’s a portal which leads, literally, into John Malkovich’s head. Those who journey into it are spit back onto the New Jersey turnpike after a short time “being” the famous actor. Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut: This classic book takes a look at things beyond common perception with its time-space flexibility and the experience of the central character in the world of the Tralfamadorians who function in higher dimensions. On the existential conundrum of deriving pleasure from pain I Heart Huckabees directed by David O. Russell: This film, starring Jason Schwartzman, Dustin Hoffman, Mark Wahlberg, and Jude Law (among others) explores the idea of “human drama” and other existential traumas using humor, irony, and a clever metaphor called “the blanket.” A great reference point for understanding why we take such great pleasure in things that make us sad.

On the American obsession with the Kennedy Family The House of Yes by Wendy MacLeod: This play, which also has a 1997 film incarnation, depicts a family with an unusual obsession with and feeling of solidarity towards the Kennedys, their famous neighbors. Fantastic, but not for the faint of heart and not appropriate for all audiences.

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EXPLORING THE PRODUCTION

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ORIGINAL IMPRESSION –THE NEW YORK TIMES REVIEWS RABBIT HOLE When Manhattan Theatre Club in New York City brought Rabbit Hole to Broadway, it caused quite a stir. Below, find the review of that production for an outside perspective on the piece. “Mourning a Child in a Silence That’s Unbearably Loud” by Ben Brantley: The New York Times, February 3, 2006 The Biltmore Theater had better be paid up on its flood insurance. Rabbit Hole, the wrenching new play by David Lindsay-Abaire that opened there last night, inspires such copious weeping among its audience that you wonder early on if you should have taken a life jacket. Do your best, though, to keep your eyes clear. Otherwise, you might miss some of the most revealingly nuanced acting to be seen on a stage or screen this year. Thanks to a certain former American president, it has become almost impossible to say that you feel someone else's pain without its sounding like a punch line. Yet the sad, sweet release of Rabbit Hole lies precisely in the access it allows to the pain of others, in its meticulously mapped empathy. With an exceptional, emotionally transparent five-member cast led by Cynthia Nixon and directed by Daniel Sullivan, this anatomy of grief doesn't so much jerk tears as tap them, from a reservoir of feelings common to anyone who has experienced the landscape-shifting vacuum left by a death in the family. The plot of Rabbit Hole, centered on the impact of the accidental killing of a small child, is one used regularly on television channels that specialize in domestic tales of redemption. You could even say that this play's shape is determined, as such television fare often is, by the steps of mourning commonly described in self-help manuals and support groups. Yet with Rabbit Hole, a Manhattan Theater Club production, you never feel as if you have been mauled by a sentimental brute who keeps telling you to go ahead and cry, Honey. There's too much honesty, accuracy and humor in the details provided by the play and by the ensemble, which also includes Tyne Daly in an invigorating return to Broadway. With works like Fuddy Meers and Kimberly Akimbo, Mr. Lindsay-Abaire established himself as a lyrical and understanding chronicler of people who somehow become displaced within their own lives. Like his peer in poetic empathy, Craig Lucas, Mr. Lindsay-Abaire has also shown a special affinity for female characters suddenly forced to re-evaluate the roles by which they define themselves. In this sense, Rabbit Hole runs true to form. But the drama also marks a significant departure for Mr. Lindsay-Abaire, which may leave his fans wondering if they have come to the right theater. A sprawling sense of whimsy and the grotesque has hitherto been Mr. Lindsay-Abaire's most conspicuous hallmark, with characters who suffer from extreme and exotic medical conditions, like amnesia or premature aging. Rabbit Hole dispenses with the flashy metaphors. It is as if Mr. Lindsay-Abaire had set for himself the task of holding up a mirror to life that for once didn't come from a fun house. The resulting work belongs squarely to the school of what were once called kitchen-sink dramas. But the sink, in this instance, has been polished to a high, reflective sheen. The dialogue is blessed with Mr. Lindsay-Abaire's customary grace and wit. But it never sounds less than organic, at least not from the mouths of these superlative performers. Ms. Nixon — in her first Broadway appearance since the end of her hit television series, Sex and the City — portrays Becca, a onetime Sotheby's employee turned stay-at-home mom in a gleaming beige-toned residence in Larchmont, N.Y. (John Lee Beatty's revolving set and Christopher Akerland's lighting are subtly infused with an aura of fractured solidity.) That Becca's very reason to be has vanished registers by affecting degrees in the first scene, which finds her sorting laundry from a basket as she chats with her younger, all-too-lively sister, Izzy (Mary Catherine Garrison). But a loud silence pervades the room. And while the talk is inflected with the ritualistic familial rhythms of fondness and annoyance, the strain of something unspoken pulses. It takes you perhaps five minutes to realize that the child-size clothes Ms. Nixon is folding with such mechanical efficiency belonged to Becca's son, a 4-year-old boy named Danny who was struck and killed by a car eight months earlier. Every action, big and small, and every word that follows are informed by our awareness of the characters' awareness of Danny's death. Grief has obviously not brought the members of Becca's family — including her husband, Howie (John

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Slattery), and her mother, Nat (Ms. Daly) — closer together. Sorrow isolates them. Anything that anyone says is almost guaranteed to be the wrong thing. Jokes and cute anecdotes only wound; kindly advice is received as if it were a slap in the face. Family conversations are shaped by a spastic pattern of recrimination and apology, of irritation and misdirected comfort. This rueful awkwardness is only enhanced by the unexpected appearance of the high school student, Jason (John Gallagher Jr.), who was driving the car that killed Danny. This may sound like the stuff of blistering confrontations. Yet Rabbit Hole is, by and large, a quiet play. Mr. Sullivan's masterly, cadenced production is filled with the silent ceremonial bustle and surface numbness that Emily Dickinson describes in her poems about houses where someone has recently died. Yet the internal despair of each character is always, unmistakably visible. It's as if every ensemble member were made of a glass that magnifies all thoughts and sensations within. Ms. Nixon, always an actress of rare integrity, astonishes here with the pure eloquence of her restraint. You never feel that you're watching an actress strategically working the brakes; instead, you believe that it's the control-craving Becca who is keeping her emotions on such a tight rein. This is achieved without the usual signals of folded lips and clenched hands. Ms. Nixon is too good to signal. Like all first-class magicians, she achieves her artistry invisibly. The same can be said of the rest of the cast. Note the stunning resourcefulness and economy of Mr. Slattery's two scenes in front of a television set, on which Howie watches videotapes of Danny. Consider the forms of discomfort Mr. Gallagher conveys without moving from the corner of a sofa. Or the way Ms. Garrison's effervescent Izzy is so clearly waging an unending battle with her desire to be the center of attention. Whether in television (Judging Amy) or theater (Gypsy), Ms. Daly is one of the finest American actresses working. She enfolds the vulgar, overbearing Nat in a compassionate embrace that avoids condescension and exaggeration. Mr. Lindsay-Abaire has given Nat the play's most beguilingly off-center dialogue. (Her monologue on "the Kennedy curse" is priceless.) But Ms. Daly never simply plays the comedy instead of the character. Such turns of plot as there are in Rabbit Hole are, in description, clichés, involving sibling jealousy, conjugal estrangement, the rivalry of grief and the urge to blame. And while the play probably ends the only way it could, given Mr. Lindsay-Abaire's obvious love for his characters, its conclusion doesn't take you anywhere that you haven't anticipated. As beautifully observed as Rabbit Hole is, it never rises to the shock of greatness. But as embodied by Ms. Nixon, the self-contained, order-obsessed Becca may offer more immediate catharsis to contemporary theatergoers than more grandly bereaved mothers like Medea and Mary Tyrone. At one point, Nat, helping Becca clear out Danny's room, picks up a tiny sneaker and freezes. "Don't," says Becca, without looking up. "Quick and clean, like a Band-Aid. Otherwise, we'd never get through it." Anyone who has ever gone through the possessions of a deceased family member or close friend understands instantly the crispness of Becca's tone. But without even flinching, Ms. Nixon makes it clear that the wound beneath the Band-Aid never really stops hurting. Nat, who lost a son of her own, says as much later in the scene. But the cast has already let us know this with an expressiveness that — like great sorrow — is beyond words.

TALK ABOUT IT One reader comment on The New York Times’ website in response to this piece asked what all the hype was

about. Apparently he or she had attended the play based on reviews like this and was disappointed. Ask students to think about the following questions: What function do theatre critics serve to the population at large? What function should they serve? What happens when a critic “over-hypes” a show? What about the opposite,

when a show is unfairly “panned” or given a bad review? Do you believe everything you read about plays or movies from the critics? Why or why not?

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AN INTERVIEW WITH DAVID LINDSAY-ABAIRE The following interview gives some insight into the playwright’s process behind Rabbit Hole and his perspective on issues the play addresses.

“An Interview with David Lindsay-Abaire”: Goodman Theatre’s OnStage magazine, March – April 2007 In a recent interview with Goodman Literary Manager Tanya Palmer, playwright David Lindsay-Abaire discussed his critically-acclaimed new play, Rabbit Hole. TP: What prompted you to write Rabbit Hole? DLA: I’d had the idea of writing a naturalistic play in the back of my head for awhile. It was a challenge to myself to see if I could even do it, because all of my other plays are absurdist comedies. Mixed in with that, when I was a student at Juilliard, Marsha Norman had said to us once, “If you want to write a good play, write about the thing that frightens you most in the world.” At that time I was in my mid-twenties, and I remember her saying that and thinking, “What is the thing that frightens me most in the world? I don’t even know what that could possibly be.” Then a few years later, I became a dad. When my son, Nicholas, was three years old, we heard a really sad story about friends of friends whose child had died very suddenly. Hearing that story, I put myself in the shoes of the parents. I thought, “This is what Marsha Norman is talking about. Now I understand fear in a profound way that I never have before.” And that really began to feed the play, imagining the worst thing that could possibly happen to a parent. It combined with that thing in the back of my head about writing a naturalistic play. TP: What was that experience like, writing about the thing you feared the most? I remember you telling me that for quite a while you didn’t tell your wife what you were writing about… DLA: I did keep it from my wife for a really long time, until she stumbled upon a book about bereaved parents that was sitting on my desk. She picked it up and said, “What is this doing in my home?” So I had to come clean. It freaked her out a little bit, but ultimately she ended up loving the play. It was hard to write about the topic for all of those reasons that you would think it would be hard. Imagining the worst. But at the same time, I hadn’t lived through it, so in that way I had the distance that allowed me to write it. I don’t know that I would be able to write it if I had actually experienced it. TP: You said that you were interested in tackling a naturalistic play. Certainly it does feel like this play is a shift from your earlier work. But do you also see ways in which it’s connected to your previous plays? DLA: Other than tone, I think it’s like every other play I’ve ever written. Thematically, it’s certainly in line with all my other plays. As absurd as Fuddy Meers or Kimberly Akimbo is, they’re still very much about protagonists finding themselves in a confusing, upside-down world where nothing seems to make sense. They’re about people seeking clarity in a constantly shifting environment. And that’s certainly what Rabbit Hole is about. Fuddy Meers and Kimberly Akimbo are both about dysfunction within families, about loss and fixing things that are broken. And again, that’s what Rabbit Hole is about. For Fuddy Meers, the protagonist happens to wake up without knowing who she is. In Kimberly Akimbo, a teenage girl has an aging disease that makes her different than everybody else. In Rabbit Hole, the main character has this awful event that turns her world upside-down, and it happens to be that her son died. But again, it’s not that different from everything else that’s happened in my other plays. TP: I saw a reading of the play at South Coast Repertory, and I remember at one point I was afraid I was going to have to leave because I was crying so hard. I’m sure I wasn’t the only person who had that experience. Did you feel a certain level of responsibility in terms of the depth of emotions you provoked from the audience? DLA: No, I didn’t. The play is what it is, and I hoped that people would connect to the play. I guess I was a little unprepared for how strongly the audience would respond. What was more interesting to me was how differently the audiences responded. People connected to the play in different places. I would observe people across the aisle, and I remember one night specifically watching a man with very long legs—he could not contain himself in his seat. I saw him holding himself back, wanting to leave the theater. But he was doing it in a moment when

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other people were not. It’s interesting how some people find their way into the play through Nat, the mother character. Other people, of course, find their way in through Becca, the protagonist. A lot of people really connect with Jason, the boy at the end of the play, and they get the most emotional during his scene. So it’s really interesting to me what affects an audience. You can never predict it. TP: While the play centers on Becca and Howie, the parents who lose their young son, we are also introduced to Becca’s sister Izzy and mother Nat. How do you think these relationships help us understand Becca and Howie’s journey through the play? DLA: One of the bigger conflicts in the family is a conflict of class. Becca clearly comes from a working-class family and has risen up in the world, whatever that means. She has gone to college, while her sister and mother have not. Becca has gotten a really fancy job at Sotheby’s and made a life for herself in Larchmont, which is a really ritzy town in Westchester County, New York; and she has made a real, assertive effort to make something different of her life than the one that she left. And so, there was already that conflict within her family before she lost the baby. She loves her family desperately. But she and her mother don’t really get each other. They have trouble connecting and communicating. She loves her sister, but her sister has always been the screw-up in the family. Becca’s always had to clean up her sister’s messes; she’s always been the good girl, and her sister Izzy has always been the bad one. And so, before any of the bad stuff happened in the family with their son Danny, there was all this other baggage, as there is in any family. At a time when Becca is desperate for solace or comfort or some sort of connection with people, she’s already saddled with this family that she just can’t connect with. People grieve in such different ways. It’s hard enough to connect with people when you’ve lost somebody, but then to try to connect with somebody who just doesn’t speak the same language as you—despite their being your mother—for me, it dramatized that difficulty of connecting. TP: Can you talk a little bit about the title of the play? There’s a direct reference made to the image of rabbit holes late in the play, but I’m interested in why you decided to choose that as the title? DLA: There are a few reasons. When I was working on the play, I did a lot of reading about bereaved parents, and one of the things that kept coming up in the reading was the description of a world that didn’t make sense anymore. The parents would be shocked to look out their window and see people putting out their trash. They would think, “How can they go on with their lives when I feel this way, when my child has died?” Things that used to make sense to them made no sense at all. They did not understand why everyone’s world had not changed the way their world had. It’s sort of that Alice in Wonderland point of view: the world is upside-down, and how do I make it right again? TP: Do you feel like this experiment in tackling realism has shifted how you approach writing now? DLA: Well, it certainly liberated me. When I wrote the play, I did have a fear, which was, “What business does David Lindsay-Abaire have writing this kind of play?” I don’t necessarily feel like I will always write this kind of play. But I do feel that if I stumble across a story that needs to be told in this way, I can do that, I have the tools to do that. I feel empowered to write in a different way than I did before.

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CONSIDER THE SOURCE: EXAMINING RABBIT HOLE IN CONTEXT David Lindsay-Abaire has earned a reputation as a master of the absurd. However, with Rabbit Hole, he has created a play firmly grounded in realism, even if the circumstances of these characters feel completely absurd to them. The following article examines Rabbit Hole in the greater context of Lindsay-Abiare’s work. “Down the Rabbit Hole: The Work of David Lindsay-Abaire” by Sandeep Das: Goodman Theatre’s OnStage magazine, March – April 2007 “Curiouser and curiouser” was the exclamation of Alice upon finding herself at the bottom of the rabbit hole in Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. As she ate and drank, grew and shrank, her simple statement aptly reflected the situation she had landed herself in. The same expression might have escaped Alice’s lips had she been sitting in the audience of any number of plays by David Lindsay-Abaire. Like the wild, disordered universe Carroll created in his famous tale, much of Lindsay-Abaire’s writing rests on a framework of madcap situations, unexpected twists and reversals, and the extreme and pathological qualities of his characters. Fuddy Meers, which premiered at Manhattan Theatre Club in 1999, showcases the playwright’s love of strange circumstances. Exploring the slippage of memory and language, the play features a woman, Claire, who wakes up every morning having lost her memory from the day before. Her only connection to the past are her family members, who are just as badly off as she is: her lisping, half-blind, half-deaf brother; their stroke-impaired mother; an abusive husband; and a perpetually stoned son. Throw in a prison break, a kidnapping attempt and a walk-in closet full of skeletons, and you have affairs that rival the maddest of tea-parties. Lindsay-Abaire’s next play, Wonder of the World, tells the tale of Cass, who one day uncovers her husband’s “dark” secret and uses it as an opportunity to rethink, restart and revive her life. She draws up a list of all the things she’s always wanted to do, but which she felt her marriage inhibited her from doing, and she proceeds to do them one by one, including recruiting a sidekick, sleeping with a bellhop and visiting Niagara Falls. Kimberly Akimbo, commissioned by South Coast Repertory for its 2000/2001 season was named “The Comedy of the Year” by The New York Times. The play explores (to its almost ridiculous end) the blurring of the line between parent and child. The title character is a 16-year-old whose father is a borderline alcoholic and whose mother is pregnant, unable to use her arms and convinced she’s about to die. To add insult to injury, Kimberly suffers from progeria, a genetic disorder that causes her to age physically at four-and-one-half times the normal rate. At first glance, Lindsay-Abaire’s latest play, the critically acclaimed and Tony-nominated Rabbit Hole, seems very different from his other work. It is filled with irony, but not his trademark absurdity. There is wit, but the joke is never at the expense of the characters. The story’s central event does not revolve around an obscure disease, sexual perversion or philosophical idea taken too far; instead, it is the simple and tragic death of a child. The plot and its characters are not abstracted in a way that would allow us, as readers or audience members, to let ourselves off the hook. Like Alice chasing after the White Rabbit and falling down the hole, a little boy named Danny chases after his dog and is hit by a car. This is very real. His parents, Becca and Howie, vacillate between stagnation and coping, both together and individually in different ways. This, too, is very real. Friends and family try to help, while feeling guilty that their lives move on. Again, very real. At no point during the play can we honestly say, “Who are these people?” and not have an answer. The characters in Rabbit Hole cannot be written off as metaphors, personifications or archetypes. They are, in all their simplicity and complexity, you and me. But the longer one considers Rabbit Hole, the more it begins to take its place as part of the Lindsay-Abaire canon. As in much of his other work, a death has occurred before the events of the play, and here it is at the center of the story. At times, characters are driven to understand the complete history of an event, while at other times they ignore or move beyond it. It’s funny, poignant, and there’s the occasional punch in the face. What makes Rabbit Hole different from Lindsay-Abaire’s other plays is a matter of degree. It is both more obvious and more subtle. It’s obvious in the sense that all the elements of the play are laid out at the beginning: there are no clever secrets or reversals waiting to be revealed. But it’s subtle in that it refuses absurdity and, in doing so, scrupulously avoids melodrama. The play is devoid of screaming, yelling, weeping or wailing. The pain of losing a child is neither abstracted into forms of grief nor cheaply manifested as the destruction of a family. Instead, Rabbit Hole showcases a playwright’s skill with restraint, quietly portraying a husband and wife trying to forgive themselves—and each other.

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FINDING PLEASURE IN PAIN: THE ALLURE OF TRAGEDY Ben Brantley’s review of Rabbit Hole in The New York Times begins this way:

The Biltmore Theater had better be paid up on its flood insurance. "Rabbit Hole," the wrenching new play by David Lindsay-Abaire that opened there last night, inspires such copious weeping among its audience that you wonder early on if you should have taken a life jacket.

The first assertion of the review is that this play will upset you. It will likely make you weep. We can assume the play is addressing thoroughly unpleasant subject matter; it’s described as “wrenching.” This begs the question, why would anyone in their right mind go to see this play? Which in turn brings us to one of the essential questions in the study of this, or any other, play that addresses some of life’s most challenging situations: why do we not only endure, but so often enjoy seeing life’s tragedies played out before us? Aristotle described the experience as one which induces “catharsis.” Allegedly, we as humans seek catharsis because it is, as defined by Merriam-Webster, “a purification or purgation that brings about spiritual renewal or release from tension.” In other words, by bearing witness to tragedy enacted in art, we are spiritually cleansed through the build up and resolution of dramatic tension. The figure we call the “tragic hero,” someone of noble birth, pure heart, and chock full of hubris, does all the suffering for us, and we come out on the other side cleansed and renewed – without having to actually do any of the dirty work ourselves. American playwright Arthur Miller wrote an essay published in The New York Times in 1949 entitled “Tragedy and the Common Man” refuting Aristotle’s assertion that a tragic hero must be of noble birth and explaining why the experience of tragedy in art is universal. He wrote:

…when the question of tragedy in art is not at issue, we never hesitate to attribute to the well-placed and the exalted the very same mental processes as the lowly. And finally, if the exaltation of tragic action were truly a property of the high-bred character alone, it is inconceivable that the mass of mankind should cherish tragedy above all other forms, let alone be capable of understanding it. … As a general rule, to which there may be exceptions unknown to me, I think the tragic feeling is evoked in us when we are in the presence of a character who is ready to lay down his life, if need be, to secure one thing – his sense of personal dignity. … Sometimes he is one who has been displaced from it, sometimes one who seeks to attain it for the first time, but the fateful wound from which the inevitable events spiral is the wound of indignity, and its dominant force is indignation. Tragedy, then, is the consequence of a man’s total compulsion to evaluate himself justly. In the sense of having been initiated by the hero himself, the tale always reveals what has been called his “tragic flaw,” a failing that is not peculiar to grand or elevated characters. Nor is it necessarily a weakness. The flaw, or crack in the character, is really nothing – and need be nothing – but his inherent unwillingness to remain passive in the face of what he conceives to be a challenge to his dignity, his image of his rightful status.

Everyone can relate to the struggle to assert “his rightful status,” but why do contemporary human beings seem to get such a kick out of all this suffering? In her essay, “Nietzsche and the paradox of tragedy” (British Journal of Aesthetics, Oct.1998), Amy Price synthesizes the seemingly oxymoronic derivation of pleasure from pain (often referred to as the paradox of tragedy) and the way we conceive of it this way:

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We have developed a need that we cannot satisfy in reality: to hear people in the most difficult situations speak well and at length; we are delighted when the tragic hero still finds words, reasons, eloquent gestures, and altogether intellectual brightness, where life approaches abysses and men in reality usually lose their heads and certainly linguistic felicity. . . Tragic drama is a valuable educative tool because it offers us not only a knowledge of suffering or a knowledge that suffering exists - for the newspapers do this well enough - but a knowledge, stunningly precise, clear, and articulated, of what it is like to suffer. ... Nietzsche does not believe that violent reality is in any way placated or excused by violent artistic representations, nor does he hold the absurd position that art can render the ugliness of reality beautiful: matricide, violent jealousy, or the false values of everyday society are not made acceptable because they pervade the content of high art. Nor is the reason why we value such treasures as the Oresteia trilogy, Othello, or Death of a Salesman because their beauty cancels out or makes up for all of the ugliness of reality. It is rather that the ways in which Orestes, Othello, and the Loman family approach the tragic underpinnings of their existence force us to examine the nature of our approach to the cruelty of life. Nietzsche's world view, his understanding that there are no moral or rational explanations for the earthly misfortune that is great and constant, is not pessimistic or dark. The members of his ideal culture are all marked by their ability to elicit from the artistic representation of tragedy an understanding of the contingency of their lives that is not coloured by remorse, resignation, or decline. Nietzsche's ideal response is, of course, not one of Schadenfreude; we are not urged to respond to senseless disasters with glee. But we are also not to ignore them or pretend that they exist because a higher being has so planned it as our punishment or trial. The paradigmatic spectator/human being does not welcome particular pain but the fact that there must necessarily be pain in human life. What we learn when we experience tragic drama is a way to acknowledge misfortune within the boundaries of our human capabilities. And in turn it is these capabilities that Nietzsche feels are enhanced by representations of tragic situations.

In essence, we value artistic expressions of tragedy because they are another way to justify the fact that the lives of human beings are fraught with pain and misfortune; that this is finally and simply the way it is. Note that Nietzsche seems to share Becca’s anti-“God people” viewpoint of the idea of predestination. There is no purpose to the suffering, it plainly is just the way the proverbial cookie crumbles, but it is comforting and necessary to survival to see that it isn’t just you whose life if filled with inexplicable pain – it’s going around. British playwright and theatre theorist Howard Barker put it a different way, expressing the need for theatrical tragedy as one central to the contemporary human experience. In his book Death, The One, and the Art of Theatre Barker writes:

It is impossible – now, at this point in the long journey of human culture – to avoid the sense that pain is necessity; that it is neither accident, nor malformation, nor malice, nor misunderstanding, that it is integral to the human character both in its inflicting and in its suffering, this terrible sense Tragedy alone has articulated, and will continue to articulate, and in so doing, make beautiful… Nothing said about death by the living can possibly relate to death as it will be experienced by the dying. Nothing known about death by the dead can be communicated to the living. Over this appalling chasm tragedy throws a frail bridge of imagination.

It is arguably this “frail bridge of imagination” combined with our need for community – our need to know that we are, ultimately, all in this together – that brings us back to the theatre time after time. Perhaps it’s easier to grapple with the unknown in the anonymity of a darkened house. Perhaps it’s easier when we have the comfort of knowing that we are not alone.

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TALK ABOUT IT Speaking of Tragedy

Before attending Rabbit Hole, have a discussion about the nature of human fascination with tragedy. The following structure may be helpful as a way to begin: Ask students to list, aloud, their favorite movies – most

likely one will be mentioned in short order that is at least moderately dark or tragic. Ask them to talk about why they enjoy that movie, pointing out the dark/tragic/unpleasant elements of it. Move on to talking about movies like

Titanic and Schindler’s List, Children of Men, or World Trade Center. We know these movies will be about difficult subject matter, yet people still go to see them in droves. Why? Ask students to list reasons people enjoy

these films. What’s the “formula” for a successful tragic movie?

Consider Rabbit Hole. Is it a tragedy because of its subject matter? If so, is Becca a tragic hero (you may wish to have a refresher on the qualities of a traditional tragic hero)? Why or why not? Is it a comedy because of the way the subject matter is sometimes addressed? Is there a genre which accurately describes this play? If so, which

one? If not – invent one. What is it called? What are its characteristics?

You may also wish to have students use the Arthur Miller, Amy Price, or Howard Barker assertions included above as a prompt for an informal or in-class essay. In their responses, ask students to reference examples

from other plays with which they are already familiar.

ACTIVITY Sappy Log

Ask students to move beyond the realm of theatre or movies and have them think about effective commercials they’ve seen on TV, especially during the holidays. Think about greeting cards. Think about songs they hear on

the radio. Are we living in a world where sadness is an industry? When and why is it beneficial to “tug on heartstrings?” Do sappy love songs sell more CDs? Does that Folger’s commercial about Peter coming home for

Christmas that they’ve run every year since 1985 really sell more coffee?

Have students keep a log of every mournful love song they hear on the radio, and every emotionally evocative commercial they see on TV. Have them bring their findings to class after a week and analyze their findings in a

class discussion.

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ACTORS REACT: THE CAST OF RABBIT HOLE REFLECTS ON THE PLAY Use this section, containing the words of the Goodman’s cast of Rabbit Hole, to help students understand the pull actors often feel towards serious – even tragic – pieces of theatre. “Actors React”: Goodman Theatre’s OnStage magazine, March – April 2007 Depicting the aftermath of a family tragedy with unerring candor and honesty, David Lindsay-Abaire’s Rabbit Hole offers a formidable challenge to each actor in its five-member cast. Prior to the beginning of rehearsals, cast members discussed their initial reactions to this uniquely resonant, affecting play.

Lia Mortenson (Becca): Speaking as a mother who once had a very sick baby, this play obviously cuts to the marrow for many reasons. A primal instinct forces you to protect and ensure survival of your young. But—and it’s a big “but”—this is out of our hands, out of our control. Our children’s lives—and deaths—are their own. This play speaks to that paradox clearly and messily. As it should be, because it is messy. There is no right or wrong way to grieve—no predetermined timeline, as Howie and Becca discover. We must all slog through the detritus that remains after the death of a loved one—especially a child. But there is also

hope. And life to live. Daniel Cantor (Howie): David Lindsay-Abaire calls for emotional restraint in the playing of Rabbit Hole, essentially reminding us that the play is about the attempt to survive and recover from tremendous loss, rather than just feel horrible about it. So that means there are all sorts of things going on: humor, passion, disconnection, mundanity. I like this, because it seems to reflect all the complexities and ironies of our real lives. The play hits very deep chords without being sentimental. The language is very natural, very breezy, almost simple at times, but there’s a lot left in the subtext, and for this actor, that’s dreamy.

Mary Ann Thebus (Nat): I guess the thing that affects me first and foremost is the honest, human, straightforward approach to a sad and scary topic. Added to which is the refusal of these very truthfully written characters to succumb to sentiment or to allow the tragedy to rob them of their lives—and also the humor inherent in the relationships and their ways of dealing with each other and their lives. It is a simple, honest, funny and touching piece, and I for one feel privileged to be a part of bringing it to theatrical life.

Amy Warren (Izzy): When I first read it I had such a strong emotional reaction—I choked up, then laughed out loud—a very visceral experience. And at the end I was overwhelmed with grief—the sadness of losing someone unexpectedly, the knowledge that these two people are forever altered, and the depth of how hard life can be. What also struck me, though, is how refreshing it is for a play to be about truly decent, funny, conscientious, humane people. They experience rage and horror and desperation, and they can be manipulative, but it’s usually out of caring or love.

Jürgen Hooper (Jason): What an amazing and painful insight into a situation—something I haven’t seen in my experience either onstage or on the screen. And it’s handled so respectfully and in keeping with the truth of where Jason is in his life and where Becca is in her process of moving forward. No flowery emotional speeches or breakdowns—for me, it captures the emotional journey of a teenager in this situation very well and very respectfully.

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EXPLORING THE TEXT

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ENGAGING WITH THE TEXT This page contains our recommendations for scene study divided by student ability level. Our hope is that this will help you and your students have a meaningful interaction with the text, regardless of learning level.

Remedial Students: Focus on a few pivotal scenes of the play to get a sense of story and style. Act One, Scene One Act One, Scene Four Act Two, Scene Three

General Students: The following scenes should give students a basic understanding of plot and character.

Act One, Scene One Act One, Scene Three Act One, Scene Four Act Two, Scene Two Act Two, Scene Three

Advanced Students: We highly recommend that students at this level read the entire play, either in class or as a homework assignment. This will facilitate fuller in-class discussions and a more empowered experience at the theatre.

Here are some suggestions of how you can use these selections in class:

Read the scenes aloud in class – but give your students time to look over the material first. As a

professional theater company, we would never ask even the most experienced actors to audition for us without having time to prepare a scene first! We suggest that you give students at least a little time to become familiar with the text before asking them to “perform” for their classmates. Assigning students roles the class period before reading the scenes aloud (perhaps one half of the class is Character A and the other will read Character B, etc.) is often an excellent way to give them time to prepare.

Act it out! Get students up on their feet, speaking the text, and relating to the other characters in the

scene. They’ll be amazed how much more sense the text makes than when it’s just on the page. You can also try dividing the class into groups with each group performing a different scene. Have the groups present their scenes in order to help give the class an idea of the scope of the plot.

Ask students to read a scene and then bring in a piece of art – a painting, photograph, poem, song,

collage, etc. – that they feel best represents that scene. Discuss everyone’s choice in an open class discussion.

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TEXT QUESTIONS The following are text questions designed to assess basic understanding of the plot and character relationships. These questions can also be found in the Student Guide. More in-depth questions are available in the “Essay and Discussion Questions” section and throughout this guide. BEFORE THE PLAY BEGINS

1. What do we know about the characters in the play before the play begins? What are their relationships to one another?

2. According to the playwright, where and when does this play take place? ACT ONE Scene One

1. What is Becca doing at the beginning of this scene? 2. What happened to Izzy at the bar? Summarize her story in three sentences. 3. How does Becca feel about Izzy’s story? 4. What excuse does Izzy give for the way she behaved? How does Becca feel about this excuse? 5. What does Izzy have for a snack? Why won’t Becca let her eat it straight out of the fridge? What

does she have to do to the snack first? 6. From where did Izzy recently get fired? 7. What is Izzy’s relationship to each of the two people in the story she tells in this scene? 8. What big news does Izzy share with Becca? Who else in the family knows about this news? 9. Who was Danny? Do we know what’s happened to him? 10. What does Becca want to save for Izzy? Why do both women decide against this? 11. What does Izzy need Becca to pretend?

Scene Two

1. How does Howie seem to be reacting to Izzy’s news? 2. What is Becca planning to get Izzy for her birthday? 3. What does Howie think of this gift idea? 4. Who are Rick and Debbie? 5. What are two things we learn in this scene about what happened to Danny? 6. Why is Howie playing Al Green and rubbing Becca’s shoulders? How does Becca react? 7. Who does Howie want Becca to see? Why? 8. What does she tell Howie she wants to do in regards to their house? Why does she want to do this?

How does Howie feel about it? 9. What is different about Howie’s experience in the house compared to Becca’s? 10. Why can’t Becca go back to work? 11. What does Howie do when Becca goes upstairs? What does he watch?

Scene Three

1. What is happening at the beginning of this scene? What is being celebrated? 2. What did Howie get for Nat? How do Becca and Izzy feel about it? 3. What curse are they discussing? What does each of the characters think about the idea of this

curse? 4. What gift does Izzy receive from Becca and Howie? How does she react? 5. What does Izzy receive from her mother? How does she react? How does Becca react? 6. What does Becca want to do after she sees what Nat gives Izzy? Why? 7. Who is Taz? What do Howie and Nat disagree about in regards to him? 8. Why did Nat bring up the Kennedys in the first place? What story does she tell? 9. Where does Becca refuse to keep going? Why?

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TEXT QUESTIONS 10. Which people does Becca not like, according to Howie? Why doesn’t she like them? What does

she call them? Of what is she jealous? 11. Who is Arthur? Why is Becca upset that Nat keeps comparing Arthur to Danny? 12. Does Becca believe in God?

Scene Four

1. Where does the beginning of the scene take place? How often does Becca go in this room? 2. Who is Jason Willette? 3. Why has he written Becca and Howie a letter? What did he include with his letter? What would

he like their permission to do? 4. What is on the tape Howie starts to watch? What should be on the tape – what has Becca taped

over? 5. What does Howie accuse Becca of trying to do, even if she’s doing it subconsciously? What

evidence aside from the tape does he give her? 6. Why does Becca say she’s been doing the things that bother Howie? 7. What are Becca and Howie doing in different ways? What “sucks” right now according to Becca? 8. What does Howie want to get back? Will he wait any longer for it?

ACT TWO Scene One

1. How much time has passed since the end of Act One? 2. What is going on at the house? What is Howie doing? 3. What business advice does Izzy give Howie in regards to the house? 4. Why does Izzy think Becca might be mad at her? 5. What question does Izzy ask Howie? What’s the prologue to her question? How does Howie

respond? 6. Where have Becca and Nat been? What happened while they were there? 7. Why was Becca so upset about the actions of the woman she encountered? 8. Who appears at the front door? Why is he at the house? 9. How does Howie react to the visitor? How does Becca?

Scene Two

1. What are Nat and Becca doing? 2. What book which used to be Becca’s do they find? 3. What does Nat find that stops her? What does Becca tell her about how to keep going? 4. What kind of class is Becca taking? What book is she studying? What does Becca like best about

the class? 5. What is different about Becca’s experience with Debbie compared to Nat’s experience with her

friend Maureen? What did Maureen say she wanted to share with Nat? How did Nat respond? 6. What is Jason’s story (which Nat finds) about? What does Becca tell Nat she plans to do regarding

Jason? 7. What story does Nat tell about Danny? 8. What big question does Becca ask her mother? What does Nat say in response?

Scene Three

1. Name two things Becca and Jason discuss before he says what he’s come to say. 2. What has Jason come to say to Becca? 3. In what year of high school is Jason? What does he plan to do after graduation? 4. What is Jason telling Becca about when she begins to cry?

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TEXT QUESTIONS

5. Of what Greek myth does Jason’s story remind Becca? 6. How does Jason explain why he believes in parallel universes? 7. What “version” of them does Becca tell Jason this must be? What is a nice thought for Becca in

regards to the idea of parallel universes? 8. What does Jason want Becca to tell Howie?

Scene Four

1. What things is Becca giving to Izzy? What did she especially want Izzy to have, according to Nat? 2. Why is Becca surprised to see Howie – to what did she think he had to go? 3. What does Howie say he wants to try to do without for a while? 4. Who did Becca call? Where have she and Howie been invited? 5. What’s coming up that’s going to be tough for Howie and Becca? 6. What does Becca seem ready to reconsider? 7. How does Howie outline their next steps? 8. What does Becca do at the end of the play? What physical action does she take?

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ESSAY AND DISCUSSION QUESTIONS The following questions or statements, divided by topic, can be used as starting points for class discussions, prompts for essay questions, or creative writing assignments to help you and your students explore the text and its themes more deeply. EXPLORING THE CHARACTERS

• With which character do you most personally identify? Which character do you identify with least? Why?

• Other than the age differences expressed in the script, how can you tell that Becca is elder sister? Give specific examples from the text.

• Do you think Becca is the only college-educated person in her family? Why or why not? What would that tell you about her? About her family?

• How does Lindsay-Abaire leave Becca and Howie’s relationship at the end of the first act? How does that make the audience feel? With whom do you most empathize at the end of the act? Why?

• Look at the way Becca and Izzy interact in Scene 1. What is Lindsay-Abaire subtly telling us about the social status of each of these two women? Look at Becca and Izzy’s other interactions in the play. What do they tell you about their status, both in a larger social context and just between the two of them? Who typically has higher status? Why do you think that could be?

• Based on the information Izzy has at the beginning of Act Two, do you think Howie is having an affair? Why or why not?

• Do any of the characters fundamentally change during the course of this play? If so, how and why do you think the changes occurred? If not, what has kept these characters more or less static?

• Describe Jason’s life as it was before the accident. How have things changed? What effect will this accident have on him in his life to come – try to think about all aspects of his life which have been changed and how his life will be affected in the future.

EXPLORING THE PLAY

• Read the Author’s Note that David Lindsay-Abaire included in the back of the script. Why do you think he wrote it? Why do you think he’s chosen to include it in the script? How, if at all, does it change your perceptions of the play?

• What do you make of the title of this play? Make a list of everything you think of when you hear “rabbit hole” – you should make this list quickly, jotting down anything that comes to your head. Now try to determine why Lindsay-Abaire chose this as the title of his play.

• David Lindsay-Abaire is very specific about the setting of this play and (through context clues) about the socio-economic status of its characters. Do you think the characters and situation are necessarily that specific? If so, explain why. If not, how would the play be different if the characters were working-class people in Chicago? What about this play makes its story universal?

• Go through the play and find all the allusions to Danny and his death. At what point do we actually find out what happened to him? The playwright could have revealed all the details about the accident in the first scene, but he chose not to. Why do you think that is? What effect does revealing the information this way have on the audience?

• With what feeling are we left at the end of the play? How could the tone with which the final scene is played dramatically affect the feeling with which the audience leaves the theatre? How might tone be established in this scene? Rewrite only the stage directions in the final scene to give the play an alternate ending. Don’t change the scene, just the way it would be performed.

• Think about the design elements needed for this play. What does Howie and Becca’s house look like? What does Danny’s room look like? How does each character dress? What type of music would you include in the sound design? How important is lighting to telling this story? Choose a design element and make sketches or create a playlist that reflects how you think the play should look and feel.

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• David Lindsay-Abaire wrote this play after being told that if you want to write a good play, you should write about what scares you the most. Do you think that’s good advice? Why or why not? If you were given the same challenge, what would you write your play about?

• Do you think it is more fun for actors to play a comedic role or a tragic one? Why? Which do you think garners more respect in the acting community? Why? Find the Will Ferrell / Jack Black musical number that was featured on the 2007 Oscars (it should be readily available on YouTube). What do you think of their message?

RESPONSIBILITY

• What does it mean to take responsibility for your actions? Why is it important to accept responsibility? • Each character seems to try to take the blame for Danny’s death at some point in the play. Do you

think anyone actually deserves to be blamed or was this truly an accident? Why do you think each of the characters feels the need to do this? Is taking blame the same thing as accepting responsibility?

• Which character in this play is the most responsible person? Who is the least responsible? Why? Use examples from the text to support your conclusions.

• Is Jason doing enough to accept responsibility for the accident? Put yourself in Jason’s shoes – in his place, would you behave the way he does in the play? If not, explain how you would act differently.

• Do you think Izzy’s new baby will help give her focus as she and Howie suggest? Why or why not? Do you think she’s ready for the responsibility of being a mother?

FAITH

• Make a list of everything in which you have faith. This list could include anything from the faith you have in yourself to answer this essay question properly to the faith you have in the Cubs for the coming season. Now think about why you have faith in those things. Based on this list, what’s the most important part of faith for you? Why?

• What’s the difference between faith and religion? Between religion and spirituality? • In what do you think Becca might have faith? Why do you feel this way? How do you think her

attitudes are different now as compared with before Danny died? • What is Howie’s definition of or experience of faith? How do you think it differs from Becca’s? • Is Nat a religious woman? How do you know? Use the text to support your conclusion.

FAMILY

• Based on their relationships now, what do you think it was like to grow up in Becca and Izzy’s house? Describe Nat as a mother then versus the time of the play. What about their father? He’s mentioned only very briefly; what do you think he was like?

• Write a scene of the family having dinner during Becca and Izzy’s childhood. Include both girls and Nat – and don’t forget their father and their brother, Arthur. What do they talk about? How do they speak to one another? What are they eating? Does anything unusual happen? Be specific in your writing.

• Do you think this family is good at communicating with one another? Why or why not? Why is communication important within a family? What happens when communication is lacking?

• What is the value of family to each of these characters? To whom is family most important? Why? Don’t forget to think about all characters – including Jason. What is his experience with family?

• What does family mean to you? How has family impacted who you are as a person? • Think about societal conceptions of “the family” and how they’ve broadened over the years. We are

currently much more accepting than in years past of single-parent families, same-gender parent families, etc. Yet, our perceptions of what a “family” looks like still tend to always include a child. How do you feel about that perception? Have Becca and Howie gone from being a couple to being a family and now back to being a couple? How do you think that will affect how they move forward after the end of the play?

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RABBIT HOLES • Imagine that there is a rabbit hole that can transport you to any time in your life that you would like to

visit – either your past or your future. Where would you choose to visit? Why? Who would you see there? What would your surroundings look like? Write a descriptive essay about where you would choose to visit.

• Currently, physicists are primarily focusing on discovering if we could use rabbit holes (or wormholes or black holes) to travel through time. Take a moment and think about if we should do this, were the technology to become available. What might be some of the dangers involved in visiting parallel realities? What could be the advantages? After weighing the pros and cons, how do you feel about this issue?

• Envision the parallel universe in which the accident didn’t occur and Danny is still alive and well. What would life be like for each character in the play? Describe how their relationships and daily interactions would be different. Can you think of any positive lessons that would not have been learned if this accident hadn’t happened? What truths would these characters not know in this alternate reality?

GRIEF & GRIEVING

• Who do you think is best dealing with grief connected to Danny’s death? Who is dealing with it in the worst way? Why do you think that? Is there a “right” way or a “wrong” way to deal with grief?

• Is maintaining a sense of humor helpful during the grieving process? Looking at the characters in Rabbit Hole, and thinking of any personal experience you may have had with grief, examine this question. Where are the “funny” parts of the play? How necessary is this lightness to the structure and reality of the play? Would it be more or less realistic to see characters depressed and full of sorrow the entire time? Why?

• What is the difference between grieving the loss of another person and grieving the part of yourself that connected you to that person? For example – when Danny died, Becca lost her son but also the part of her identity that was a mother. Similarly, Howie lost the part of his identity that was his fatherhood. Which aspect of grief do you think might be more difficult?

• Make a list of the differences in the ways Becca and Howie are grieving. For example, Howie wants reminders of Danny throughout the house – his dinosaurs, his fingerprints – and Becca feels the need to put things out of sight in order to move forward. What are your findings? Why do you think they’re approaching this process from these perspectives?

• Is death more difficult to deal with when the person who has died is a child? Many have termed the deaths of children “unnatural” or “against the natural order.” Do you agree? Do you think the grieving process is more difficult when the person lost was at a young age? Why or why not?

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FROM THE AUTHOR: THOUGHTS ON PERFORMING THIS PLAY David Lindsay-Abaire chose to include a note at the back of his script to give some tips and hints to would-be performers of this challenging play. However, his insights are also valuable for readers of the work, especially those studying it!

AUTHOR’S NOTE Rabbit Hole is a delicate play tonally, and its balance can be easily thrown out of whack. With that in mind, a little guidance from the playwright… Yes, Rabbit Hole is a play about a bereaved family, but that does not mean they go through the day glazed-over, on the verge of tears, morose or inconsolable. That would be a tortuous and very uninteresting play to sit through. The characters are, instead, highly-functional, unsentimental, spirited, often funny people who are trying to maneuver their way through their grief and around each other as best they can. Sure, they hit bumps along the way, and are overcome by various emotions, but I’ve tried to be very clear about exactly when and how that happens. It’s a sad play. Don’t make it any sadder than it needs to be. Avoid sentimentality and histrionics at all costs. If you don’t, the play will flatten out and come across as bad movie-of-the-week. Tears – If the stage directions don’t mention tears, please resist adding them. Howie gets some at the end of Act One. Becca cries at one point during her scene with Jason. Nat might almost cry when she finds Danny’s shoes in his room. But I think that’s about it. I’m pretty sure Izzy doesn’t need to cry in this play. And I know Jason shouldn’t cry, ever. (Yes, he’s haunted by the death of Danny, but his emotions aren’t especially accessible to him. Please, no choked-up kids openly racked with guilt. That’s not who he is. Restraint, please.) Laughter – There are, I hope, many funny parts in the play. They are important. Especially to the audience. Without the laughs, the play becomes pretty much unbearable. Don’t ignore the jokes. They are your friends. Please, no extra embracing, or holding of hands. Avoid resolution at all costs. Becca and Nat, for example, shouldn’t hug at the end of their scene in Danny’s room. It’s not that kind of play. There can and should be moments of hope and genuine connection between these characters, but I don’t ever want a moment (not even at the very end) where the audience sighs and says “Oh good, they’re gonna be okay now.” Rabbit Hole is not a tidy play. Resist smoothing out its edges.

THINK ABOUT IT Ask students to think about the points that Lindsay-Abaire addresses in this note: tears, laughter, resolution. Do you agree with his directions? Why or why not? If you do, what about his directions feels right to you? If

you don’t, with what do you disagree? How would you write a note guiding the performance of this play? Lindsay-Abaire notes that this is not “that kind of play.” To what kind of play do you think he’s referring?

ACTIVITY

Set the Tone Ask students to imagine that someone has made a play out of each of their life stories. Have them write an

introductory note, in the style of David Lindsay-Abaire’s note included here, telling the director and the performers things they should keep in mind in producing the play and staying true to the story.

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EXPLORING THE CONTEXT

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TALKING ABOUT GRIEF IN THE CLASSROOM Rabbit Hole is a play about life after loss, and in order to get your students to truly engage with this play you’re going to have to talk about your collective experiences with loss. This is going to be hard. It’s going to be hard for your students and hard for you. For some students who haven’t yet had any truly personal experience with loss, this idea is going to be difficult for them to get their heads around – we all know about the adolescent immortality complex some of our students have: “Not only am I invincible, but so are all my family, my friends, and the lifestyle to which I’ve become accustomed.” In Rabbit Hole, this family – and even 17-year-old Jason – shows us that this theory will not always hold up in the face of the unexpected. The flip side of this comes from students who have experienced the kind of loss found in this play. We live in a community often rocked by violence and the senselessness of premature or “unnatural” death. Some students may be trying to cope with a death in their family or their community. They may have lost a child, lost a sibling, lost a parent or someone else with whom they had a strong bond. They most likely have troubles outside of your classroom about which you have no way of knowing. Some students dealing with tragedy in their lives may not have had a place to talk about their feelings in a safe way before. What a gift then to those students if you can create that sanctuary for them in your classroom, and what better way for students on the other side of the issue to learn about these realities than from their peers? Again, this will be hard. You have to recognize that fact. You need to have discussions – potentially many discussions – with your students about this play and the issues it raises. You will need to be sure that no one leaves your classroom in an unhealthy place. This will take a lot of work. BUT – it will all be worth it because in the course of your discussions, you and your students have the chance to learn something about the way each person handles the curves life throws at us. To quote an overused graduation song circa 1999 – “The real troubles in your life are apt to be things that never crossed your worried mind; the kind that blindside you at 4pm on some idle Tuesday.” When that Tuesday comes – or if students are still reeling from the Tuesday that happened to them six months ago – they can be stronger for your discussions. They can learn how to support one another – in the classroom and in their communities. Studying this play gives you the opportunity to create a community within your classroom where everyone and their experiences are respected; a place where each student feels nurtured and able to speak freely in a trusting environment. Here are a few ideas for creating that sort of environment.

Be clear and direct with students – let them know that you are going to be discussing things that may be difficult for them to think about. Full disclosure about the study of this play will be your friend.

Establish a strong policy of privacy – tell students that what’s discussed in the classroom stays in the classroom so that everyone can feel safe in being honest and sharing personal experiences and emotions.

Enforce a zero-judgment policy; while there is certainly room for debate, disrespecting another student’s ideas or experiences cannot be tolerated.

You may wish to begin by asking your students to determine a set of rules for these delicate discussions – students are often more strict on themselves and more likely to follow rules they establish as a group. The rules should focus on showing each student who shares an experience respect and on ways to help inspire community in the classroom.

Make sure that everyone is leaving these discussions in a healthy place – try to really monitor everyone during these talks and make sure no one’s leaving feeling inappropriately upset.

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CLINICAL GRIEF Before exploring the more subjective arenas of this topic, it may be useful to simply begin with the more “clinical” definitions of grief and grieving. edited from WebMD: www.webmd.com GRIEF is your emotional reaction to a significant loss. The words sorrow and heartache are often used to describe feelings of grief. Whether you lose a beloved person, animal, place, or object, or a valued way of life (such as your job, marriage, or good health), some level of grief will naturally follow. GRIEVING is the process of emotional and life adjustment you go through after a loss. Grieving after a loved one’s death is also known as bereavement. Grieving is a personal experience. Depending on who you are and the nature of your loss, your process of grieving will be different from another person’s experience. There is no “normal and expected” period of time for grieving. Some people adjust to a new life within several weeks or months. Others take a year or more, particularly when their daily life has been radically changed or their loss was traumatic and unexpected. COMMON SYMPTOMS OF GRIEF OR GRIEVING A wide range of feelings and symptoms are common during grieving. While feeling shock, numbness, sadness, anger, guilt, anxiety, or fear, you may also find moments of relief, peace, or happiness. While grieving is not simply sadness, “the blues,” or depression, you may become depressed or overly anxious during the grieving process. The stress of grief and grieving can take a physical toll on your body. Sleeplessness is common, as is a weakened immune system over time. If you have a chronic illness, grieving can worsen your condition. Although it may be possible to postpone grieving, it is not possible to avoid grieving altogether. If life circumstances make it difficult for you to stop, feel, and live through the grieving process, you can expect grief to eventually erupt sometime in the future. In the meantime, unresolved grief can affect your quality of life and relationships with others GRIEF AND GRIEVING – WHAT HAPPENS? Grieving a significant loss takes time. Depending on the circumstances of your loss, grieving can take weeks to years. Ultimately, passing through the major stages of grieving helps you gradually adjust to a new chapter of your life. Becoming aware of a loss Full awareness of a major loss can happen suddenly or over a few days or weeks. While an expected loss (such as a death after a long illness) can take a short time to absorb, a sudden or tragic loss can take more time. Similarly, it can take time to grasp the reality of a loss that doesn't affect your daily routine, such as a death in a distant city or a diagnosis of a cancer that doesn't yet make you feel ill. During this time, you may feel numb and seem distracted. You may search or yearn for your lost loved one, object, or way of life. Funerals and other rituals and events during this time may help you accept the reality of your loss. Feeling and expressing grief Your way of feeling and expressing grief is unique to you and the nature of your loss. You may find that you feel irritable and restless, are quieter than usual, or need to be distant from or close to others, or that you aren't the same person you were before the loss. Don't be surprised if you experience conflicting feelings while grieving. For example, it's normal to feel despair about a death or a job loss, yet also feel relief. The grieving process does not happen in a step-by-step or orderly fashion. Grieving tends to be unpredictable, with sad thoughts and feelings coming and going, like a roller-coaster ride. After the early days of grieving, you may

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sense a lifting of numbness and sadness and experience a few days without tears. Then, for no apparent reason, the intense grief may strike again. While grieving may make you want to isolate yourself from others and hold it all in, it's important that you find some way of expressing your grief. Use whatever mode of expression comes to mind – talking, writing, creating art or music, or being physically active are all ways of expressing grief. Spirituality often enters into the grieving process. You may find yourself looking for or questioning the higher purpose of a loss. While you may gain comfort from your religious or spiritual beliefs, you might also be moved to doubt your beliefs in the face of traumatic or senseless loss. Grieving problems. In this complex and busy world, it can be difficult to fully grieve a loss. It is possible to have unresolved grief or complications associated with grieving, particularly if you:

Had several major losses in a short period of time. Are grieving permanent losses caused by chronic illness or disability. Lost someone very important in your life. You may feel that you will never get over the loss of someone

special. Experienced the unexpected or violent death of a loved one, such as the death of a child or a death caused

by an accident, a homicide, or a suicide. Have special life circumstances that act as obstacles to grieving, such as having to return to work too soon

after a death, or needing sedative medicine to cope with overwhelming emotion. Have a history of depression or anxiety.

Adjusting to a loss It can take 2 or more years to go through a grieving process. The length of time spent grieving depends on your relationship with the lost person, object, or way of life. Even after 2 years, you may reexperience feelings of grief, especially over the loss of your loved one. Be prepared for this to happen during holidays, birthdays, and other special events, which typically revive feelings of grief. Some grief experts consider grieving to be the slow recovery from a crisis of attachment: After losing something or someone to whom you are deeply attached, your sense of self and security is disrupted. As you adjust to a major loss, your goal is therefore to develop or strengthen connections with other people, places, or activities. These new parts of your life are not meant to replace what you have lost. Instead, they serve to support you as you begin to start a new phase of your life.

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RESEARCHING GRIEF: NEWS FROM THE FRONT As explored in this article, some of the most concrete research about the stages of grief has just emerged. The full text of the JAMA article on the study can be found in the “Additional Resources” section. “Scientists measure 5 stages of grief” by Ronald Kotulak: Chicago Tribune, February 21, 2007 Most people’s anguish eases after six months; others might need treatment, study finds When a loved one dies, people go through five stages of grieving, according to accepted wisdom: disbelief, yearning, anger, depression and acceptance. Now the first large-scale study to examine the five stages suggests that they are accurate, and that if a person has not moved through the negative stages in six months, he or she may need professional help dealing with the bereavement. The study, published in Wednesday’s issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association, also found that, contrary to common belief, yearning or missing a loved one is a far more dominant emotion than depression—meaning mental health experts who treat the grief-stricken may need to refocus attention on feelings of loss. “It’s important both for clinicians and the average layperson to understand that yearning and not sadness is what bereavement is really all about,” said study author Holly Prigerson, associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and director of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute’s Center for Psycho-Oncology and Palliative Care Research. “It’s about yearning, pining, longing and being angry and protesting that you can’t have this person back,” Prigerson said. Not everyone follows the exact same pattern of grieving, she said, but most do. The three-year study of 233 individuals interviewed as part of the Yale Bereavement Study found that disbelief reached a peak one month after the loss, then declined. Yearning steadily increased and reached its high point at four months before declining. Anger rises to a peak at five months, and depression peaks at six months. Acceptance is strongly present even from the first but becomes ever more dominant as time passes. Christine Reilly, 39, of Whitman, Mass., said she still misses her son Michael, who died in 1999 at age 5 after battling cancer for more than four years. “It’s his physical presence, the laughter, the jokes, the hugs, the kisses and things that you miss,” she said. “I can close my eyes and feel Michael’s presence with me every single day.” After Michael’s death, Reilly said, she and her husband experienced anger and depression. “But after a period of time, four or six months, you sort of realize that Michael’s in a much better place,” she said. “There’s nothing we can do. We can’t bring him back, and there’s no point in being angry.” The couple gradually accepted Michael’s death and decided to move on. “The first five years that Michael was alive, cancer dictated what my life was going to be like,” Reilly said. “I had two choices after Michael died. I could let cancer continue to dictate my life or I could dictate my life. I chose to take over at that point and not let cancer run my life.” According to Prigerson, the Yale study found that survivors tend to be better able to deal with their grief when the loved one had been diagnosed with a terminal illness more than six months before death. Reilly said that in the last six months of Michael’s life, when his condition steadily worsened and doctors said he wouldn’t make it, she started coming to terms with the loss she would suffer. “If it’s an anticipated death, acceptance becomes a part of it earlier than if the death is faster,” said Ramona

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Behrendt, a senior oncology social worker at the University of Chicago. “People have not had time to absorb that this truly is happening.” People also have a harder time dealing with grief when a loved one dies unexpectedly, such as in an accident, the authors of the Yale study said. But such deaths are far less common than those due to chronic health conditions or terminal disease. “Acceptance is the norm in the case of natural deaths, even soon after the loss,” said the study’s lead author, Paul Maciejewski, an assistant professor of psychiatry at Yale. Although the five stages of grief have been in general use for several decades, Prigerson said they had never been thoroughly studied. John Bowlby and Colin Parkes first proposed in the early 1960s and 1970s that there is a natural and progressive psychological response to loss. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, then at the University of Chicago, popularized in the late 1960s a five-stage response of terminally ill patients to the awareness of their impending death: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. Although survivors do not generally go through a bargaining stage, Prigerson said she and her colleagues were surprised to find how closely bereavement followed the same pattern as people adjusted emotionally and cognitively to the loss of someone close. Prigerson and Maciejewski said that although they believe the five stages of grief are a universal human response to loss, studies would have to be carried out in other cultures to find out if the results reported Wednesday held true outside the U.S. But the researchers said they were struck by the finding that in normal grief, each of the five stages peaked in exactly the same sequence, and the four negative stages by six months. Acceptance, the fifth stage, kept increasing. “This would suggest that people who have extreme levels of depression, anger or yearning beyond six months would be those who might benefit from a better mental health evaluation and possible referral for treatment,” Prigerson said. Ten to 15 percent of the bereaved survivors in the study experienced prolonged grief, she said. They still felt a great loss and yearning for a loved one more than six months later and were far from accepting the reality of the death. “They are people who have a very close dependent relationship to the person who died,” Prigerson said. “That person really made them feel safe and secure and defined who they are.” People suffering from prolonged grief may have trouble working and may be at risk for other problems, such as high blood pressure, suicidal thoughts and excessive drinking and smoking. Intervention should focus on encouraging a person with prolonged grief to dwell less on the loss, to reconnect with relatives and friends, and not to feel guilty about moving on with life, Prigerson said. Because most deaths result from chronic diseases, it’s important that a spouse and other relatives discuss the seriousness of a diagnosis and the possibility of death, Behrendt said. “If you have a chance to say goodbye, and you and your loved one have had a chance to really do a life review, you’re going to be able to move on a lot better than people who’ve never communicated with the dying patient,” she said.

A study that followed bereaved people for 24 months after the loss of a loved one supports the traditional notion that there are five stages of grief. The first four stages recede gradually after peaking within the first six months, and acceptance was still rising at the end of the two-year period.

Months After Death

Stage of Grief Narrative

1 DISBELIEF Feelings of disbelief are at their highest

4 YEARNING Missing a loved on, the most dominant of the negative grief responses, peaks at four months

5 ANGER Reaches its highest level after five months

6 DEPRESSION The last of the negative grief indicators, it is at its strongest at six months

24 ACCEPTANCE Even in the beginning, acceptance is the strongest response to loss. As time passes, it increases steadily as the others fall away.

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THE UNIVERSALITY OF GRIEF Also important to understanding the experience of grief is the concept of its universality. Grieving is not simply a Western phenomenon. It is not exclusive to a certain class, race, or creed, but something that all of humanity must take in equal measure, even if the ways in which cultures around the world react to grief differ. The truth of this concept is explored in the following article, which highlights the challenges of the grieving and their caregivers after the devastating tsunami of 2004. edited from “The borders of healing” by Marianne Szegedy-Maszak: U.S. News & World Report, January 17, 2005 A disaster claims victims in many ways. The death and devastation from the post-Christmas tsunami killed thousands almost immediately. But as each day passes, many other lives are claimed by disease and untreated injuries. Then there are those who are physically all right but who struggle to cope with the shattering burden of grief, terror, and loss. One man from Sri Lanka says he has not slept for days because each time he closes his eyes he sees his wife and child swept out to their death. A 13-year-old boy from Banda Aceh remembers seeing the killer wave and hearing his father shout, “Run! Run!” He last saw his parents swept away in the roiling water. Long after some semblance of order is restored to the afflicted countries, those who survived will have to contend with the emotional effects of the giant wave. And another huge public-health problem will face these countries—a problem that has nothing at all to do with germs. “What makes this so devastating to survivors is that the very things that they need to recover emotionally—the attachment to other people, the support of the community—have all been torn out from beneath them,” says Jon Allen, a psychologist with Baylor College of Medicine and the author of Coping With Trauma. The emotional consequences of trauma and disaster constitute a vast new field of professional inquiry. After the 9/11 terrorist attacks, a small mental health industry sprang up almost overnight, as post-traumatic stress disorder became as familiar a medical term as epilepsy. In the areas hardest hit by the tsunami, helping victims deal with the emotional effects of the breathtaking loss and devastation will be critical. “Most of what we know about psychological trauma is based on western models and research on western populations,” says Gordon Nagayama Hall, professor of psychology at the University of Oregon and the editor of the journal Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority Psychology. “Very little research has been done on coping with trauma in Asian populations.” The question is: Does it matter? Aren’t there universal paths to healing that transcend national borders? The answer to this is both yes and no. Experts in psychological and cultural issues point out that all human experience can be distilled through three major dimensions: the universal, the group, and the individual. These dimensions come into stark relief during a disaster. “In the case of trauma,” says Frederick Leong, professor of psychology at the University of Tennessee and the president of the Asian American Psychological Association, “the universal gets stimulated immediately. Everyone is together in their experience of the shock, of the need to survive, even in the first experience of grief.” Universal human experience demands what virtually all experts in trauma recommend as an essential first response: immediate attention to the most basic human needs of food, water, shelter, sleep, and medical attention. An appreciation for the universality of human experience also means that normal responses to horrible events should not be seen as demanding the attention of a mental health expert. “If you have spent all day fishing floating bodies out of water, you will not sleep well,” says David Ratnavale, a psychiatrist who has been advising the Sri Lankan government on disaster management for several years. “These are not psychiatric cases, and sleeplessness is not a medical problem.” But after the universal reactions, the cultural dimensions must come into play. “People are in a disaster zone in a culture that does not look at the diagnostic manual of the American Psychiatric Association,” says Anthony Ng, chair of the APA’s committee on disaster. “Anyone who comes to help must work within the confines of these cultures and see how mental health fits into it.” Less ego. Some experts say that Asian cultures tend to be more interdependent than western cultures. Manoj Shah, a psychiatrist at Schneider Children’s Hospital on Long Island, went to Gujarat, India, after a devastating earthquake in 2001. In providing mental health care to the victims, he explained, Indian culture “fosters interdependency and

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is sociocentric rather than egocentric. Individuality and privacy are not encouraged. These characteristics lend themselves to group therapy.” But there is a continuum for these relationships. “We are not like the Japanese, where everything is the company, or the society, or the community. And we are not as individualistic as western culture. We are somewhere in between.” While this model may be true in India, elsewhere in Asia this interdependence has another side. One of the few studies of Asian populations in stressful situations found that they tended not to seek support from others the way westerners tend to. Interdependence, in this cultural context, involves a concern for interpersonal harmony and concern over loss of face. “Loss of face involves fulfilling one’s social role,” says psychologist Hall. “Seeking the help of others might be perceived as burdensome and upsetting the harmony of these social relations.” The way people communicate further illustrates the importance of cultural sensitivity. Anthropologists and linguists point to two basic communication styles: high context and low context. Westerners tend to communicate in a low-context style, using words to explain nearly everything. Asian cultures, by contrast, are high-context cultures, valuing and emphasizing nonverbal communication. Eye contact, gestures, and facial expressions communicate even more than spoken language. “Not every culture is a talk-it-out type of culture,” says psychologist Neil Boothby, a professor of public health at Columbia University who worked for Save the Children with the children of Banda Aceh for years before the tsunami, during the civil war. Now, he will return to cope with a more traumatic disaster. “Some people will pray, some will meditate, some will seek solace in burial rituals and things of that nature. At a minimum, a western approach to talking about things could be ineffective; at maximum it could be harmful.” For those providing relief, the challenge is to bolster existing local resources, like schools, religious groups, and civic associations, so they can provide the mental health support necessary for recovery. The essence of that support, as Baylor’s Allen explains, can be found in the new attachments created out of the experience of loss and the chaos. Human relations, in the end, provide the security that can lead to a fragile sense of hope. “This is not a mental health thing,” says Allen. “This is what people have been doing for tens of thousands of years.”

ACTIVITY Identifying Grief – Making a Master Loss List

As explained in the preceding sections, grief is an intensely personal experience and grieving an equally personal process, yet it is something universal to the human experience. Grief is not always associated with death – it can

be encountered after any kind of significant loss. Ask students to identify times in their lives when they have experienced grief over things small or large by making a Master Loss List (an activity suggested by author Melody Beattie in her book The Grief Club) that catalogues each loss or change a person has experienced. This list will

help students take stock of how they’ve dealt with loss thus far. When examining each item on the list, students should determine if they have previously acknowledged the loss or tried to ignore it, what they learned, who or what they turned to at the time of the loss, whom or what they could have turned to, and what they could have

done differently in the situation.

Have students, either as a class or in small groups, discuss their lists. What experiences of grief do students share? What have they learned about their particular coping styles thus far? Do they notice any patterns in their responses to grief? Are those patterns positive or negative? If negative, what might students do to change their

grieving patterns in the future?

After the discussion, you may wish to have students “decompress” by journaling about their experience creating the Master Loss List and discussing their lists with classmates

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THE COMFORTS OF THE FAITHFUL In Rabbit Hole, Becca derides the viewpoint of the “God people” who insist on asserting that God’s need for “another angel” is somehow supposed to ease the pain after losing her child. For a time, Howie seems to find comfort in the support of those same individuals. Below, Anne Lamott (Bird by Bird, Traveling Mercies, Hard Laughter) explores reasons for turning to faith (here Christianity specifically) when life and loss and grief become overwhelming with a less. edited from “Breaking the Surface” by Anne Lamott: www.salon.com, April 1, 1999 I love the heady cruelty of spring. The cloud shows in the first weeks of the season are wonderfully adolescent: “I’m happy!” “I’m mad, I’m brooding.” “I’m happy — now I’m going to cry ...” The skies and the weather toy with us, refusing to let us settle back down into the steady sleepy days and nights of winter. But above all, this is a big time of year for my Jesus-y people, these days and nights when we celebrate the birth, death and resurrection of our darling Jesus. So when I am doing radio interviews, I get much crankier crank calls — half from people who think Jesus was a nice man, a shaman, a New Age guy who probably would have dated Linda Evans if He’d come back during her heyday; and half from fundamentalists who say I am not any kind of real Christian at all and am going to rot in hell for all eternity. I thank all my cranky callers for sharing, and I say, “Hey, you know the difference between you and God? God never thinks He’s you.” Then I get on with celebrating. People who think we Christians are idiots or delusional for our beliefs get hung up on the Good Friday part — the part where Jesus is suffering, everyone is bad, God is mad. I try not to bog down in it, though, and not because of what Lenny Bruce said, that if Christ had been killed in the modern era, we Christians would be wearing electric-chair charms on chains around our necks. It’s because I got sober, against all odds, and then I started hanging out with people who were trying to get sober too, and over time I got to watch a number of the walking dead come back to life — as I came back to life. So I believe in the basic Christian message: that life happens, death happens and then new life happens. I believe in resurrection. So sue me. Or go read something else. Veronica, our pastor, said the other day that Jesus’ promise was not that he was going to try and patch up our old raggedy-assed lives, but that he wanted to give us new life. Now, this is not what I would do, personally, if I were anyone’s savior. I would at least try spackle, caulking, dry cleaning fluid. Maybe some nice new furnishings to hide the bare spots in the rug, the water-stained walls; some chemicals to kill off the dust-mite ashrams in the old sofa. But Jesus says, as Veronica put it, you can’t get to the good stuff without killing off the old stuff. And death and dying, hanging out with the dying and grieving the dead, and grieving the losses along the way, is where this process most often happens. When you give up all hope, you’re probably only giving up the hope of getting your own outcome to happen. You’re probably only giving up the hope that it will turn out that you actually have lots of power and input; that you are secretly God’s West Coast representative. But it was when I was hopeless, caught in desperation and grief, that I got humble, teachable, willing to surrender. Of course, I grew up with an older brother, so to me surrender means you get your face ground in the dirt. It means you get noogies on your upper arm and then you have to go downstairs and get him oranges. But surrender to God means you come over to the winning side. A synonym for “surrender” is “yield,” which means, agriculturally, to step aside and let something grow. … Two friends died recently after long illnesses. Both were aware that they were closing up shop, although I think both were caught by surprise at how quickly the end came. But they had been talking about it with their friends for some time, trying to die as consciously as they had tried to live, so they had been in training, as if for a 10K race. And when this is the case, it seems that in the months and weeks and days and then hours before death, beginning to die is about breaking the surface. It’s like swimming underwater until your air is gone, then popping your head out of the water for a breath. It’s like a baby in the birth canal, inching toward the outside world, and then crowning.

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This process … [is] about giving up the dubious comfort of the earthly, of human appearances where everything works or seems to. It’s about giving up on the superficial, in order to go way down below. It’s about the willingness or necessity of being wiped out of what you think holds you together, to face a benevolent annihilation, without all the stuff that you think defines you, the stuff where we live, which we think is reality. Because you have to give up some false stuff to get to the true. I think it is a terrible system. I think they should let you have your true authentic healed whole self and the cool car. I think you should get to have an awareness of the eternal now and the buns of steel. But as a species, we’re pumped full of the longing for more, for better security, to help the race go on, to help the system keep running, and this runs roughshod over the material of the soul. It’s much louder and more compelling than the parts of us that are free, that we lived in and were surrounded by when we were in the womb, unattached, full of light. Jesus said from the cross (OK, so I’m paraphrasing), “Look, you’re a human, you’re badly wired, you’re in desperate need of grace. And you will die, as I am dying up here. But we can surrender: We can commend our spirit into my father’s hands. We need to forgive everyone first, though, because we don’t want to die angry, like other people I could mention ...” (I love that He didn’t name names. I love that Scripture does not read: “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do, except for that awful Annie Lamott, who in 2,000 years will usually know exactly what she was doing wrong. But We’ll forgive her anyway, because You said to.”) Jesus opened himself up entirely to the fear and suffering even though he would have preferred a little something from Column B. He said, “If it is possible, let this cup pass from me,” but he kept his eye on the prize, which was feeling loved by God, which is new life. And he let people he loved keep him company in his suffering, which is about as radical a concept as I can imagine. I don’t want people’s company when I have the flu or PMS. But when friends of mine have opened up to this willingness to have companionship at the end of their lives, or when they were losing or had lost a child, which may be the same thing, at some point they found themselves involved with material that enabled them to hook onto something bigger than the grasping, crying “I.” They plugged in to all of life that surrounds us, that shimmers with loss and light and movement, the very broth of creation, the salty, the sweet, what’s real, the light and the shadows, the blackness, the cold, the streams of warmth, the plankton. I wish you didn’t have to feel so fucking stressed to do this, but you do, because you have to do it when you’re not acting. It happens when you’re raw, in grief and withdrawal, when you have to shut down into the depths so entirely. Catastrophe puts us in the situation of thinking, “This is so shitty and I hate this so much, but if I hang out here without armor or drugs or my old patterns, being here will shine a dark light onto the garish distracting stuff, and then past it, to what is maybe true.” Being at the end of your rope is usually what it takes to convince your ego — your little armed Brinks guard — to say, “Hey! We can throw all this shit off the side of the boat! We’ll be fine.” And nothing in you is going to believe this for a second, which is why it can be a gift to be in crisis. The stuff gets thrown overboard, and you come to with that having happened. You come to. This is the Easter message, that awakening is possible, to the goodness of God, the sacredness of human life, the sisterhood and brotherhood of all. So in this fickle spring weather, when it feels like life is trying out all of its muscles, with the cold winds, the feverish blossomings, maybe you’ll find that it wakes us up to exhilaration and discomfort, makes us more aware than usual that we’re alive; that grace abounds and that we can cooperate with that.

THINK ABOUT IT Ask students to take a moment to consider the importance of tone and approach in making an argument for

anything which requires you to simply “have faith.” Do they think Anne Lamott’s words would be comforting to Becca? Why or why not? How is Lamott’s message different from that of the “God people” found in Rabbit Hole?

WRITE ABOUT IT

Ask students to think about something in which they have faith – it need not be related to religion or spirituality. Have them write an essay defending or reflecting on that faith and discussing how and why that faith brings

comfort. Students should be aware of the tone of their piece – could it win opponents to their way of thinking?

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AN ENLIGHTENED GRIEF? – SEARCHING FOR PERSPECTIVE Baba Ram Dass is the name taken by the American-born Hindu spiritual leader Dr. Richard Alpert. A former Harvard professor, Dass traveled to India in 1967 where, with the guidance of Shri Neem Karoli Baba (better know to Westerners as Maharajji), he studied yoga and non-violence among other tenets of Hinduism. He returned to the US in 1969 and continues to spread his message of spiritual harmony to this day. Below is an excerpt from his book Still Here: Embracing Aging, Changing, and Dying exploring the concept of grief. from Still Here: Embracing Aging, Changing, and Dying by Baba Ram Dass, 2000 The older we get, the more we lose; this is the law of impermanence. We lose loved ones, cherished dreams, physical strength, work, and relationships. Often, it seems like loss upon loss. All these losses bring up enormous grief that we must be prepared to embrace completely, if we are to live with open hearts. Over the years, in working with people who are grieving, I’ve encouraged them first of all to surrender to the experience of their pain. To counteract our natural tendency to turn away from pain, we open to it as fully as possible and allow our hearts to break. We must take enough time to remember our losses — be they friends or loved ones passed away, the death of long-held hopes or dreams, the loss of homes, careers, or countries, or health we may never get back again. Rather than close ourselves to grief, it helps to realize that we only grieve for what we love. In allowing ourselves to grieve, we learn that the process is not cut and dried. It’s more like a spiral that brings us to a place of release, abates for a time, then continues on a deeper level. Often, when grieving, we think that it’s over, only to find ourselves swept away by another wave of intense feeling. For this reason, it’s important to be patient with the process, and not to be in a hurry to put our grief behind us. While the crisis stage of grief does pass in its own time — and each person’s grief has its own timetable — deep feelings don’t disappear completely. But ultimately you come to the truth of the adage that “love is stronger than death.” I once met with a girl whose boyfriend was killed in Central America. She was grieving and it was paralyzing her life. I characterized it for her this way. “Let’s say you’re in ‘wise-woman training.’” If she’s in wise-woman training, everything in her life must be grist for the mill.

ACTIVITY Keeping the Faith

Using a research-based approach, have students investigate the tenets of major world faiths in the face of grief and loss. Either individually or in small groups, students will choose one of the following belief systems: Christianity [which can be broken into Catholicism and Protestantism (feel free to divide this category even further into Presbyterian, Lutheran, etc)] Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Taoism, Buddhism, Agnosticism, and

Atheism. Ask each group to answer the following about their assigned belief system: What does this system say specifically about death? What happens to us when we die? Is there an afterlife construct in this system? If so, how is it described? What does this system say specifically about grief or grieving?

Have students present their findings in either a research paper or presentation. In either case, images should

be used to help convey what they’ve discovered.

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GRIEVING RESPONSIBLY Is it possible to be irresponsible – even disrespectful – in your grieving process? Garret Keizer thinks so, and sees a great deal of irresponsibility in the grief displayed by the U.S. government in the years following 9/11. edited from “Grief and Grievance” by Garret Keizer: The Christian Century, May 17, 2003 …Some of this change of attitude comes from my years as a high school teacher. I dreaded those inevitable tragedies that struck our school community—student suicides and fatal car wrecks—not only for the heartbreaking loss of young life, but also for the disheartening spectacle of sentimentality and recklessness that followed in their wake. Of course, one can excuse some excess in these cases, if it can even be called excess. After all, the death of a young person is far in excess of the normal bereavement we mortals must expect. These poor kids were just beginning to deal with emotions that can send the strongest of us reeling. Nevertheless, through the course of repeated tragedy, I came to identify a certain pathology, laid bare in the unsophisticated grieving of adolescents but by no means absent in the behavior of adults. These were the most notable symptoms:

a spirit of competition, in which mourners vied with one another in ostentatious displays of grief, some going so far as to insinuate that those persons less demonstrative than themselves weren’t really sorry.

a tendency to take offense at every turn, a sort of McCarthyistic morbidity that saw disrespect for the dead in the most innocuous words and gestures

a shameless appropriation of the tragedy as an excuse to advance the most self-serving agendas (“With Stacey dead, I’ll never be able to face homework again”).

a complete disavowal of free will, expressed alternately in a fatalistic view of the tragedy (i.e., Stacey’s drunk-driving accident was “meant to happen”) and in a sacrosanct priority given to the supposed wishes of the dead (“It’s what Stacey would have wanted”).

It is the last of these, as witnessed not only in school life but in … national life too, that has led me to conclude that of all forms of oppression, rich over poor, white over black, male over female, perhaps none is so insidious or so deserving of defiance as the tyranny of the dead over the living. Not that the dead should never have a vote, only that they should never be given a veto. … I left classroom teaching some seven years ago, but ever since the events of September 11, 2001, I have had the impression that I’m back in high school once again. All those characteristics I mentioned above—the competitive mourning, the absurd blaming, the use of mourning to mask self-interest, and above all the sentimental overruling of thought—are out in force. We grieve; therefore we are above reproach. We are under orders from the dead; therefore we may not be questioned. This is not to say that I’ve stood dry-eyed on the sidelines of those grievous events, no more than I stood dry-eyed at the funeral of some young person who had sat just the day before in my classroom. It is only to say that among the mourners I have felt that familiar teacher’s worry and whispered that old teacher’s prayer: “Dear God, please just keep the rest of them from doing something dangerous and stupid.” With the war and occupation in Iraq, “dangerous and stupid” are upon us. In the name of the dead, we have passed an unconscionable (and unprovoked) death sentence on untold numbers of the living. Like mourners rending their garments, we have torn asunder our civil liberties, the rule of international law and the self-respect befitting a people who make war only in self-defense. Greed is at the root of this, we say. And fear and the lust for revenge. …

TALK ABOUT IT Have students look at Izzy’s assertion that she is still coping with Danny’s death in the first scene.

Becca accuses her of using Danny as an excuse for her own bad behavior. Many US citizens have accused President Bush of taking advantage of our grief as a nation following 9/11 to advance his own agenda in the

Middle East. What changes in thinking about the grieving process when you’re dealing with a group instead of an individual? What is the difference between showing support and creating hysteria? Where is the line between

grieving and manipulating a situation for your own benefit?

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POETIC GRIEF Constructive outlets for grief are often an indispensable part of the grieving process. Creating or immersing oneself in poetry, literature, art, or music can be a healthy alternative to finding solace in drugs, alcohol, or other self-destructive behavior. In the next several pages, we’ll explore the fruits of others’ grief across several mediums.

Talking to Grief by Denise Levertov Ah, Grief, I should not treat you like a homeless dog who comes to the back door for a crust, for a meatless bone. I should trust you. I should coax you into the house and give you your own corner, a worn mat to lie on, your own water dish. You think I don’t know you’ve been living under my porch. You long for your real place to be readied before winter comes. You need your name, your collar and tag. You need the right to warn off intruders, to consider my house your own and me your person and yourself my own dog.

In The Third Month By David Ray First snow wet against the windshield. I drive by the storefront where we found his blue Toyota. How he loved that car – put fur upon the dashboard to cover cracks – then he and his girl devotedly stretched leather across the back seat making a love nest. And they went out to Western Auto and bought a little fan, the kind bus drivers use, and mounted it to blow down up on them when they made love, parked by a roadside or perhaps in one of those shadowed drive-ins. It’s a weekend and I’m about my errands, Bach’s Sleepers Awake on FM. The tears pour down as I think how much he wanted to be a man, simply a man with his woman and his car, later his fireside books, those I still have, saved too long to pass on – The Way of All Flesh, A Shropshire Lad, Don Quixote, and one stamped in gold but with all pages blank. The bustle in a house By Emily Dickinson The bustle in a house The morning after death Is solemnest of industries Enacted upon earth,— The sweeping up the heart, And putting love away We shall not want to use again Until eternity

ACTIVITY Coaxing the Muse

Choose a specific form of poetry – haiku, sonnet, limerick, ode, prose poem, etc. – and have students write about a personal loss they have experienced using that form. The loss need not be a death – it can be as small or large

as they’re comfortable with. Have students speak about the events surrounding the loss, to the entity or circumstance that caused the loss, or to what was lost itself.

Next, have them imagine that instead of her literature course, Becca has enrolled in a poetry class and must

compose a poem about the worst day of her life. Using either the same or a different form of poetry, complete Becca’s poetry class assignment.

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LITERARY GRIEF The following short story explores the adjustments to a new normalcy endured by grieving parents. “In the White Night” by Anne Beattie: Where You’ll Find Me and Other Stories, January 2002 “Don’t think about a cow,” Matt Brinkley said. “Don’t think about a river, don’t think about a car, don’t think about snow. . .” Matt was standing in the doorway, hollering after his guests. His wife, Gaye, gripped his arm and tried to tug him back into the house. The party was over. Carol and Vernon turned to wave goodbye, calling back their thanks, whispering to each other to be careful. The steps were slick with snow; an icy snow had been falling for hours, frozen granules mixed in with lighter stuff, and the instant they moved out from under the protection of the Brinkleys’ porch the cold froze the smiles on their faces. The swirls of snow blowing against Carol’s skin reminded her—an odd thing to remember on a night like this—of the way sand blew up at the beach, and the scratchy pain it caused. “Don’t think about an apple!” Mall hollered. Vernon turned his head, but he was left smiling at a closed door. In the small, bright areas under the streetlights, there seemed for a second to be some logic to all the swirling snow. If time itself could only freeze, the snowflakes could become the lacy filigree of a valentine. Carol frowned. Why had Matt conjured up the image of an apple? Now she saw an apple where there was no apple, suspended in midair, transforming the scene in front of her into a silly surrealist painting. It was going to snow all night. They had heard that on the radio, driving to the Brinkleys’. The Don’t-Think-About-Whatever game had started as a joke, something long in the telling and startling to Vernon, to judge by his expression as Matt went on and on. When Carol crossed the room near midnight to tell Vernon that they should leave, Matt had quickly whispered the rest of his joke or story—whatever he was saying—into Vernon’s ear, all in a rush. They looked like two children, the one whispering madly and the other with his head bent, but something about the inclination of Vernon’s head let you know that if you bent low enough to see, there would be a big, wide grin on his face. Vernon and Carol’s daughter, Sharon, and Matt and Gaye’s daughter, Becky, had sat side by side, or kneecap to kneecap, and whispered that way when they were children—a privacy so rushed that it obliterated anything else. Carol, remembering that scene now, could not think of what passed between Sharon and Becky without thinking of sexual intimacy. Becky, it turned out, had given the Brinkleys a lot of trouble. She had run away from home when she was thirteen, and, in a family-counseling session years later, her parents found out that she had had an abortion at fifteen. More recently, she had flunked out of college. Now she was working in a bank in Boston and taking a night-school course in poetry. Poetry or pottery? The apple that reappeared as windshield wipers slushed snow off the glass metamorphosed for Carol into a red bowl, then again became an apple, which grew rounder as the car came to a stop at the intersection. She had been weary all day. Anxiety always made her tired. She knew the party would be small (the Brinkleys’ friend Mr. Graham had just had his book accepted for publication, and of course much of the evening would be spent talking about that); she had feared that it was going to be a strain for all of them. The Brinkleys had just returned from the Midwest, where they had gone for Gaye’s father’s funeral. It didn’t seem a time to carry through with plans for a party. Carol imagined that not canceling it had been Matt’s idea, not Gaye’s. She turned toward Vernon now and asked how the Brinkleys had seemed to him. Fine, he said at once. Before he spoke, she knew how he would answer. If people did not argue in front of their friends, they were not having problems; if they did not stumble into walls, they were not drunk. Vernon tried hard to think positively, but he was never impervious to real pain. His reflex was to turn aside something serious with a joke, but he was just as quick to wipe the smile off his face and suddenly put his arm around a person’s shoulder. Unlike Matt, he was a warm person, but when people unexpectedly showed him affection it embarrassed him. The same counselor the Brinkleys had seen had told Carol—Vernon refused to

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see the man, and she found that she did not want to continue without him—that it was possible that Vernon felt uncomfortable with expressions of kindness because he blamed himself for Sharon’s death: he couldn’t save her, and when people were kind to him now he felt it was undeserved. But Vernon was the last person who should be punished. She remembered him in the hospital, pretending to misunderstand Sharon when she asked for her barrette, on her bedside table, and picking it up and clipping the little yellow duck into the hair above his own ear. He kept trying to tickle a smile out of her—touching some stuffed animal’s button nose to the tip of her nose and then tapping it on her earlobe. At the moment when Sharon died, Vernon had been sitting on her bed (Carol was backed up against the door, for some reason), surrounded by a battlefield of pastel animals. They passed safely through the last intersection before their house. The car didn’t skid until they turned onto their street. Carol’s heart thumped hard, once, in the second when she felt the car becoming light, but they came out of the skid easily. He had been driving carefully, and she said nothing, wanting to appear casual about the moment. She asked if Matt had mentioned Becky. No, Vernon said, and he hadn’t wanted to bring up a sore subject. Gaye and Matt had been married for twenty-five years; Carol and Vernon had been married twenty-two. Sometimes Vernon said, quite sincerely, that Matt and Gaye were their alter egos who absorbed and enacted crises, saving the two of them from having to experience such chaos. It frightened Carol to think that some part of him believed that. Who could really believe that there was some way to find protection in this world—or someone who could offer it? What happened happened at random, and one horrible thing hardly precluded the possibility of others happening next. There had been that fancy internist who hospitalized Vernon later in the same spring when Sharon died, and who looked up at him while drawing blood and observed almost offhandedly that it would be an unbearable irony if Vernon also had leukemia. When the test results came back, they showed that Vernon had mononucleosis. There was the time when the Christmas tree caught fire, and she rushed toward the flames, clapping her hands like cymbals, and Vernon pulled her away just in time, before the whole tree became a torch, and she with it. When Hobo, their dog, had to be put to sleep during their vacation in Maine, that awful woman veterinarian, with her cold green eyes, issued the casual death sentence with one manicured hand on the quivering dog’s fur and called him “Bobo,” as though their dog were like some circus clown. “Are you crying?” Vernon said. They were inside their house now, in the hallway, and he had just turned toward her, holding out a pink padded coat hanger. “No,” she said. “The wind out there is fierce.” She slipped her jacket onto the hanger he held out and went into the downstairs bathroom, where she buried her face in a towel. Eventually, she looked at herself in the mirror. She had pressed the towel hard against her eyes, and for a few seconds she had to blink herself into focus. She was reminded of the kind of camera they had had when Sharon was young. There were two images when you looked through the finder, and you had to make the adjustment yourself so that one superimposed itself upon the other and the figure suddenly leaped into clarity. She patted the towel to her eyes again and held her breath. If she couldn’t stop crying, Vernon would make love to her. When she was very sad, he sensed that his instinctive optimism wouldn’t work; he became tongue-tied, and when he couldn’t talk he would reach for her. Through the years, he had knocked over wineglasses shooting his hand across the table to grab hers. She had found herself suddenly hugged from behind in the bathroom; he would even follow her in there if he suspected that she was going to cry—walk in to grab her without even having bothered to knock. She opened the door now and turned toward the hall staircase, and then realized—felt it before she saw it, really—that the light was on in the living room. Vernon lay stretched out on the sofa with his legs crossed; one foot was planted on the floor and his top foot dangled in the air. Even when he was exhausted, he was always careful not to let his shoes touch the sofa.

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He was very tall, and couldn’t stretch out on the sofa without resting his head on the arm. For some reason, he had not hung up her jacket. It was spread like a tent over his head and shoulders, rising and falling with his breathing. She stood still long enough to be sure that he was really asleep, and then came into the room. The sofa was too narrow to curl up on with him. She didn’t want to wake him. Neither did she want to go to bed alone. She went back to the hall closet and took out his overcoat—the long, elegant camel hair coat he had not worn tonight because he thought it might snow. She slipped off her shoes and went quietly over to where he lay and stretched out on the floor beside the sofa, pulling the big blanket of the coat up high, until the collar touched her lips. Then she drew her legs up into the warmth. Such odd things happened. Very few days were like the ones before. Here they were, in their own house with four bedrooms, ready to sleep in this peculiar double-decker fashion, in the largest coldest room of all. What would anyone think? She knew the answer to that question, of course. Anyone who didn’t know them would mistake this for drunken collapse, but anyone who was a friend would understand exactly. In time, both of them had learned to stop passing judgment on how they coped with the inevitable sadness that set in, always unexpectedly but so real that it was met with the instant acceptance one gave to a snowfall. In the white night world outside, their daughter might be drifting past like an angel, and she would see this tableau, for the second that she hovered, as a necessary small adjustment.

ACTIVITY Writing from Pictures

Ask students to choose a memory – not necessarily one associated with grief or loss – that is a very clear picture in their heads. Using this memory picture as a starting place, have them write a short story

expanding from the image. It can either be an account of what lead to that moment, what happened afterwards, or even a completely fictional story based on those circumstances.

Students should try to employ at least one of the following literary devices: simile, metaphor, or

personification. Extra points if you can include all three!

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MUSICAL GRIEF Themes of loss and longing are prevalent in contemporary music. The feeling of solace often inspired by a song that seems to be “telling your story” can help to ease the pain of loss – whether the loss of a lover due to the end of a relationship, or the loss of a loved one through death. Tears in Heaven By Eric Clapton & Will Jennings Recorded by Eric Clapton Would you know my name if I saw you in heaven? Would it be the same if I saw you in heaven? I must be strong and carry on. 'Cause I know I don't belong here in heaven. Would you hold my hand if I saw you in heaven? Would you help me stand if I saw you in heaven? I'll find my way through night and day 'Cause I know I just can't stay here in heaven. Time can bring you down, time can bend your knees. Time can break your heart, have you beggin' please beggin' please. And I know there'll be no more tears in heaven. The Dance By Tony Arata Recorded by Garth Brooks Looking back on the memory of The dance we shared 'neath the stars alone For a moment all the world was right How could I have known that you'd ever say goodbye And now I'm glad I didn't know The way it all would end the way it all would go Our lives are better left to chance I could have

missed the pain But I'd have had to miss the dance Holding you I held everything For a moment wasn't I a king But if I'd only known how the king would fall Hey who's to say? You know I might have chanced it

all Yes my life is better left to chance I could have missed the pain but I'd have had to miss the dance

Mama’s Just a Little Girl (excerpt) Written & Performed by Tupac Shakur She was... Born a heavy set girl with pig tails and curls A heart full of gold Still it won't change the world Though she could never understand why Some underhanded plans, witnessed a man die Was only 15 Should have been a beauty queen Still see her crying by the caskets when her parents

got killed Little girl don't cry 'Coz even though they died You can best believe they watching over thee from

the sky Never asked for this misery But look at what you gettin' It's a blessing in disguise When you find out you’re pregnant No money, no home And even though you all alone You'se got to do this on your own So baby go on I wish you luck And if you need me, call Just come to me and let me feed you all I can understand The way it feels when you fighting the world Facing all this drama When mama's just a little girl

ACTIVITY Something to Sing About

Ask students to choose one song that has helped them through a difficult time. The size or type of difficulty faced is irrelevant. Ask students to share the song with the class and explain how the song is comforting to them – is it because of the lyrics,

the melody, or something else entirely?

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VISUAL GRIEF Visual art is replete with representations of grief, from paintings to photography to sculpture. Here are only a few examples.

Artist Kathleen Crocetti’s Abstract Measure of Grief counting lives lost in Iraq

ACTIVITY When the Words Don’t Work: Expressing Grief Visually

Ask students to bring in a visual representation of grief and share it with the rest of the class. The piece can be a photograph, a sketch, a painting, or sculpture, can be realistic or abstract, and should be something that speaks

to the student and his or her individual conception of grief.

After exploring other peoples’ methods of expressing grief, ask students to create their own pieces of visual art, in any medium, exploring grief. Create a gallery in your classroom for displaying students’ work.

John Stanhope’s Patience on a Monument Smiling at Grief

Figure of Grief at the tomb of Pierre Gareau by Francis Milhomme

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OTHER VISUAL REPRESENTATIONS OF GRIEF

Constructed by family and friends of those who died, roadside memorials are often constructed to signify the site of a fatal accident. Responding to 9/11, a group asks those in power to remember

the difference between responsible & irresponsible grief.

The official memorial to the Oklahoma City federal building bombing in 1995 features a vacant chair for each person killed and a still pool where the building once stood.

Thousands of people brought flowers to the gates of Kensington Palace in response to the tragic death of Britain’s Princess Diana.

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PARENTS AND GRIEF – SURVIVING THE UNTHINKABLE Many have described the loss of a child, especially a young child, as “unnatural” and “against the natural order.” Below we explore the realities of mothers – and then of fathers - forced to endure the same aberrant grief explored in Rabbit Hole. “It takes one to know one” by Sarah Hartmann: www.salon.com, January 15, 2002. A mother who has lost a child is an ally in the hellish war against all-consuming grief. "How could you not have known?" she hissed at me through clenched teeth. "Everyone here knew." Tears sparked by accusation and injury rolled down her cheeks. She had delivered her child stillborn; her grief remained very much alive. Though I tried to tell her that the news of her loss had not reached me, she was having none of it. To her, my innocent inquiry about the new baby was a dagger purposefully flung at her heart, and nothing I could do or say would change that. She shrank from the arm I tried to place around her shoulder and turned her back on my apologies. I had breached a delicate threshold by mentioning what she could not bear, what I could not possibly understand. It was wrenching to be the source of this relapse into misery; even worse was the irony that lay in it all. I, too, had lost a child. This spring will mark the seventh anniversary of his death, which, even by the most callous standards, was a miserably prolonged one. I stopped recounting the story in any detail maybe three years ago, when I realized that the tragedy had finally passed through me, and I was free to move on. But now here was this woman, ripe with her loss and sense of entitlement to express it, and suddenly I was back where I started. Grief is relentless. Like a harpy, it pursues you madly during your waking moments so that by day's end you are more than ready for sleep. But when you wake to face the next 24 hours, you find nothing has changed. The same unspeakable sadness returns; the same vise grabs hold of your heart. With no other thought than making it through the next task without falling apart, you go about the tedium of living, of doing laundry or making lunch or buying groceries. And you almost succeed, until you see some mother balancing her baby on a cocked hip as she tosses a box of cereal into her cart, and you realize all over again how horribly you have been cheated. "It's not fair! Why me, why my child?" you want to scream. But if you're smart, you'll do so in private. Outsiders, believe me, do not get it. This is a fact I learned quickly in the intensive care unit where my son spent the majority of his life. Families and friends were infrequent visitors there, not because they didn't care but because children dying and parents grieving the loss were just too hard to watch. And who could blame them? Who in his right mind wanted to see broken, damaged children connected to respirators and heart monitors? How was anyone supposed to make sense of genetically defective babies, whose sole purpose in being born, it seemed, was to wither and die? How were they supposed to respond to partially drowned toddlers, whose futures would be played out in pediatric nursing homes? And who could honestly be expected to fathom the grand inequity of youngsters who, having beaten the odds of one illness, were then cursed to battle another? For seven months, I watched parents, mothers in particular, mired in their misery, try to cope with the senselessness and waste of it all. And while one or two beat their breasts in loud desperation to anyone who would listen, the vast majority pulled their grief around them like a privacy screen and traveled the territory more quietly. Every now and then, however, something that resembled conversation would spring up between two of these women. It was a peculiar verbal shorthand that seldom settled on the obvious. In it they might mention attending a family party out of duty and leaving abruptly, or viewing a garden of bright yellow daffodils and feeling affronted, or walking the streets of a bad neighborhood thoroughly unafraid. In a landscape where every mother was losing a child, the subtext was simple: Your pain is my pain, and nothing else matters.

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Among these women there were no critiques of mothering styles or behavior, no judgments passed on any of the difficult decisions each woman had to make, no looking for sympathy, no room for private fury or any misplaced belief that one woman was any worse off than another. And in the practice of this code came the strength to handle the harpy. "I dreamed of Anna last night," I remember one mother telling me about the child that lay before her. Her baby daughter, who had fallen ill 11 months earlier, had been on the ward all that time, each day losing ground to a nameless disease that had left her empty and useless. "She was hiding there," continued Anna's mother, pointing to the shadowed space behind the heavy wooden door of the ward. "She called to me, 'Mommy, I have to go now.' I went out yesterday and bought a beautiful white dress for her funeral." "It will look perfect on her," I told her, and she smiled. Anna would be dead within the month. My son would die soon after, the only consolation for my husband and me being that he would do so at home. I could sense, as I stood gazing at Anna that day, that when this part was through, her mother and I would feel again. But first, our grief would roll over us and take us down. I would end up devoting quality time to the fetal position. I would drink too much, fight with my husband and call God a heartless abdicator. But I would never -- ever -- aim the arrow of my anguish at innocent outsiders. They just wouldn't get it.

THINK ABOUT IT Ask students the following questions: Is Becca’s a private or a public grief? Does she seek out others to tell about her loss or does she, as the woman in describes in this piece, pull her grief around her “like a privacy screen?” How does Becca’s experience of grief affect those around her? Find evidence in the text to support

your thoughts. “Fathers – The Forgotten Grievers”: www.athealth.com The death of a child is probably the most traumatic and devastating experience a couple can face. Although both mothers and fathers grieve deeply when such a tragedy occurs, they grieve differently, and it is most important that each partner give the other permission to grieve as he/she needs. This may be the greatest gift each can give the other. Parental grief is strongly influenced by the nature of the bond between child and parent. Bereavement specialists actually speak of "incongruent grieving" patterns in mothers and fathers and of differences in the timing and intensity of the parental bond for mothers and fathers. For the mother, the bond is usually more immediate and demonstrable, more intense at the beginning of life, more emotionally and physically intimate. The mother's bond with the baby is usually tightly forged from the moment of conception and continues through the pregnancy, the birth, and the nursing process. The maternal bond involves the present and the baby's immediate needs, while the father's bond with the baby more often concerns the future and dreams and expectations for the child. Today, however, many fathers are forging earlier and more intense prenatal bonds with their babies. Fathers also are often present in the delivery room for the birth. Some fathers become direct caregivers of the newborn, developing early and close bonds with their infants. Yet, still in many cases, "the father's emotional investment in parenting tends to occur later and less intensely than the mother's. This has implications for the way parents grieve" (Cordell and Thomas 1990, 75).

When is it my turn to cry? I'm not sure society or my upbringing will allow me a time to really cry, unafraid of the reaction and repercussion that might follow. I must be strong, I must support my wife

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because I am a man. I must be the cornerstone of our family because society says so, my family says so, and, until I can reverse my learned nature, I say so. - A FATHER, IN DEFRAIN ET AL. 1991, 112

In spite of the trend towards earlier bonding between fathers and babies, the influence of cultural expectations about men and grief persists and is powerful. Typically, the societal view of parental loss is not the same for the father as the mother. Most of the literature on parental bereavement still tends to focus on the mother's grief. Often, men are not acknowledged as experiencing grief; or more importantly, men are not taught that it's necessary to grieve and are discouraged from demonstrating signs of grief openly. Bereaved fathers frequently feel that they are the forgotten mourners and are often referred to as "second class grievers" (Horchler and Morris 1994, 72). Fathers are expected to be strong for their partners, to be the "rock" in the family. All too often fathers are considered to be the ones who should attend to the practical but not the emotional aspects surrounding the death; they are expected to be the ones who should not let emotions show or tears fall outwardly, the ones who will not and should not fall apart. Men are often asked how their wives are doing, but not asked how they are doing. Such expectations place an unmanageable burden on men and deprive them of their rightful and urgent need to grieve. This need will surface eventually if it is not expressed. It is not unusual for grieving fathers to feel overwhelmed, ignored, isolated, and abandoned as they try to continue to be caregivers and breadwinners for their families while their hearts are breaking. "Fathers' feelings [often] stay hidden under layers of responsibility and grim determination" (Staudacher 1991, 124). Bereaved fathers often say that such strong emotions are very difficult to contain after their child's death. Fathers often fear that they will erupt like volcanoes if they allow themselves to release these feelings and so, too often, fathers try to bury their pain with the child who died. It is most important that a father's grief be verbalized and understood by his partner, other family members, professionals, coworkers, friends, and by anyone who will listen. Fathers need to try to free themselves of stereotypes and societal expectations about men and grief; they must be able to tell others that their grief is all they have from their child's brief life. Fathers repeatedly say that for their own peace of mind, they (and those who care about them) need to move away from this mind set and allow them to grieve as they are entitled.

In too many instances, fathers' responses to infant loss tend to coincide with how they believe they should act as men, rather than how they need to act to confront and resolve [their own] grief. - CORDELL AND THOMAS 1990, 75

THINK ABOUT IT

Have students think about these questions. How is Howie’s experience of grief over Danny’s death different from Becca’s? Do you think that he feels that his grief is not being given the amount of respect it deserves? Why or why not? Do you think he would agree or disagree with the idea that fathers are considered “second

class grievers” Why or why not?

Ask students to take a look on the internet or at the local library and see if they can find any personal essays on bereavement written from the father’s perspective. Look specifically for things that have been published in print or on-line in reputable journals – avoid blog postings or on-line journal entries. They

may find it more difficult to locate an essay as openly emotional as “It takes one to know one” written from a male perspective. Why might that be?

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WHAT YOU HAVE INSTEAD OF YOUR CHILD Much like what Nat tells Becca about the pain of losing a child, the following essay explores the metamorphosis of motherhood when your child leaves you and you’re forced to keep on living. edited from “Dancing With Death” by Camille Peri: www.salon.com , May 5, 1999 The loss of a child leaves a hole in your heart that never heals. Rose opens her eyes and he is there -- his breath soft on her face, hollow little chest, eyes lit like half-moons in the night. When he was 4, nightmares of fire would send him bursting into their bed to wedge his body between hers and his father's. Now he is whispering to her to come and see the midnight stars. They stand outside, two tiny human figures under an enormous sky. Rose is shivering in her robe and slippers. Toby's feet are on the ground but his head is floating somewhere above, her 8-year-old guide through the galaxy. Rose opens her eyes again. He is not there. Toby, the eldest of her three sons, died eight years ago, but he comes back to her often in her dreams. A parent's worst nightmare. Now she wonders, Is that watching your child die or outliving him? For a while, it seemed that she was sentenced to live out the nightmare literally. Sleep would plunge her back into his early dreams of burning buildings and dizzying cliffs, and she would be helpless to save him. After a while, his dream-self got older. Now sometimes he is a young man, robust and healthy, as he was before cancer killed him at the age of 30. When she has these dreams, she knows it will probably be a good day. I met Rose when I was 24 in what now seems like another life. Nancy, a law student and dancer, had become my best friend and Toby my boyfriend when they each came out to San Francisco to start their adult lives. All of us were shedding childhood and convention, trying to figure out our places in the world; within the triangle of our friendship, I felt safe to be anything, to try out everything. Nancy and I were friends until her death from cancer four years ago, just after her 40th birthday. I thought Toby had left my life years before, when we split up and went on to marry others. Yet as he and Nancy were linked in my life, so were their deaths -- they died four years apart to the day. Each died within weeks of my sons' births -- no sooner was I flooded with the overwhelming instinct to protect my children than I was up against the jarring impossibility of doing that. Since then, I have been unable to separate them from my children -- I often see Toby in the eyes of my older son, Joey, and hear Nancy in the laughter of my younger son, Nat. For a long time, the lingering connection to my dead friends both fueled my love for my children and made me fearful. When my children were babies, I could avoid probing those feelings, but as they grew older and I started saving baby teeth or wisps of hair, trying to hang onto the parts of them that were slipping away, I could no longer ignore the proximity of loss. I began to think of Toby and Nancy not only as my friends, but as other mothers' children. And so this year, on the anniversary of their deaths, I found myself drawn to their mothers, and through them, back to my friends. … We are sitting in the den of their 350-year-old farmhouse in Connecticut. When I first came to this house almost 20 years ago, I thought she and Bob were the coolest parents I had ever met: Rose was a vivacious, 39-year-old mother of three sons -- Toby, Todd and Troy -- and still looked like a model in a bikini; Bob was an illustrator who was just breaking into fine art with a series of highly sensuous paintings of dancers. ... So much in this house is familiar -- the only thing new to me is the story of how he died. … Parents never completely stop feeling responsible for their children's health and safety; when a child dies, they still feel somehow to blame, no matter how old the child or what caused his death. For five years, Rose tells me, she reviewed Toby's life and found guilt in even the smallest details -- from whether she let him eat too much candy as a child to a family fight that was a turning point in his life. Toby had been out drinking with high school friends when he flipped his parents' Jeep. "Fortunately, no one was hurt, but Bob blew up," Rose recalls. "He said, 'After graduation you're out of here.' I think it was too soon -- he had just turned 18 and he wasn't ready. Intellectually, I know it didn't cause the cancer, but maybe it had some impact, weakened his immune system. Maybe I should have stood up to Bob more." …

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In the last century, when up to half of the babies born in the United States died in childhood and parents could lose all of their children in a single epidemic, it was a common practice to photograph the dead or dying. Most of the postmortem photos disappeared with the people who treasured them; some that remain, including many of children, are gathered in a collection called "Sleeping Beauty: Memorial Photography in America." They are strangely beautiful, reminders of an age when people looked more steadily at death because they had no choice. In some, the grieving mother cradles a dead child in her lap like a stiff little doll. In one sequence, a ball lies on a bed near the limp open hand of a dying boy; in the next picture, the child is dead. Many were the only photos ever taken of these children, and they were cherished -- hung in homes, worn in lockets, sent to relatives and friends. Bob did paint Toby. His work now hangs in their home: huge, grief-wreathed portraits of a young man whose gaze stays clear and serene while disease destroys his body. They are both beautiful and raw, filled with a palpable rage and tender, bereaved love. And for a year after Toby's death, they were almost all Bob could do. "When a woman loses a child, she loses her past, present and future," he says. "A man loses his future. Toby was an extension of me." The only way for Bob to reclaim him was through painting. "As long as I have pictures of somebody, I have them. I don't know that I could ever go back and do them now. I don't think I could do a realistic picture of his face anymore. But he's still there, in some way, in every painting I do." … I drove under an empty blue sky through the Massachusetts Berkshires to the home of Nancy's mother, Suzanne. "I've been planning to make a Nancy album," Suzanne says, carrying in a box of photos and notebooks as we sit down on the sofa. "But it was two years before I could look at these, and then I just put them in a box and couldn't touch it until today. And that's doing well for me." On the mantel is a kind of shrine to Nancy -- photos, candles, poetry and an old Christmas ornament, a pair of ballet slippers dangling on a pink ribbon. Each year on the anniversary of Nancy's death, Suzanne goes to a peace pagoda near her home in Amherst and sits by herself with a book of poetry. "But I try to focus on her birth more than her death. I know Nancy would prefer that." … A small child who is separated from his mother cannot comprehend the loss -- he still expects that she will respond to his cries. The child will look eagerly toward any sight or sound that may be his mother, using all his resources to recapture her any way he can. Psychologists call this behavior "searching." The mother is the center of the child's universe, and when the mother is gone, the child feels not only her loss, but lost himself. A mother who loses a child often does the same. No matter how expected a child's death is, the mother's hope for a miracle can become a physical prayer, so strong that it continues even after death. A child's absence is simply too unnatural; if the parent is alive, her mind insists that the child must be alive somewhere too. If the longing is strong enough, she may see the child or hear him moving about or calling to her. "For the first few years, I thought, Toby's just gone for a while. He'll be back," says Rose. The first time she saw him was on a stage in London, shortly after his death, when she was shooting photos of dancers in rehearsal. "The light was falling on his face and hair, but his body was partly hidden in the curtains," she recalls. "He was wearing his glasses, like he used to. My heart was pounding. I grabbed the telephoto lens to get a better look, but he was gone." Later, she found out it was the ballet's young composer. "But that used to happen a lot -- I'd see a young man and think it was him." Suzanne still remembers a phone call on the first anniversary of Nancy's death. "I picked up the phone and I heard Nancy's voice on the other end." The caller was her daughter Julie, but the feeling was so strong, Suzanne kept waiting for Nancy to return. "I thought maybe she couldn't be here for a while, maybe she was with Aaron," Suzanne says. "Then one day I was thinking about her and the wind chimes outside started ringing, although there was no breeze. And I knew it was Nancy. Now I feel her close to me from time to time. When I'm really in a bad place and I ask for her to come, she does." Suzanne talks to Nancy and also writes to her, filling up the pages in the journal that Nancy left incomplete. Her notes to her daughter are touchingly conversational -- about summer storms, Aaron's growth -- like the things they used to talk about, or a mother's letters to a daughter who is simply away for a while. …

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When mothers talk of a child's death, they say that the emotional pain becomes physical -- overwhelming and unendurable, like the pain of childbirth. But women seem wired to forget the pain of childbirth, while the pain of a child's death appears to be limitless. Researchers trying to ascertain the endpoints of grief have yet to determine if there is a limit to parents' mourning. Rose and Suzanne would say there is not. "It softens after about seven years," says Rose. "It never goes away." A woman carries a baby in her body and when that child dies, no matter how old he or she is, the mother feels that something has been cut out from inside her -- the loss is as profound and permanent as becoming a parent. I asked Rose and Suzanne how childbirth and child death changed their lives. "A woman named Elizabeth Stone wrote that having a child is 'to decide forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body,'" Suzanne says. "That's what becoming a parent is like. And now I've lost that piece of myself." Rose thinks back to Toby's birth. "I remember holding him when he was a newborn, being scared to death. Here was this tiny human being that I was responsible for, and the love and commitment is for life, even after he's married and has children. And when you lose that child, it takes a part of you out that never returns -- a part of your heart. A light goes out forever. You just learn to live with the loss." I looked at photos of my children a lot on that trip. I memorized Joey's skinny knees and the deep brown pools of his eyes; the kissable curve of Nat's chin and the sprinkling of cinnamon freckles across his nose. I devised my own waltz with mortality. I will become the perfect mother, I thought, I will write down every deed and phrase. At home, Joey hugged me with his ever-ready love and said, "I felt empty when you were gone." Nat held back, needing to know that I was not going to disappear again. The next day, when I was untangling a hopelessly knotted shirt that he was trying to get over his head, he burst out, "I love you, Mom," and threw his arms around me. But the problem with trying to live every day as if your children could die is that life gets in the way. Dishes pile up, homework needs to get done, bills must be paid. Work pressures rise, children misbehave. A few weeks later, Joey and I were at the grocery store. We were on our way to Disneyland and had a cart bulging with chips and SnackPack cereals, and he was whining for a 25-cent toy in the gum machines. Suddenly, that toy became a point of honor, all that stood between me and spoiling him rotten. Oblivious to my tough-love stance, the checker reached into her pocket and gave him a quarter. "How can you resist those big brown eyes?" she cooed. I shot Joey a look and he made the weakest possible effort to refuse her money, then ran off to the machine before she could finish insisting that he take it. The checker looked at me softly. "I know, it's not good to spoil them," she said. "But I lost my son when he was 11, so let me spoil him just a little."

THINK ABOUT IT Have students examine this excerpt from Nat’s perspective and respond to these questions: Do you think she

would find any comfort in the experiences of these mothers? Why or why not? Do you think an essay like this one might help Becca communicate with her mom or at least begin to better understand her experience?

Why or why not?

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WAGING THE MOMMY WARS A brief allusion to Sotheby’s in the text of Rabbit Hole tells us that the decision to become a full-time mom took Becca off a presumably successful career track and onto the “mommy track.” Since the hard-fought victories of feminists and the explosion of women in the work force in the 1980’s, there has been a seemingly endless debate over the true “place” of the modern, liberated woman. The piece below notes that while the articles may have more recent dates of publication, the arguments remain largely the same as ever. This article synthesizes a handful of calls and responses that emerged late 2003/early 2004 and is included here as a sum-up of some current perspectives on this still hot-button topic. “Opting Out: the press discovers the mommy wards, again.” by Cathy Young: Reason Magazine, June 2004 Ever since the rise of the modern women's movement in the 1960s, two genres of "trend" stories have periodically appeared in the media: stories about women advancing into new, nontraditional roles, and stories about women going back to traditional roles. Far from following a progress-backlash pattern, these stories often coexist, though perhaps not too happily, side by side. The latest trend story involves professional women "opting out" of the career track to raise children. In October 2003, The New York Times Magazine ran an article by Lisa Belkin, "The Opt-Out Revolution," that examined the phenomenon of highly educated, successful women giving up or curtailing their careers. Pointing to several well-known women who had left top-level leadership positions to spend more time with their families -- among them Karen Hughes, a former adviser to President Bush, and Brenda Barnes, a former president of Pepsi-Cola North America -- Belkin wrote: "Why don't women run the world? Maybe it's because they don't want to." Several months later, the cover of Time magazine offered "The Case for Staying Home: Why More Young Moms Are Opting Out of the Rat Race." It's amusing to see the "opting out" trend treated as news, considering that the story has been around for the last 25 years or so -- that is, for as long as women have been on the career track in significant numbers. In the 1980s, articles about career women "bailing out" famously raised the hackles of Susan Faludi, author of the 1991 bestseller, Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women. Today the topic continues to stir controversy. A critique of "The Opt-Out Revolution" in Salon elicited letters slamming Belkin's article as "clueless," "horrifyingly retro," "dangerous and almost misogynistic." You'd think Belkin had suggested repealing women's right to vote. Indeed, the syndicated columnist Bonnie Erbe invoked this very parallel: "This is hardly the first time some women with particular...agendas have tried to turn back decades of advancement forged by other women," she wrote, pointing to the anti-suffragist women who scoffed at the 19th Amendment. Meanwhile, at the other end of the spectrum, the conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly gleefully touted Belkin's story as evidence that feminism had been "mugged by reality." Does the "opting out" trend really exist? Erbe asserts that Belkin's claims are based on shaky data: The finding that only 38 percent of women who graduated from Harvard Business School in 1981, 1985, and 1991 now work full-time came from a survey with a very low response rate. But clearly, many professional women scale back or give up their careers for family reasons -- and there is some evidence that more women than before are making this choice. Catalyst, a respected research and consulting group focusing on women in business, reports that one in three women with MBA degrees are not working full-time (compared to just 5 percent of the men). According to the Census Bureau, 36 percent of women with college degrees who'd had a child in the previous year were staying home in 2002, up from 32 percent in 1995. Overall, the work force participation of married women with children under 6 slipped from an all-time high of 63.7 percent in 1998 to 62.5 percent in 2001.

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This hardly amounts to a "revolution." It's not even necessarily a steady trend. But these numbers don't tell the whole story either. Many mothers who are in the labor force are employed part-time or are self-employed, and still others who work full-time don't pursue promotions. Belkin herself left the Times newsroom, giving up the chance for a top editorial slot, to work as a home-based writer. It's an open secret that child rearing is a major factor in the so-called glass ceiling. Thus, the American Bar Association's 1995 report on women in the legal profession, which pointed to the low numbers of female partners in big law firms as solid proof of discrimination, also acknowledged that women "often base their choice of work environments on how their environment can accommodate their personal needs," including family life. Blaming the lack of family-friendly policies hardly resolves the dilemma: In European countries such as Sweden, family-friendly policies often keep women on the mommy track. In the March 2004 issue of the left-of-center magazine The American Prospect, Margaret Morganroth Gullette, a women's studies scholar at Brandeis University, issues a numbingly familiar battle cry for a "vast radical and feminist agenda" including "affordable, high-quality child-care and after-school programs, run by well-paid and well-trained and caring teachers." But as the psychologist Daphne De Marneffe -- no conservative -- argues in her new book, Maternal Desire: On Children, Love, and the Inner Life, the day care solution ignores "the value people place on caring for their own children, and their desire to do it themselves if they can." One could argue that child rearing should be shared equally between the sexes. Perhaps some day it will be; we have already made strides in that direction. In a 2000 Harris poll, more than four-fifths of men in their 20s and 30s said that a work schedule that allowed for family time was more important to them than a challenging or high-paying job. Yet for the time being, most women and men, even those with egalitarian ideals, seem comfortable with a certain degree of traditionalism in family roles. These unliberated tendencies irritate some feminists to the point of recklessness. In The American Prospect, Gullette concludes her article with a warning to straight young women who want marriage and children: "Until the revolution comes, they would do well to be a little wary." Most young women today, having grown up with the assumption of equality, are largely free from guilt about letting feminism down if they leave the fast track. This is probably one reason more women are putting family before career. Another factor may be that for the younger generation, flexibility is normal. The old, linear "male" model of corporate success -- defined as a steady climb from an entry-level position to the highest status one reaches before retirement -- has changed, and not just for women. In its place, there is a rich variety of paths that include self-employment, entrepreneurship, and midlife career changes. Women who move in and out of the workforce, or find creative ways to balance work and child rearing, are very much a part of this larger revolution. The "unfinished revolution" in family roles poses its share of problems. The equilibrium it creates between the sexes is an uneasy one. Currently, women have more freedom than men in choosing whether and how much to work, but they also bear the burden of grappling with those decisions. The "mommy wars" are likely to persist as well: It's difficult to vindicate stay-at-home motherhood without suggesting that working mothers are neglecting their children, or to vindicate working mothers without making stay-at-home mothers feel that their role is not essential. Still, flexibility and freedom are vastly better than the alternatives. By and large, for the new generation of parents, rigid division of gender roles is obsolete -- and so is the stark dichotomy of Superwoman vs. Supermom. That's a good start.

ACTIVITY Becca’s Pros & Cons

Becca left a professional life in order to be a full-time mom for Danny. Now that he’s gone, how should she move forward? Have students make list from Becca’s perspective of the pros and cons involved in returning to the workforce. What are their findings? What would your students do in her place? Discuss as a class.

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AMERICAN ROYALTY – EXAMINING THE KENNEDY FAMILY As a country, we have spent the past several decades obsessed with one family, the one we have dubbed our “American royalty.” And, very much like their more literally titled British counterparts, there is nothing we have enjoyed quite so much as seeing them falter and fall. Our love for them – our unbridled adoration and the hope we placed in those gallant young sons in the 1960’s – has metamorphosed into a kind of schadenfreude which is most pronounced when we hear them mocked, learn of their defeats or transgressions, and even, tragically, when we see them die. David Horowitz, an official Kennedy biographer, wrote the following shortly after the death of JFK, Jr. In this essay, he recaps some of the major tragedies in the lives of these giants, examines their transcendence into mythological figures, and postulates that the death of America’s iconic little boy necessarily closes a chapter of our history. “The Last Kennedy” by David Horowitz: www.salon.com, July 17, 1999 From the moment he was photographed as a three-year old saluting the coffin of his father, he had a place in America's collective heart. He was the star of the last generation of America's most star-struck and most star-crossed family. Now, John F. Kennedy Jr. joins fathers and uncles, cousins and aunts in a procession of tragedies going back more than half a century that has compelled the imagination of a nation and provoked some of its most searing self-reflection. From the moment when a photographer's flash caught him as a 3-year-old saluting the coffin of his martyred father, John F. Kennedy Jr. had a place in America's collective heart that no other of its citizens could rival. As he grew into a strikingly handsome young man he acquired an aura that was equal to that of any public celebrity or icon from any professional sphere. So great was the adoration his presence inspired that it transcended anything he had ever achieved or could ever hope to accomplish. This, ultimately, is the cross he had to bear through his adult life, and he did so with a dignity and a sense of self-irony that prevented him from getting involved -- and then submerged -- in the destructive behaviors that overwhelmed so many of his male Kennedy cousins. Most important of all, he eschewed the political career that was the birthright expectation of all Kennedy males, but one that his mother, Jacqueline, widow of the martyred president, specifically wanted him to avoid. Instead, John F. Kennedy Jr. became a journalist, which seemed a very un-Kennedy profession by the time his generation came to manhood. By then politics had become the only career worthy of Kennedy males. In part this was because of the ghost of unfulfilled promise that haunted the memories of the Kennedy martyrs, John and Robert, who had been struck down in their prime. In part, it was because of the demons that had been unleashed by the tarnish to the Kennedy name after the fathers were gone. This tarnish occurred as the result of revelations in the 1970s about their association with illicit women, with Mafia plots to assassinate foreign leaders, by the above-the-law and above-the-rest-of-us attitude that came to fruition in their brother Ted, and took the life of a young woman at Chappaquiddick. But the journalistic career, which was JFK Jr.'s courageous path out of the Laocoon of the Kennedy myth, was actually the profession his father had pursued in the time of innocence, before the first Kennedy tragedy and the ambitions of the family patriarch impelled him on a political course. JFK's brother Joe had been the family patriarch's chosen vehicle for the presidential ambitions that had been thwarted in himself when he emerged as an appeaser during the Second World War. It was Joe who was going to run for president when the war was over. But Joe never made it to the end of the war. The first Kennedy tragedy was also a plane flight over water. During the last days of the war, Joe had volunteered for a highly risky mission to pilot a plane loaded with explosives -- a flying bomb -- across the English Channel toward the German V-2 rocket sites on the other side. His orders were to aim his plane at the sites and bail out before the plane exploded. The first Kennedy was killed when the explosives detonated before he could make his escape.

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The second Kennedy tragedy, too, was a plane flight and much closer in circumstance to the one that has apparently taken JFK Jr.'s life. His aunt Kathleen, the fourth of Joseph Kennedy's children, had undertaken a forbidden romance with a wealthy Irish earl. Kathleen's mother Rose had already disowned her daughter because her betrothed was married and was not a Catholic. The couple had set off in bad weather in the earl's private plane to meet secretly with Joseph Kennedy and arrange their eventual elopement. But the plane never reached its destination. In fact, in all the Kennedy tragedies, down to the present, there has been a powerful element of hubris, a defying of fate and the gods, as though members of this family had to be more than mere mortals, just to prove they were Kennedys. As appropriate to his character, JFK Jr.'s hubris in the flight to Martha's Vineyard was mild at best. A novice pilot, who was not instrument-rated, he had set out in not quite full physical health to steer a brand new plane at night in weather that became problematic. These were risks that a Kennedy would hardly notice. If he did, he would be scorned by other members of the family for his faintness of heart and would redouble his resolve. And this seems to have happened to JFK Jr. A cousin reportedly mocked his flying abilities, saying "I'm not getting into that plane with him." Anyone familiar with Kennedy family rituals also knows the response. In the years Peter Collier and I were writing our book, The Kennedys: An American Drama, I found being with the risk-taking family more frightening than being with the Black Panthers. An irony of this conclusion to a young and promising life is that it should occur off Martha's Vineyard and thus near the island of Chappaquiddick. And that it should do so on the 30th anniversary of the incident that engulfed the Kennedy family and unleashed the demons that have tainted its name. Until that moment, the Kennedys had been seen by all and sundry through the prism of Camelot, that fantasy kingdom whose image Jacqueline had invoked to memorialize her husband's reign. But with the incident at Chappaquiddick, there began a series of interrogations and revelations by citizens, journalistic institutions and eventually congressional committees. It was this blot on the Kennedy escutcheon that was to become a primary inspiration for the family members of JFK Jr.'s own generation to orient their own life ambitions towards public service in an attempt to redeem the great myth their fathers had created. But most of the young knights who set out to rescue Camelot from its sordid fate were engulfed by the demons that had been unleashed by the family myth. Scandal dogged the scions of the Kennedy name and stymied their political ambitions. Amidst these disappointments, JFK Jr. alone emerged into manhood unscathed, holding all the promise of a golden future that had been aborted in other family members for so many years. The awful conclusion to this young man's life can be said then to symbolize the end of the Kennedy quest. Both the family legend and the hope for its redemption have been sunk off the waters of Martha's Vineyard for good. JFK Jr. would have appreciated this final irony. I once interviewed the man who had been defeated by JFK Jr's cousin, Patrick Kennedy, to gain his first political office. At the time Patrick was a young and callow upstart, without notable claim to public office other than the Kennedy name and the power that flowed from his father's Senate seat. His opponent, a local undertaker named John Skeffington, was a seven-term member of the Rhode Island House. Skeffington was a Kennedy Democrat, and was bewildered that a political family to which he had been so devoted would attempt to take away his seat just because they had a kid who wanted it. The district at stake was so small that there was only one significant polling place, serving the vast majority of voters. On the morning of the election, a raft of Kennedys including John Jr. and Caroline appeared at the polling place with a photographer. A sign offered free autographed snapshots with a Kennedy to the voters who showed up. Patrick easily won the seat. But there was a coda to John Skeffington's story. When he showed up at the polling booth, John F. Kennedy Jr. came over to where Skeffington was standing and said to him. "I'm sorry about this. I have to do it. It's a family thing." Here was a man blessed with privilege, who acquired humility and grace. But he was also a man who -- like so many of his kin -- was unable finally to free himself from the myth that undid him.

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THE KENNEDY WAY OF GRIEF Also written not long after the tragic death of JFK, Jr., Joan Walsh’s essay explores the more personal kinship much of America felt with the Kennedys – especially those of Irish decent—and her incredulity at how a family that has endured so much loss can seem to be so terrible at grieving. “The Kennedy way of grief” by Joan Walsh: www.salon.com, July 22, 1999 Is the clan’s Irish stoicism linked to its history of alcoholism, risk-taking and self-destruction? Like millions of Americans I’ll be watching whatever is televised of John F. Kennedy Jr.’s funeral Friday. But I may be alone in hoping to see somebody in the stoic Kennedy clan defy history and break down over the loss of their cherished relative. All week long, reports from inside the Kennedy compound at Hyannis Port said the same thing: The mood there was somber, but composed. “Kennedys don’t cry,” commentator Rowland Evans told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer on Sunday. Evans had been at the compound to attend Rory Kennedy’s wedding, and he was there when it turned into a wake. He praised Ethel and Ted Kennedy for their stiff-upper-lip sense of orderliness, making sure Mass was said daily and everybody got fed. Ethel and some of the cousins even went out sailing twice, in the same waters that had claimed their beloved John. Life went on, if sadly. But I’d have been happier if Evans had described wailing and keening and rending of garments inside the compound. Because I think the Kennedy way of grief is linked inextricably with the Kennedy way of tragedy: alcoholism, addiction, risk-taking, self-destruction and early death – a flight path that is particularly male and congenitally Irish. There’s not an Irish American alive who doesn’t feel some connection to the Kennedys, even if they resist or reject it. Jack Kennedy’s 1960 election was a huge psychic boost for American Catholics – he was the first and last Catholic elected president, remember – but particularly for Irish Catholics. It was a step toward recovery from that vicious sense of inferiority and Irish self-loathing that’s made worse by the fact that no one ever admits to it. My Irish-American parents, just a few years removed from Brooklyn and the Bronx (and in my father’s case, one generation from Ireland), worked hard to belong when we moved to the suburbs, to shed their working-class, ethnic roots. I remember my mother in the kitchen, obsessively transferring all food from cooking pots to serving dishes, because “only the shanty Irish eat from the pot.” Bringing a pot to the table, even for seconds, would trigger a scolding. She had reason to worry: Our next door neighbor, a working-class first-generation Russian-American, called us “shanty Irish” whenever the grass got too long or the shingles needed painting. “Just like the niggers,” he used to mutter. The Kennedys, of course, were lace-curtain Irish at minimum, but Jack Kennedy’s ascent to the nation’s highest office took the rest of us up a notch with him. Although separated from the Kennedys by millions of dollars, private-school pedigrees, yachts, planes and several homes, we felt a part of the family. I was brought up on the full-strength Camelot myth: that JFK started the civil rights movement, tried to stop the Vietnam war and with his youth helped awaken the conscience of a generation. As I got older, I realized my family had more in common with the Kennedys than roots in Ireland and Democratic politics. I saw a dysfunctional Irish stoicism in the Kennedy way of grief that I would notice later in my childhood, when tragedy hit my family, and my mother, youngest cousin, favorite uncle, grandmother and grandfather got sick and died within a seven-year span, in what felt like our own not-for-television version of the Kennedy curse. I saw that stoicism first in President Kennedy’s death, the first big loss of my childhood. Wild with grief, my family watched TV all weekend, and the images are indelible: the flag-draped coffin in the Capitol rotunda; Jack Ruby shooting Lee Harvey Oswald; the funeral procession; the riderless horse; and the salute, John-John’s goodbye to his father, televised over and over. But even at age 5, I remember feeling a queer, animal revulsion at the salute. I was sick with sadness over the Kennedy children. Already a daddy’s girl, I couldn’t imagine losing my father, and if I did, I’d knew I’d be howling

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in fear and grief, not saluting. John-John’s salute, and Caroline’s composure, seemed the cost of being Kennedy. What others praised made me cringe, to this day. So I comforted myself, at age 5, by writing letters to Caroline Kennedy, who was a year older than me, and was, like me, a precocious oldest daughter with a mischievous little brother named John. My parents encouraged my epistolary ministry, though they warned me not to write about her father, so as not to upset her. My letters asked her about school and invited her for play-dates. I don’t know how many I sent: more than one, fewer than five. My mother would write our return address on the envelope. One day Tony the mailman came running up my street with some neighborhood kids trailing behind him. He was carrying a large manila envelope addressed to “Miss Joanie” at my house (I’d never signed my last name), from “Mrs. Jacqueline Kennedy, 1040 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY.” There was a picture of the Kennedy family, and a typed thank-you card, signed by Jackie. It was my 15 minutes of childhood fame. We kept the picture and the note for a long time, but it eventually got lost, after my mother died and my father moved away and there was nobody to keep track of the family lore, ours or the Kennedys. As I grew up with the Kennedys I watched their family, and mine, corrode with grief. When his brothers were assassinated, Ted Kennedy went off a bridge, emotionally, but he could never deal with his loss. A year after Bobby died, the hard-drinking senator acted it out literally, at Chappaquiddick, taking Mary Jo Kopechne with him. With eerie timing, Maria Shriver just published a children’s book about death, because she remembered the Kennedy adults being unable to talk about their many losses to the grieving kids. There are too many stories about how Bobby Kennedy’s boys fell apart after their father’s murder, and got little comfort from anyone. Family matriarch Rose Kennedy walked the beach alone and told the fatherless children: “God gives us no more than we can bear.” On the train back from the funeral, Ethel applauded as eldest son Joe walked through the cars, shaking hands with passengers and repeating, “I’m Joe Kennedy, thanks for coming,” as though they’d been to a political rally, not a funeral. “He’s got it!” Ethel crowed proudly – and indeed Joe had Kennedy political instincts, as well as Kennedy denial. Meanwhile, a despondent David Kennedy, who would die in 1984 of a drug overdose, hung his head out that same train window, and almost lost it to a passing steel girder. All summer after his father’s death, David would tell biographers David Horowitz and Peter Collier, he tried unsuccessfully to get somebody to talk to him about it. “It’s not a subject I want to discuss,” Ethel snapped at him. (With no apparent irony, the family sang “When Irish Eyes are Smiling” at David’s funeral.) I know something about how David felt. My father could only talk about my mother in small doses, and her brothers all but avoided me after her death, as though the sight of me was too painful. They’d keep a friendly distance at family events when sober; collapse in tears, unable to talk about my mother, when drunk. (My aunts were a little better, though all of them were undone by crying, so I learned not to.) My family rivals the Kennedys when it comes to drinking and denial, not just early death, and there’s no doubt a connection between them. I have always heard a strange double-meaning in the phrase “bottled up,” as though it was inextricably, etymologically linked to alcoholism. It’s the bottling of feeling that leads to the unbottling of alcohol, and to the morbid excesses of families like the Kennedys, and so many of the Irish. It took me more than a year after it won the Pulitzer to pick up Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes, and when I did I read it slowly, reluctantly, in pieces, because I couldn’t stand it, it felt so close and real: The loss, the sorrow, the anger and the drunken, broken men. Clearly there are millions of Irish-Americans who escape these patterns. But from the dirt-poor McCourts at the bottom to my up-from-working-class family in the middle to the Kennedys on high, something of the strangling, self-destructive Irish way of grief has kept its hold. To her credit, Jacqueline Kennedy, after encouraging the robotic, boys-don’t-cry salute by John Jr., actually raised her children differently. There’s the oft-told anecdote

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about how Bobby Kennedy told young John, after a ski-slope mishap, “Kennedys don’t cry.” His nephew retorted: “This Kennedy cries.” But not publicly. John Kennedy’s announcement of his mother’s death outside her apartment in New York struck me as too composed, too detached, for a man who’d lost his only parent, to whom he was famously close. He was well-behaved for a Kennedy man, but his compulsive risk-taking and thrill-seeking, not to mention his inability to find a career or marry until his mother’s death, makes me wonder about whether he ever recovered from the loss of his father. That he plunged to a watery death in plain view of his mother’s Martha’s Vineyard estate chills me. I’m superstitious – the Irish are – but not enough to believe in a Kennedy curse. Still, I’ve found myself thinking this week that maybe the Kennedys will have to endure loss after loss until they finally bow to it, and give up their stoic pose in the face of grinding pain. Maybe they need to say to fate or God or nature what is the truth, and has been for a while: that they have been given more than anybody can bear.

ACTIVITY Cult of Celebrity

How much can you tell about a group of people by whom they idolize? Have students bring images of celebrities cut from magazines to class. Ask them to bring in photographs of celebrities whose lives they follow – especially those they admire. Create a class collage of these images and then deconstruct your

collage as a class asking these questions: Whom do we as a group choose to include in this collage? Why did we choose these people? Think very specifically – is it because they’re people we admire? People whose

dramatic lives we enjoy experiencing vicariously? How do these celebrities seem to react to the spotlight focused on them and their personal lives?

Ask students to think about the American obsession with the Kennedy family along similar lines. Why do they think the American people have kept such close tabs on this famous family? How do they think the

Kennedys feel, constantly living in the spotlight? How would the students feel in a similar situation? Have they ever they felt constantly scrutinized and judged by outsiders? Ask them to share their stories with the

class.

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BEYOND ALICE – REAL PHYSICS AND THEORETICAL RABBIT HOLES The concept of the “rabbit hole” as explored in Jason’s short story seems purely the stuff of science fiction, but there’s a surprising nugget of truth at the core of that black hole of creative conjecture. Dr. Michio Kaku, a leader in the field of theoretical physics, is also to be commended for his skills as a writer. His essays about some of the more complex concepts in the cosmos – including black holes, string theories, and higher dimensions – are written in a tone that is exceptionally accessible. The following essay helps to shed some light on the real physics behind the science fiction briefly explored in Rabbit Hole. “Blackholes, Wormholes and the Tenth Dimension” by Dr. Michio Kaku: www.mkaku.org Will these concepts be proven by a theory of everything? Last June, astronomers were toasting each other with champagne glasses in laboratories around the world, savoring their latest discovery. The repaired $2 billion Hubble Space Telescope, once the laughing stock of the scientific community, had snared its most elusive prize: a black hole. But the discovery of the Holy Grail of astrophysics may also rekindle a long simmering debate within the physics community. What lies on the other side of a black hole? If someone foolishly fell into a black hole, will they be crushed by its immense gravity, as most physicists believe, or will they be propelled into a parallel universe or emerge in another time era? To solve this complex question, physicists are opening up one of the most bizarre and tantalizing chapters in modern physics. They have to navigate a minefield of potentially explosive theories, such as the possibility of “wormholes,” “white holes,” time machines, and even the 10th dimension! This controversy may well validate J.B.S. Haldane's wry observation that the universe is “not only queerer than we suppose, it is queerer than we can suppose.” This delicious controversy, which delights theoretical physicists but boggles the mind of mere mortals, is the subject of my recent book, Hyperspace. Black Holes: Collapsed Stars A black hole, simply put, is a massive, dead star whose gravity is so intense than even light cannot escape, hence its name. By definition, it can't be seen, so NASA scientists focused instead on the tiny core of the galaxy M87, a super massive “cosmic engine” 50 million light years from earth. Astronomers then showed that the core of M87 consisted of a ferocious, swirling maelstrom of superhot hydrogen gas spinning at l.2 million miles per hour. To keep this spinning disk of gas from violently flying apart in all directions, there had to be a colossal mass concentrated at its center, weighing as much as 2 to 3 billion suns! An object with that staggering mass would be massive enough to prevent light from escaping. Ergo, a black hole. The Einstein-Rosen Bridge But this also revives an ongoing controversy surrounding black holes. The best description of a spinning black hole was given in 1963 by the New Zealand mathematician Roy Kerr, using Einstein's equations of gravity. But there is a quirky feature to his solution. It predicts that if one fell into a black hole, one might be sucked down a tunnel (called the “Einstein-Rosen bridge”) and shot out a “white hole” in a parallel universe! Kerr showed that a spinning black hole would collapse not into a point, but to a “ring of fire.” Because the ring was spinning rapidly, centrifugal forces would keep it from collapsing. Remarkably, a space probe fired directly through the ring would not be crushed into oblivion, but might actually emerge unscratched on the other side of the Einstein-Rosen bridge, in a parallel universe. This “wormhole” may connect two parallel universes, or even distant parts of the same universe.

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Through the Looking Glass The simplest way to visualize a Kerr wormhole is to think of Alice's Looking Glass. Anyone walking through the Looking Glass would be transported instantly into Wonderland, a world where animals talked in riddles and common sense wasn't so common. The rim of the Looking Glass corresponds to the Kerr ring. Anyone walking through the Kerr ring might be transported to the other side of the universe or even the past. Like two Siamese twins joined at the hip, we now have two universes joined via the Looking Glass. Some physicists have wondered whether black holes or wormholes might someday be used as shortcuts to another sector of our universe, or even as a time machine to the distant past (making possible the swashbuckling exploits in Star Wars). However, we caution that there are skeptics. The critics concede that hundreds of wormhole solutions have now been found to Einstein's equations, and hence they cannot be lightly dismissed as the ravings of crack pots. But they point out that wormholes might be unstable, or that intense radiation and sub-atomic forces surrounding the entrance to the wormhole would kill anyone who dared to enter. Spirited debates have erupted between physicists concerning these wormholes. Unfortunately, this controversy cannot be resolved, because Einstein's equations break down at the center of black holes or wormholes, where radiation and sub-atomic forces might be ferocious enough to collapse the entrance. The problem is Einstein's theory only works for gravity, not the quantum forces which govern radiation and sub-atomic particles. What is needed is a theory which embraces both the quantum theory of radiation and gravity simultaneously. In a word, to solve the problem of quantum black holes, we need a “theory of everything!” A Theory of Everything? One of the crowning achievements of 20th century science is that all the laws of physics, at a fundamental level, can be summarized by just two formalisms: (1) Einstein's theory of gravity, which gives us a cosmic description of the very large, i.e. galaxies, black holes and the Big Bang, and (2) the quantum theory, which gives us a microscopic description of the very small, i.e. the microcosm of sub-atomic particles and radiation. But the supreme irony, and surely one of Nature's cosmic jokes, is that they look bewilderingly different; even the world's greatest physicists, including Einstein and Heisenberg, have failed to unify these into one. The two theories use different mathematics and different physical principles to describe the universe in their respective domains, the cosmic and the microscopic. Fortunately, we now have a candidate for this theory. (In fact, it is the only candidate. Scores of rival proposals have all been shown to be inconsistent.) It's called “superstring theory,” and almost effortlessly unites gravity with a theory of radiation, which is required to solve the problem of quantum wormholes. The superstring theory can explain the mysterious quantum laws of sub-atomic physics by postulating that sub-atomic particles are really just resonances or vibrations of a tiny string. The vibrations of a violin string correspond to musical notes; likewise the vibrations of a superstring correspond to the particles found in nature. The universe is then a symphony of vibrating strings. An added bonus is that, as a string moves in time, it warps the fabric of space around it, producing black holes, wormholes, and other exotic solutions of Einstein's equations. Thus, in one stroke, the superstring theory unites both the theory of Einstein and quantum physics into one coherent, compelling picture. A 10 Dimensional Universe The curious feature of superstrings, however, is that they can only vibrate in 10 dimensions. This is, in fact, one of the reasons why it can unify the known forces of the universe: in 10 dimensions there is “more room” to accommodate both Einstein's theory of gravity as well as sub-atomic physics. In some sense, previous attempts at unifying the forces of nature failed because a standard four dimensional theory is “too small” to jam all the forces into one mathematical framework. To visualize higher dimensions, consider a Japanese tea garden, where carp spend their entire lives swimming on the bottom of a shallow pond. The carp are only vaguely aware of a world beyond the surface. To a carp “scientist,” the universe only consists of two dimensions, length and width. There is no such thing as “height.” In fact, they are incapable of imagining a third dimension beyond the pond. The word “up” has no meaning for them. (Imagine their distress if we were to suddenly lift them out of their two dimensional universe into “hyperspace,” i.e. our world!) However, if it rains, then the surface of their pond becomes rippled. Although the third dimension is beyond their

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comprehension, they can clearly see the waves traveling on the pond's surface. Likewise, although we earthlings cannot “see” these higher dimensions, we can see their ripples when they vibrate. According to this theory, “light” is nothing but vibrations rippling along the 5th dimension. By adding higher dimensions, we can easily accommodate more and more forces, including the nuclear forces. In a nutshell: the more dimensions we have, the more forces we can accommodate. One persistent criticism of this theory, however, is that we do not see these higher dimensions in the laboratory. At present, every event in the universe, from the tiniest sub-atomic decay to exploding galaxies, can be described by 4 numbers (length, width, depth, and time), not 10 numbers. To answer this criticism, many physicists believe (but cannot yet prove) that the universe at the instant of the Big Bang was in fact fully 10 dimensional. Only after the instant of creation did 6 of the 10 dimensions “curl up” into a ball too tiny to observe. In a real sense, this theory is really a theory of creation, when the full power of 10 dimensional space-time was manifest. 21st Century Physics Not surprisingly, the mathematics of the 10th dimensional superstring is breathtakingly beautiful as well as brutally complex, and has sent shock waves through the mathematics community. Entirely new areas of mathematics have been opened up by this theory. Unfortunately, at present no one is smart enough to solve the problem of a quantum black hole. As Edward Witten of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton has claimed, “String theory is 21st century physics that fell accidentally into the 20th century.” However, 21st century mathematics necessary to solve quantum black holes has not yet been discovered! However, since the stakes are so high, that hasn't stopped teams of enterprising physicists from trying to solve superstring theory. Already, over 5,000 papers have been written on the subject. As Nobel laureate Steve Weinberg said, “How can anyone expect that many of the brightest young theorists would not work on it?” Progress has been slow but steady. Last year, a significant breakthrough was announced. Several groups of physicists independently announced that string theory can completely solve the problem of a quantum black hole. (However, the calculation was so fiendishly difficult it could only be performed in two, not 10, dimensions.) So that's where we stand today. Many physicists now feel that it's only a matter of time before some enterprising physicist completely cracks this ticklish problem. The equations, although difficult, are well-defined. So until then, it's still a bit premature to buy tickets to the nearest wormhole to visit the next galaxy or hunt dinosaurs!

ACTIVITY Thinking Theoretically

Given the information from Dr. Kaku included in this guide – and any other information they care to research – ask students to create their own “theory of everything” in which they state, in the simplest possible terms,

how space and time are related. Extra points for the use of visual aides – posters, models, Power Point presentations, etc.

OR – for those who cry “brain drain” at the mention of theoretical physics – ask students to think about what they wish science could accomplish. If space is infinite (as many quantum physicists propose), then there are no limits to what scientists can discover. Some examples of science’s infinite possibilities include: time

travel, teleportation, the perfect pimple remover, talking cats – anything. Ask them to either create an advertisement for this new wonder or a visual art interpretation of the concept.

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PERSONAL PERSPECTIVE – USING PHYSICS TO COPE WITH GRIEF The essay “Physics and Grief” by Patricia Monaghan explores the unique comfort the study of physics brought her after the death of her husband. While the piece is excerpted here, the text in its entirety is included in the “Additional Resources” section of this guide. Use this story as a means to discuss the comfort Becca may find in the concept of parallel universes – and also the comfort your students might find in unconventional places. edited from “Physics and Grief” by Patricia Monaghan: Fourth Genre, July 11, 2006 Where religion had failed me, being so certain of itself, physics offered paradoxes and complexities so bizarre that my hatred and fear of the universe began to be replaced with what can only be called awe. I’d known Newtonian physics before, from my days as a science reporter, but I had never ventured into quantum mechanics. There I found the most astonishing ideas, ones which smashed the clockwork universe just as Bob’s death had torn apart mine. …“Our universe seems to be composed of facts and their opposites at the same time,” I read in Louis de Broglie’s work, and “everything happens as though it did not exist at all.” Such statements seemed eminently sensible, reasonable, even straightforward. Yes, I responded passionately. Yes, the universe was that strange, that indescribable. Death is not an equal and opposite reaction to life; consciousness is not some strange form of inertia. I needed a new physics to describe the wild movements of my grieving soul. And a new physics I found. … I found quantum theory immeasurably consoling. With an uncertainty-loves-company kind of logic, I lost myself in Heisenberg and the reassurances of the Uncertainty Principle. If we cannot conceivably know everything about the physical universe, then the abyss of doubt whereon I stood was as good a standpoint as any from which to view life. If we cannot know something as simple as two aspects of a subatomic particle’s motion simultaneously, how can we know for certain that there is no life after death — or that there is? If our measurements may alter the reality that we measure, could not consciousness be a form of measurement, subtly altering the universe? … I drew solace from the dumbfounding absoluteness of Heisenberg’s theory. We could not know everything, not ever, because in the moment of such knowing we may change what we know. I could not know — I could never know — if or where Bob existed, for each time I sought for him — each time I measured this universe in terms of Bob’s existence or nonexistence — I was perhaps changing the conditions of the very universe through which I sought. It was as though Heisenberg, by enshrining uncertainty at the center of perception and knowledge, made anything and everything both possible and impossible at once. Suddenly the world seemed to make sense again, although in a deeply paradoxical way. Where religion’s certainties had left me bitterly bereft of comfort, quantum uncertainty allowed for unimaginable possibilities. Whatever measurement I took of the universe, I understood now, could be only partial. There would always be something that eluded my grasp. This was an enormous comfort. It was not only uncertainty that captured me. Because this new physics was all about time and space, Einstein spoke to me like a voice from a burning bush. I, who lived in a time and space from which my love had disappeared, found respite in considering the ways that time and space were linked. “Any two points in space and time are both separate and not separate,” David Bohm said. What a salvation that seemed! As incomprehensible as this new space-time was, it was more lively with possibilities than linear and planar realities. My separateness from Bob was real, but in some way, we were also still together. In some way — this was most important to me. For this was not a metaphoric togetherness, a trick of language. This was science, after all. And not just science but the queen of sciences, physics. Physics, which did not ask me to believe, did not ask me to have faith. Physics, which observed and experimented. Physics, which offered a description of the world, admittedly bizarre but as accurate as blundering language could make it. I did not have to believe. I only had to wonder. … Indeed, those theories polished the world so that it shone with

a strange and compelling luster. The world could never again be ordinary once I had plummeted through the rabbit hole of quantum mechanics. If there was uncertainty at the basis of the universe, there was also a

ravishing mystery.

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MASTER CLASS Acting 101

This is a very basic introduction to some of the fundamental principles of acting. It is neither exhaustive, nor is it intended for students with advanced theatrical training. However, for the

newcomer, the following pages may help to shed some light onto the process of the actor.

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WARM IT UP – EXERCISES TO GET YOU ON YOUR FEET Knots: Have students stand shoulder to shoulder in a circle and put their arms in the middle, grasping hands with two different people. Then have them ‘untie’ themselves without ever letting go of one another’s hands. Empty Space Sculptures: Have half of your students stand in a straight line with their legs apart, feet touching, arms at their sides. Instruct the remaining students to ‘fill the empty spaces’, and the original students to move out of the sculpture when someone has worked around them. Students can move in an out of the sculpture as many times as they wish. Art Gallery: Put students into groups of three or four. Have each group choose a sculptor. The sculptor should position the remaining members of their group into a sculpture meant to convey a feeling or depict an activity. Then have each sculptor move to another sculptor’s piece and describe to the class what they think is going on in the sculpture. Vocal Warm-up: Have students clasp hands in a circle, swinging their arms gently in a steady rhythm and chanting a number sequence: 1…121…12321…1234321…123454321….12345654321…1234567654321…123456787654321…12345678 NINE 87654321. The NINE should be held for a few seconds, with arms raised above their heads before descending the scale again. Repeat three or four times getting faster each time, with emphasis on clear enunciation of all numbers. Yes It Is! Using an object found in the classroom, students stand in a circle and take turns showing the rest of the group what the object could be. For example, a student holds a stapler up to his ear and says “This is a telephone.” The rest of the group then responds with an emphatic “Yes It IS!” and the object is passed to the next person in the circle. The pattern should always be the same: “This is a .” Group response: “Yes It IS!” For a greater challenge, have students show what the object is three times (making it different things) in quick succession before passing it to the next person. Find the object: Give a small object (a key, a bottle of eyedrops, a lipstick) to the class and have one student volunteer to leave the room. Tell the class to move quickly around the room, and pass the object every five seconds. When he or she returns, the volunteer has three tries to guess who has the object. Find your partner: Have students team up and decide upon a noise by which to identify themselves. Have them move to the outskirts of the room and close their eyes. Partners should find each other by making the noise they agreed upon until they are able to meet, no peeking! Chorus line: Split the class into two even groups and place them in lines facing each other. Have one line sit down and watch the other line. Each person in the standing line should choose a movement and a noise that they like. When you say go, the line should morph into all doing the same movement and noise in unison without talking or communicating. Time them. Then have them sit down and watch the other group try to beat the other team’s time.

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Physicalizing relationships: Split class into two lines, with partners facing each other, separated by a few paces. The rows have to change places, and the partners have to touch each other in passing, but they hate each other. Then have them pass again, but this time they cannot touch, and they love each other madly. Repeat two more times with one side loving and the other hating. Guess Your Status: Assign each student a number from 1-7 with 7 being the highest status and 1 being the lowest. Have students move around the room saying hello to people they pass while their body language demonstrates their status. Then have students arrange themselves in a line from lowest to highest without telling each other what their numbers were. You can also play this game with a deck of playing cards, with aces being the highest status, twos the lowest. Show Your Status: Have three students volunteer to demonstrate for the rest of the class then assign each one a pair of status numbers, one for internal one for external (ex: they think of themselves as a six, but outwardly they are a 2 etc.) Have the class guess based on their actions what the internal and external numbers are.

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HOW TO READ A PLAY – THE ACTOR’S PERSPECTIVE Whether reading a play for the first time in preparation for an upcoming audition or reviewing lines and business prior to his opening night performance, an actor will almost always have a different perspective on the act of reading a play than a person reading a play as a piece of literature. The Bedford Introduction to Drama tells us this about the experience of reading a play:

Reading a play is a different experience from seeing it enacted. For one thing, readers do not have the benefit of interpretations made by a director, actors, and scene designers in presenting a performance. These interpretations are all critical judgments based on a director’s ideas of how the play should be presented and on actors’ insights into the meaning of the play. … For a fuller experience of the drama when reading plays, one should keep in mind the historical period and the conventions of staging that are appropriate to the period and that are specified by the playwright.

However, for actors, even when first reading a script the experience can be quite different. Often, actors will read from the perspective of the characters they will play (or hope to play) and will have less difficulty envisioning the fully realized experience of the drama. Of course, their fully realized interpretation may not be the same as the director’s (and this can sometimes lead to a bit of dramatic tension not intended by the playwright) but that is a problem to be solved in the rehearsal room. Here is a list of things to consider when approaching a play from the actor’s perspective:

1. What are the given circumstances of the play? Where does the play take place? What time of year is it? What are the historical circumstances of the period?

2. Who are the characters in the play? On which character will you be focusing; what is his or her relationship to the other characters in the play (sometimes it helps to keep a chart handy to remind you of each character’s relationship to the others)?

3. What does your character say about him- or herself? What do other characters in the play say about him or her? What do your character’s actions (or the actions of others as they relate to your character) say about him or her?

4. How does your character speak? Is he direct, only saying what he means? Does she use poetic or heightened language to illustrate her point? Is there any simile or metaphor in your character’s language? Does he or she need to speak in a specific dialect (for example a Southern accent) or does your character already sound like you?

5. How might your character move? Are there any clues to this in the text? Would he be slow and heavy? Quick and light? Why do you think so?

6. Are there any clues in the text as to what your character looks like physically? 7. What do all these things say about your character’s social status? To what economic class

does he or she belong? What status are the other characters in the play in relation to your character?

Celebrated director and former Producing Director of the Actors Theatre of Louisville, Jon Jory cautioned against only reading the play from start to finish once. He has this advice for actors in his book Tips: Ideas for Actors:

You read the script when you got the role. Maybe you re-read it twice. Soon, you underlined your role and, after that, you took to reading the parts you’re in. Own up. Sometimes you never read the whole text again. Big mistake. Every time you learn something about your role, it can be used as a lever to learn five other things. Re-read from start to finish at least once a week and definitely once during tech. … The more you know about the play, the more a full reading will reward you. … Remember that you are doing the play – not your part.

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SUBTEXT & INTENTION – CONVEYING WHAT YOU’RE NOT SAYING Now that you have an idea of how to get at what your character is saying in the script, let’s look at what he or she is not saying – the meaning just below the lines – what we call subtext. Subtext – literally the words or meaning “under” the text you see on the page – is often the character’s true intent that he or she, for some reason in the given circumstances of the scene, cannot or will not reveal directly. Imagine the following situation – you are working at a coffee shop as a barista and every day a handsome and successful-seeming man comes in and orders the same double half-caff latte. You may be saying something ordinary, something commonplace like “Here’s your latte; that’ll be $3.75,” but what you really want to say – the text that’s lying just under the surface – might be “I’ve loved you for the last six months – let’s run away together!” For various reasons, you keep that text to yourself; yet it will still inform how you say the line. In this way, subtext is very closely related to the intention or tone with which you’ll play each scene. FOCUS ON INTENTION Choose five volunteers from the class. Give each volunteer one of these simple lines.

• I love you • Whatever • Thank you • Tell me about it • I don’t think so • That’s what you think

Each student is going to make three “entrances” – each time saying the line with a different intention. Each entrance should be clearly motivated, and each delivery of the line should have a different subtext appropriate for a different set of given circumstances. Have the rest of the class determine the intention and subtext of each entrance. To whom was the actor speaking? How do you know? FOCUS ON SUBTEXT – Inner Monologue An inner monologue is the series of thoughts going through a character’s head at any given moment during the play. Sometimes, especially in plays where a character is seemingly erratic, or when an actor must reach a high emotional peak quickly it is useful to write out that character’s inner monologue. Choose a two-character scene in Rabbit Hole (or another play with which you have been working and are familiar). Have a pair of students read the scene aloud. Then, have each student write out the inner monologue for their characters. The students will read the scene again but this time, two other students will sit just behind each actor and quietly read the inner monologues aloud to them. Now have the students read the scene again, without having the inner monologues read aloud, but keeping those inner thoughts in mind. What does an awareness of inner monologue do for the actors? Does it enrich the experience of the scene for the audience? Why or why not? Jon Jory’s thoughts on subtext from Tips: Ideas for Actors Subtext is, obviously, what you really mean under what you say. You say, “I’m going to bed;” you mean, “I don’t want to talk to you.” Over the course of a career as a director, I’ve found that asking what the subtext is improves work more immediately than almost any other tool. Usually when you identify subtext, you find it also describe an action [objective] and thus is doubly useful. While most actors with use subtext consciously or unconsciously, they may not think to decode the other characters’ unspoken intentions, which can unlock a recalcitrant scene. We not only speak code, we are always busy decoding one another’s conversation, which deeply influences the way we relate to each other. If the scene is eluding you, write the subtext for the other character as well as your own, and see if it isn’t wonderfully clarifying.

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CREATING A CHARACTER

One of the most important jobs of the actor – and arguably one of the most enjoyable – is creating a believable character. There are many methodologies for breathing life into a human being designed to exist exclusively on the stage, but almost every great acting teacher will tell you that it is most important that you start by using yourself – your experiences, your emotions, your worldview. If you begin anywhere other than where you are personally, what you put on the stage will not likely ring true to your fellow performers or to your audience. Uta Hagen, a revered actress, teacher, and author of acting theory created the Six Steps method of character creation in her book, Respect for Acting. These steps are a great starting place for creating your character, and a place that many professional actors always begin when approaching a new role. HAGEN’S SIX STEPS Answer the following questions in first-person from the perspective of your character. 1. WHO AM I?

What is my present state of being? How do I perceive myself? What am I wearing?

2. WHAT ARE THE CIRCUMSTANCES?

What time is it? (The year, the season, the day? At what time does my selected life begin?) Where am I? (In what city, neighborhood, building, and room do I find myself? Or in what landscape?) What surrounds me ? (The immediate landscape? The weather? The condition of the place and the

nature of the objects in it?) What are the immediate circumstances? (What has just happened, is happening? What do I expect or

plan to happen next and later on?) 3. WHAT ARE MY RELATIONSHIPS?

How do I stand in relationship to the circumstances, the place, the objects, and the other people related to my circumstances?

4. WHAT DO I WANT? (This is called your goal or objective – we’ll talk more about this later)

What is my main objective? My immediate need or objective?

5. WHAT IS IN THE WAY OF WHAT I WANT? (We call this your obstacle – more on this later too)

How do I overcome it? 6. WHAT DO I DO TO GET WHAT I WANT?

How can I achieve my objective? What's my behavior? What are my actions? Also – What will happen if I cannot achieve my objective?

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CHARACTER WORKSHEET Once you have worked to clearly establish answers to the Six Steps, you can begin to think about your character in more detail. Answer the following questions in the first person from your character’s perspective, using either information that you have found in the script or using your imagination to color in the lines of the character sketch provided by the playwright. Remember to try to make choices that will support the information given to you by the playwright in the character descriptions and in the text of the play.

1. What is your name?

2. What is your age at the beginning of the play? Your age at the end of the play?

3. Nationality and ethnic heritage?

4. What is your religion?

a. Are you a religious person? Why or why not?

5. Where were you born? Where were you raised?

6. Who were your parents?

a. Briefly describe your mother’s physical appearance and personality.

b. Briefly describe your father’s physical appearance and personality.

c. Did you get along better with your mother or your father? Why?

7. List and briefly describe your siblings.

8. Describe your physical appearance.

a. What color are your hair and eyes?

b. How tall are you? What is your build?

c. Do you have any noticeable scars? Tattoos? Piercings? Describe the circumstances under

which you acquired any of these.

d. Do you have any other distinguishing features? Do you wear glasses? Contacts? Do you

have a mustache?

9. How would you describe your walk? Is it a saunter? A stroll? A march?

10. Describe your favorite outfit. Why is it your favorite? Where did you acquire each piece of clothing?

11. What items might usually be found in your pockets?

12. What is your source (or sources) of income?

13. Are you good with money? Do you save money for the future? Are you in debt? If so, to whom do

you owe money?

14. When you speak to people do you look them in the eye?

15. How would you describe your voice? Is it sweet? Melodious? Harsh?

16. Describe the way you sit. Describe the way you stand. What do you do with your hands – do you

talk with them? Do you hold your hands in front of you? To your sides? Behind your back?

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17. What is your happiest memory? Your saddest? Write brief descriptions of each and the

circumstances surrounding them.

18. Do you have any recurring nightmares? Describe them.

19. Describe the three people most important to you. Why are they important?

20. What is your most dearly held dream or aspiration?

Answer the following question for each of the categories below: “If you were a , what kind would you be?”

1. tree

2. drink

3. dessert

4. kitchen appliance

5. musical instrument

6. dog

7. shoe

8. flower

9. breakfast cereal

10. car

11. weapon

12. book

13. film

14. genre of music

15. shape

16. color

17. rock star

18. vegetable

19. sport

20. clothing

21. scent

22. city

23. season

24. month

25. fabric

HINT: Work quickly and go with your first instinct when completing these category questions.

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GOALS, OBSTACLES, & TACTICS What do you want? What do you have to do to get it? In Acting One (fourth edition), author Robert Cohen outlines the fundamental principle of acting this way:

There is one fundamental principle in acting. It’s that the actor must always play towards a goal. This is because characters, who resemble persons in life, are pursuing goals. The actor acts by pursuing – often vigorously – the presumed goal of the character. Sometimes this goal is called the objective. Often … it is also called the victory. Some other teachers use the word intention, or purpose, or want. It doesn’t really matter what it is called, as long as you pursue it. This is what makes acting represent life; it’s what makes acting lifelike. There is a corollary to this principle. It’s that in a play the goal should be fairly difficult to achieve. This is what makes acting dramatic. “To take a breath” may be a real-life goal, but in everyday situations it is not difficult enough to engage our energies or to be interesting to an audience. If you were under water, however, “to take a breath” would be a goal sufficiently difficult to be dramatic. Therefore the actor must pursue a goal (e.g., “to take a breath”) in the context of an obstacle (e.g., “you are under water”). You want to marry – a person who is reluctant. You want to overthrow – an adversary who is powerful. You want to win the race – despite your sprained ankle. The goal is what you – your character wants. The obstacle is what stands in your way.

Many actors and teachers find it most useful to think of your objective or goal in terms of something you want the other person (your scene partner) to do. Using active verbs when thinking about your objective is also useful, as is putting them in a clear, concise sentence. Here are just a few examples: I want to force him to leave the room. I want her to comfort me. I want to awaken him to his ability to change.

I want her to tell me where the treasure is buried. I want him to kiss me. I want to inspire her to acknowledge her guilt.

Obviously, your obstacle is anything that stands in the way of achieving your goal. The different ways you go about trying to achieve your goal are called tactics. As defined by Robert Cohen in Acting One

Tactics are the strategies of human communication; they are the active ingredients of dynamic interactions. Most of the tactics of everyday life are simple and benign, generated more by spontaneous impulse than by conscious plan. Smiling, for example, encourages agreement and tolerance; raising the level of the voice, on the other hand encourages compliance. … In the effort to achieve goals and overcome obstacles, the actor continually tries to put some pressure on the other actors – who are, of course, characters in the play or scene. The pressure is real; it may be the seductiveness of a raised eyebrow, the menace of a clenched fist, or the bedazzlement of a brilliantly articulated argument, but it is a pressure felt by the other actors and the audience alike.

In other words, your objective is what you want, the obstacle is what keeps you from getting it, and the tactics are the different things you do as you try to overcome your obstacle.

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EXPLORING TACTICS In order to get a better sense of employing different tactics to achieve your goal, we’ll use the following exercises. These will also give you a chance to get up on your feet and collaborate with a scene partner. This exercise, adapted from Robert Cohen’s Acting One, is “intended to deepen your concentration and extend your repertoire of communication tactics.” Choose a partner and, without touching that person and using only the words “one two three four five six seven,” you must try to elicit the following actions or feelings from your partner.

1. Make your partner sit down next to you. 2. Make your partner kneel before you. 3. Make your partner feel sorry for you. 4. Make your partner happy. 5. Make your partner nervous. 6. Make your partner feel chilled. 7. Make your partner applaud you.

Have both partners discuss this experience – the feeling of trying to compel someone to do these tasks with limited text and the feeling of being compelled. What tactics were used in the scene? How could the tactics have been more successful? Next, working one pair at a time, choose one partner to leave the room. While that person is out of the room and cannot hear what’s being said inside the room, have the rest of the group give the remaining partner an objective that relates to the something physical the other half of the pair can perform in the room. Examples include doing a cartwheel, giving the partner a hug, writing his or her name on the chalkboard, etc. The partner will come back in the room, and the pair will begin an improvised scene (using either their own words or the “numbered” text) in which the partner with the objective tries to see that task accomplished. For a greater challenge, try giving both halves of the pair objectives that they must each work towards in the context of the same scene. Again, discuss this exercise as a group. Try to answer the following questions:

1. What tactics were being employed? 2. Were those tactics successful? 3. How could they have been more successful?

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EXPLORING OBJECTIVES & RELATIONSHIPS Now that you’ve mastered a few basic acting exercises and know how to create a character from a given text, it’s time to practice creating and performing a character using nothing but your imagination. The scene on the next page is called “contentless” because it gives you no information regarding setting, character relationships, or background; it is simply text on a page. To make a complete scene, you have to fill in the details yourself. Working with a scene partner, students decide their “given circumstances” – time, place, relationship, what happened just before the scene, and each of their objectives. Have each pair present its scene to the rest of the class. If the actors have done their work well, the circumstances, relationship, and objectives should be clear to the class. Afterwards discuss the variance among scenes – which scenario works best with the text? Which one is most interesting? Did anything simply not work? Why or why not? Use nothing but what can be found in the room for set pieces and/or props. This activity should be accomplished within one class period with actors working quickly and listening to their first instincts. If anyone is having difficulty, the following are lists of suggested relationships and objectives: RELATIONSHIPS – A and B are…

• parent and child • brother and sister • best friends • bitter enemies • employer and employee • employee and customer • orchestra conductor and musician • actor and director • teacher and student

OBJECTIVES – A wants B…

• to give him a hug • to leave the room • to tie his shoe • to give her a ride to the movies • to loan him $20 for a new DVD • to help her move • to loan him the car for the weekend • to help her with homework

The more specific these relationship and goals, the better. Part of the fun of the contentless scene is the ability to use your imagination completely. This is one instance where the actors aren’t bound by the text and can have fun filling in all the details of the scene. Actor A should want something very precise from Actor B who should want something equally exact in return!

YOUR TURN… Once students get the hang of the contentless scene provided, ask them to write one of their own. Giving them a short (yet reasonable) amount of time, have them complete the new scene in pairs, then switch with other groups. No pair should perform the scene that it wrote – if possible, collect the scenes and assign them randomly to other groups. How do these scenes compare with the ones performed with the text given? What different choices do students make working on the new scenes?

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CONTENTLESS SCENE TEXT

A. Oh.

B. Yes.

A. Why are you doing this?

B. It's the best thing.

A. You can't mean it!

B. No, I'm serious.

A. Please...

B. What?

A. What does this mean?

B. Nothing.

A. Listen...

B. No.

A. So different.

B. Not really.

A. Forget it.

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TEXTERCISES! These exercises are based on specific use of the Rabbit Hole text. Feel free to use other texts with which students are familiar instead of (or in addition to) the ones provided. Back to Back Using the first section of Act 1, scene 1 (pages 1 – 4) have pairs sit back to back while reading their scene. Discuss the difficulties inherent in playing a scene where you cannot see the face of the person you are talking to. What does it do to how you listen to each other? How might it be helpful for actors to work like this, especially on a scene written like this one? Restraining exercise: Have two students volunteer to play the roles of Becca and Howie on pages 61 and 62 of Rabbit Hole. Place them at opposite ends of the room with the rest of the class between them. While reading the scene Becca must try to reach Howie while the rest of the class tries to keep them apart. Can Becca get to Howie before the end of page 65? What did it feel like for the two characters? What did it feel like for the people keeping them apart? Think about what the group of students in the middle might symbolize – what “forces” are working to keep Becca and Howie from connecting? For the actors playing Becca and Howie – how might you use the memory of this physical exercise in performance? Motivations: Look at the beginning Act 2, scene 3 between Becca and Jason (page 103 to bottom of 105). Have different pairs of students read the scene while the class tries to determine their internal motivation. Have each student in the pair pick an objective and see if they can communicate what they want to the rest of the class. Status exercise with Text: Using a portion of Act 1, scene 2 (middle of page 21 to middle of page 23), place sheets of paper on the floor numbered 1-10 (ten representing the highest status, one the lowest). Have two people read the parts and two others move them more or less arbitrarily up and down the scale changing their status – who has the power at any given moment. How does this change the reading? Do the scene again, this time allowing the actors to position themselves along the line. Finally, do the scene once more, allowing all four (two actors, two movers) to first discuss where the most effective status levels will be during the scene. Discuss as a class which incarnation of the scene was most successful and why.

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ADDITONAL RESOURCES

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BEYOND DINNER In this essay a woman explores her unique relationships with her family, loss, grief, and comfort food. “Beyond Dinner” by Susan Straight: www.salon.com, January 19, 2000 Cooking for pain, for loss, for heartache, for life. I will be peeling and cubing potatoes for a long time tonight, arranging them in large baking pans like I’m cooking for a restaurant, but I’ll be thinking about breast cancer, about illness and death and fear.

I will be cooking for an acquaintance from my daughter’s elementary school. I don’t know her well, but we have talked in parking lots and at birthday parties for five years. She is a single mother, like me, and she works with disturbed and autistic children at school. This week, she will have surgery for breast cancer, followed by seven weeks of chemotherapy.

I will take her one dinner a week for two months. It’s not a church assignment, or a pity assignment. It’s life.

I'd always seen the phrase "company dinner" in magazines and newspaper cooking sections. My oldest daughter recently read the novel "Betsy’s Wedding," which I’d read years ago, where the main character agonizes over developing her own company dinner. Every woman should have one meal that reflects her taste, her cooking, her life, right?

Somehow, my life and those of my friends and relatives have not included company dinners. For my friends and me, many of us single working mothers struggling to get by, company means all our kids playing in the yard and ordering pizza to eat outside. But as I’ve grown older, I have discovered the keep-you-company dinner, the one that can be eaten right then or reheated when you’re hungry or exhausted, the one someone brings you when you or someone in your family is ill or fading.

I love to cook, to make dinners big enough for many. I didn’t grow up like this, because with three children, two foster kids and a husband, my mother cooked dinners that were just enough for us. No leftovers, few friends invited over to eat. But when I met my future husband at 14, and began visiting his house regularly at 16, I watched my mother-in-law’s style of cooking for the multitudes.

She taught me to make a 20-pound baked ham, to cut up several chickens for barbecuing, to cook side dishes in those institutional-size baking pans that take up half a table. For holidays (including Super Bowl Sunday, a national holiday for my in-laws), we had 50 to 100 people in the kitchen, dining room, yard and the sidewalk. Each person held a plate heaped with food, and my mother-in-law smiled with pride and contentment.

Five years ago, when I was pregnant with my third child, my mother-in-law had a series of strokes, and in only two weeks, she was gone. It was not my first funeral, but my first time being a bereaved daughter-in-law. We cooked and cooked, for family while she was in the hospital, for visitors to the house, for everyone. I perfected my bring-to-potluck dish then, turning it into a heat-up-from-the-hospital dish. It was curried rice cooked with sausage and black beans – one of my mother-in-law’s favorites.

Church women cooked for the reception after the service, but we daughters-in-law and female friends and relatives cooked for more solemn home gatherings, and then we cleaned the whole kitchen, our way of mourning.

A few days later, my neighbor Jeannine’s husband was killed in a car accident. They had met as teens, like my husband and me, and we had lived across the street from each other for seven years. Jeannine and I laughed and gossiped, and she had given me hand-me-down clothes, a used Barbie limousine (bright pink) and plenty of advice on strep throat and puberty and how to fit three girls in one room. Now she was a widow at 35, left to raise four kids while finishing nursing school.

All I could do was cook, and then I knew we were entering a phase in life I had wondered about: food as love, as caring, as commitment, as solace. I had to cook something my family and hers would eat, something I could make after work, and I had an old 1940s electric range with only two burners working.

But it had a double oven, the envy of all my friends who baked. I remembered a recipe for Mahogany Chicken, something about cream sherry and garlic, high heat to brown the skin. It was a dish I thought adults and kids would eat, even if their stomachs were upset from worry or illness or life.

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And it worked, for Jeannine and me, because once I stuck it in the oven, we could help the kids with homework, do laundry or collapse. There was no vigil at the stove, stirring. And it wasn't a casserole, which sometimes kids hate because everything’s mushed together. Jeannine’s kids, and mine, liked the separate chicken and potatoes.

I felt old when I first made four pans of my dinner dish and walked two, covered with foil, across the street. I felt old when Jeannine’s face mirrored mine, washed-out, sleepless, with lines around our mouths.

A month later, Aunt Sister, my husband’s aunt, died of lung cancer. I baked the chicken and potatoes dish again and again, for months, it seemed. But we survived. Jeannine graduated from nursing school. That summer, I had my third daughter. And six months later, my husband moved out. The same month, I found out that the mother of a kindergarten classmate of my middle daughter, someone exactly my age, was struggling to take care of her husband, who was dying of a brain tumor.

I wouldn’t have baked the chicken and potatoes for myself, but I baked some for Kari’s family and some for us. I made other things, too, once or twice a week delivering dinner. And during the year when her husband died and mine decided he wasn’t coming back, we cooked together, ate together with our total of six children, and we used food to form a close friendship.

I baked the dinner in round smaller pans for another neighbor, Lorraine, who has breast cancer. Three years later, she is still struggling through more chemotherapy. (She calls it "The Red Devil" in her Arkansas accent.) She is in her 60s. And tonight, I will bake the dinner in the usual rectangular pans for Cathy, the school aide, who is in her 40s. Breast cancer, my daughters whisper in hushed tones, glancing at my own chest. Everyone has cancer. They are scared, nervous about me, even about their bodies.

What can I tell them, except to use food? "We don’t know why people get cancer," I say, "but eating right is supposed to help prevent it. Broccoli, especially, and foods in that family." My oldest daughter hates broccoli, which we eat once a week. I will shamelessly bring up food for everything, because it’s one of the few areas I can still control, can still understand, can still use to express my love.

I cook special extra-spicy dinners for my father, who has lost his sense of taste to Parkinson's. For potlucks and holidays, which I still attend at my ex-husband’s house, I cook my curried rice with sausage and black beans. (After 14 years and hundreds of relatives, you can’t just stop going and bringing your signature dish.)

At Easter and Thanksgiving, I cook hams big enough to share with many neighbors and relatives, thinking the whole time of my mother-in-law. And once a week, I bake the chicken-and-potatoes dinner.

I have turned into the kind of woman who delivers dinners, who empties a whole bag of potatoes in one night, who will baste and think of the scary stuff and the good stuff in life. I will be this way forever, I know, and hope someone brings dinner for me, when I need it.

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JAMA ON GRIEF – NEW STUDY RELEASED FEBRUARY 2007 This Journal of the American Medical Association article is referenced earlier in the guide, and is included here in its entirety.

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PHYSICS AND GRIEF The following piece of creative non-fiction, excerpted previously in this guide, is included in its entirely here. “Physics and Grief” by Patricia Monaghan: Fourth Genre, July 11, 2006

In nature nothing remains constant. Everything is in a perpetual state of transformation, motion, and change. However, we discover that nothing simply surges up out of nothing without having antecedents that existed before. Likewise, nothing ever disappears without a trace, in the sense that it gives rise to absolutely nothing existing in later times.

- David Bohm “ACTUALLY,” DAN SAID, I’ve been reading a lot of physics. He looked down at his empty paper plate and shrugged one shoulder, then the other. “I don’t suppose that makes any sense.” Dan had not spoken to me in almost a year. We’d seen each other occasionally; we had too many common friends for that not to happen. But when it did, Dan made certain to stay on the other side of the room, to find himself in need of a drink when I came near, to turn suddenly away when I tried to catch his eye. That was the year when I was a new widow, and Dan was about to become one, his partner, Steve, descending into a hell of lesions and pneumonia and fungal invasions of the brain. Even in the blur of my loss, I felt no anger toward Dan — though anger is so predictable a part of grief—for avoiding me. I knew the cause: I already was what he most feared to become. Six months after I was widowed, Dan joined me in that state. Steve gave up his obdurate struggle to remain alive, asking to be kept home when the next crisis hit. It was only a week. Friends told me that Steve’s death was gentle and that Dan bore up as well as could be expected. Dan dropped from sight for a time, disappearing into memories and pain. Now it was summer, and we were sitting under blue canvas at an outdoor festival. Dan had approached me with an apology for his actions. I had embraced him with understanding. We were sitting companionably together, catching up on each other’s lives, when I asked him what most helped him deal with his grief. Physics. Dan met my eyes, and his brows came together, then raised. “Relativity. Quantum mechanics. Bell’s Theorem. You know?” I think he expected me to be surprised. But I was not. It had been the same for me. To explain how physics came to be important on my journey of grief, I have first to describe the problem with my keys. There were five of them, bound together with a wide steel ring: a big silver skeleton key, for the embossed brass Victorian lock on the front door; a round-headed key that opens the more modern deadbolt; a little golden key to the garage; an institutional “do not duplicate” key to my office; and a black-headed key to the Ford station wagon. I remember the day — the hour — that the keys disappeared. It was late spring, less than three months after Bob died. Walking out the door to go shopping, I had reached into my jacket pocket, where I always kept my keys. They weren’t there. At the instant, it seemed inconsequential. I’d mislaid keys before; hasn’t everyone? I was inside the house, so I had used the keys to enter. They were, therefore, somewhere in the house with me. I merely had to look carefully and I would find them. I was unperturbed. I did what I did whenever I had mislaid something. I looked in all the logical places; in my coat’s other pocket; on the shelf near the front door; next to the telephone; in the kitchen near the sink. Nothing. I was still not overly concerned. I must have been distracted when I entered, I reasoned with myself; I must have put the keys in some unlikely spot. So I began methodically searching the house. Entry hall. Living room. Pulling out furniture, looking under pillows. Nothing. Dining room. Kitchen. Opening cabinets, reaching to the back of shelves. Nothing. Okay, then, I must have carried them upstairs. Guest room. Bathroom. Moving around each room slowly, looking especially in places where keys were unlikely to be. Behind pictures. In rarely opened drawers. Study. Nothing. Linen closet. Nothing. In my bedroom, I suddenly grew frustrated. I needed my keys! The only key to my car was on that ring; I could not go to work without it. What would I do without my keys? I started to cry.

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I had been crying for months, ever since Bob had finally died, fighting cancer to the last. The six months before his death were exhausting. For three months I was his sole caregiver; then, during his final hospitalization, I visited him two, three, even four times each day. Economics forced me to continue working, so I had neither physical strength nor emotional resources left when he died. In the days before Bob’s death, I had been with him constantly, telling him stories of the future we should have had, praising his work and his son to him, reminiscing for him about happy times when he could no longer speak. I did not sleep for perhaps forty-eight hours as I held vigil by his bedside, leaving only for necessary moments, for he had been shatteringly fearful of being alone at the moment of death. And so I was with him when that moment came, holding his hand as his breathing slowed, singing old songs to him, stroking his face through its paralysis. It was the hardest thing I have ever done, witnessing as he “departed from this strange world a little ahead of me,” as Einstein said when his oldest friend, Michele Besso, died. When I left that hospital room, bearing with me the amaryllis that had bloomed only the day before, I felt that I was leaving all happiness behind, that my world had changed unutterably, and only for the worse. I lived the months afterward in a trance of grief. There was a memorial service that I planned, I remember that. I remember a brick meeting hall with red tulips, a jazz pianist, readings from Bob’s novels, visitors from many states. For the rest, I barely recall anything. I apparently kept working, and doing laundry, and feeding the dogs, and planting the garden. My body kept moving through the Midwestern spring. But my soul was in the desert, in winter. That day in May, the loss of my keys reduced me to tears, though of course I was weeping for my greater loss, which every other loss would now reflect. Possibly I wept for hours; I did such things at that time. Finally the storm passed. I got up and set determinedly about to find the keys. To survive, I had to work. I needed to drive to my office. I could not manage without my keys. I would find them. I had to. And so I repeated my search. I must have missed the keys the first time, I told myself. I started again at the front door and scoured the downstairs. Living room: no. kitchen: no. And so it went. After an hour or so, I found myself again in the bedroom, still keyless. I began to weep again. This time, my desolation seemed endless. I could not stop crying. I lay on the bed, sobbing and flailing my arms. I soaked several handkerchiefs. I buried my head in pillows and drenched them with tears. Then I became enraged. I got up from the bed and began to scream at Bob, furious at him for dying and leaving me so helplessly besieged by grief. I screamed that he was cruel and heartless, that I’d been there in his hour of need, and where was he when I needed him? I raged and wept, wept and raged. I had not, before Bob’s death, spent much time thinking about the question of whether or not there is an afterlife. I had been brought up with a conventional picture of heaven and hell. And I had studied enough other religions to realize that many wiser than I believed in some kind of survival after death. I had read believable-enough accounts of those who claimed to have been contacted by the dead. But the possibility of an afterlife was not something I dwelt upon. I did not wish to make moral decisions by weighing the possibilities of future reward or punishment for myself. Nor did the survival of my own small person seem especially important in comparison with the universe’s vast majesty. So, for myself, what happened or did not happen after death was not a very important question. Bob, by contrast, had been quite clear about his beliefs. A natural mystic, he had practiced Zen for twenty years. But he was also an unrelentingly hard-headed empiricist who believed the universe to be a mechanistic place in which consciousness was only a byproduct of the body’s functions. Thus, when the body died, consciousness ceased as well. Bob believed, as Fred Alan Wolf put it in describing the Newtonian worldview, that mind — or soul, or spirit, whatever you call it — was just “a convenient byproduct of the physiology of the mechanisms of the brain, down to the remarkable electrical and mechanical movements of the nerve firings and blood flows.” He never changed his belief once he entered the hospital that final time, even though I, desperate for some reassurance that our love could continue after he faded from this life, talked to him about reincarnation and other possible survivals. But Bob would be no foxhole convert; he marched gamely toward that abyss which he saw as the likely end of his being. Death was painful to him; he had much to live for; but he would not grasp at hope of continued life just to ease his pain. Unless he had time to ponder, unless he could become completely convinced, he would believe as he always had. Happy lies held no appeal for him.

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One thing I loved about Bob was this: he had more integrity than any person I’d ever met. That integrity remained to the end. He met his death with his long-held beliefs intact. He was frightened, but he was very, very brave. Because I had no personal convictions on the subject, I held true to Bob’s beliefs after he was gone. It was a way of remaining close to him. I, too, would refuse to grasp at imaginary straws just to ease my pain, if Bob believed that all traces of his consciousness would evaporate at his death, that only his physical works would remain, then I would loyally uphold that belief. And so I lived in the desert. Life has never seemed so dry and meaningless to me as it did then. I would watch lovers kiss in a coffee shop and a whirlpool of pain would open beneath me, as I thought of one of them holding the other as they parted forever. I would stare at parents playing with their children near the lake and imagine sudden illnesses and accidents, wondering how life could create such joy only to obliterate it. I wept constantly: when I heard beautiful music, when I saw painful news, when I saw new flowers, when I went to bed, when I woke up. But I adamantly refused to settle for those happy visions that religion held out, of dreamy heavens full of harps, of other lives to come, of eventual reunion in some cosmic void. I even rejected nonreligious spiritualism. When friends said they had dreamed of Bob, or felt him near, I received the information in silent disbelief. It was their need of solace, I told myself, that caused these apparitions. They had just imagined it. I, loyal to Bob’s beliefs, would not settle for such self-deluding comfort. I would tough it out, looking reality right in its cruel face. But the day I lost my keys, I could not be brave like Bob, not any longer. Seeing those loving eyes go dim had been the single most painful moment of my life. The idea that the universe could so wantonly create beauty, could bestow upon our lives the kind of love that seems like ultimate meaning, only to destroy it in a breath, had finally become too much for me. I wanted so desperately to believe that Bob, and Bob’s love for me, still existed somewhere in the universe, that in my furious pain I flung down a challenge. Standing in the middle of the bedroom, I demanded that he come back. Find my keys, I insisted. Find my damned keys! If there’s anyone there, if there’s any love left in this universe for me, find my keys! After the fury had passed, I felt mortified. I had been screaming at a dead man. Standing in my room alone, screaming at a dead man. Worse, it was all so trivial. If I were going to throw down the gauntlet to the universe about whether there is life after death, couldn’t I have chosen something more important as proof? World peace? Personal economic security? A beatific vision? But I’d spoken. I’d insisted that Bob prove his continuing existence by finding my keys. Even writing about that day, I feel embarrassment cover me. It was such an excess of emotion about such a small matter, about such a minor inconvenience. Why had I broken down over such a silly thing? Why had I challenged the universe over something as unimportant as a key ring? But break down I had, and challenge the universe I had. And I could not bear the answer to be silence, negation, the absence of Bob forever, anywhere. Now I truly had to find the keys. So I resolutely began, yet again, to search. I started once more in the front hallway. But this time, I took a new tack. I might as well do spring- cleaning, I decided. I’d clean the entire house, front door to attic, and in doing so I would certainly find the keys. There was more than a bit of desperation about all this. If I did not find the keys, all was indeed lost. If I did not find the keys, there was no vestige of Bob in the world. If I did not find the keys, I was alone in the cruelest universe imaginable. Three days later, I was back in the bedroom. Except for that one room, the house was now clean, ammonia-and-paste-wax clean. I had taken down curtains and washed them, cleaned out closets, pulled up rugs. I had upended sofas and searched their bowels. I had repotted plants. I had pulled books from shelves and dusted both. The house sparkled, indeed. But I had not found the keys. The bedroom was the final outpost of possibility. From the first corner around to the last, then spiraling in to the center, I cleaned and searched. I opened drawers and rearranged them, shaking out their contents on the floor. I moved pictures and dusted their frames. I worked slowly, with mounting despair, for the keys had still not appeared. I moved the bed and polished the floor under it. I shook out the bedclothes and aired out the mattress. Finally, I was finished. There were no keys. I collapsed. This time my grief truly knew no bounds. I had asked for an answer from the universe, and I had — I believed — received one. Bob had been right. Consciousness was a byproduct of our body’s functioning, and

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now that the ashes of Bob’s body sat on the bookshelf in a white box, there was nothing, anywhere, left of the curiosity and passion and brilliance and love that had been him. The depression that began that day incapacitated me. I was unable to work for nearly a week. Finally, however, I called the car dealership and got new car keys. I found the spare house keys. I began to reconstruct the openings to my life. I knew now that I was indeed alone, that I could not call upon Bob for help, that he was no longer present anywhere, in any form. It was a bleak and cruel universe, but at least I knew the truth of it. What I experienced during that next year was more than simple grief and certainly more than emotional depression, although I suffered from both as well. It was stark existential despair. Life had no meaning, much less any savor. I tried to find what comfort I could in friendship, in earthly beauty, in art, in learning. But at my center was an abyss of meaninglessness. I could as easily have gambled all my resources away as built a garden; as easily have crashed my car as driven it safely across the Midwest; as easily have drunk slow poison as cocoa for breakfast. That I did one thing rather than another seemed only an arbitrary choice. At last, however, I began to awaken from my coma of sorrow. I began to argue with Bob in my mind. As I gardened, I noticed again the resilient connection of matter and energy, how nature never destroys but only transforms. As I walked in the woods with my dog, I saw spring flowers emerging from the withered leaves of autumn. What hubris, I began to think, to imagine that human consciousness is the only thing this universe cares to obliterate. Surely we are not that important. But these were fleeting thoughts, unconvincing, evanescent, ideas which did not in any case reach to the root of my grief. It was easy to accept that Bob’s body would eventually nourish other beings, through the cycle of decomposition and recomposition. But it was Bob’s self that I’d loved — not only his body, though certainly that. And although I knew and accepted, with piercing pain, what had happened to his body, that told me nothing about where the unique energy went that had invigorated it. Every once in a while, I would think of the lost keys and sigh. I had, after all, asked for a sign, and I had been given one. That was when I began reading books on physics. I had been reading a lot of spiritual literature, looking for answers to the appalling questions life presented. But I only grew more isolated, angry at the serenity that seemed forever beyond my grasp, despairing at my continuing inability to find any sense in death’s senselessness. It was not that the answers which spiritual literature offered seemed implausible or incorrect; it was simply that I could not believe them, could not make the leap into not-doubting. The more rigidly codified the religious insight, the more it seemed to exclude — even to mock — my anguished confusion. I can’t remember exactly which book, which author, brought me to physics. Most likely one that pushed the boundaries of science to include spirituality. Fritz Capra, perhaps, or Gary Zukov. One of those wild minds who saw bridges where others saw barricades. But it wasn’t the spirituality that gripped my attention. It was the science. Where religion had failed me, being so certain of itself, physics offered paradoxes and complexities so bizarre that my hatred and fear of the universe began to be replaced with what can only be called awe. I’d known Newtonian physics before, from my days as a science reporter, but I had never ventured into quantum mechanics. There I found the most astonishing ideas, ones which smashed the clockwork universe just as Bob’s death had torn apart mine. Ideas that read like Bob’s beloved Zen koans, statements that strained the limits of my linear thinking. “Our universe seems to be composed of facts and their opposites at the same time,” I read in Louis de Broglie’s work, and “everything happens as though it did not exist at all.” Such statements seemed eminently sensible, reasonable, even straightforward. Yes, I responded passionately. Yes, the universe was that strange, that indescribable. Death is not an equal and opposite reaction to life; consciousness is not some strange form of inertia. I needed a new physics to describe the wild movements of my grieving soul. And a new physics I found. Like my friend Dan, I found quantum theory immeasurably consoling. With an uncertainty-loves-company kind of logic, I lost myself in Heisenberg and the reassurances of the Uncertainty Principle. If we cannot conceivably know everything about the physical universe, then the abyss of doubt whereon I stood was as good a standpoint as any from which to view life. If we cannot know something as simple as two aspects of a subatomic particle’s motion simultaneously, how can we know for certain that there is no life after death — or that there is? If our measurements may alter the reality that we measure, could not consciousness be a form of measurement, subtly altering the universe? My deepest consolation, however, was not in speculating about whether a consciousness suffused, as mine was, with grief altered the world in a different way than one flooded with happiness. Rather, I drew solace from the dumbfounding absoluteness of Heisenberg’s theory. We could not know everything, not ever, because in the

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moment of such knowing we may change what we know. I could not know — I could never know — if or where Bob existed, for each time I sought for him — each time I measured this universe in terms of Bob’s existence or nonexistence — I was perhaps changing the conditions of the very universe through which I sought. It was as though Heisenberg, by enshrining uncertainty at the center of perception and knowledge, made anything and everything both possible and impossible at once. Suddenly the world seemed to make sense again, although in a deeply paradoxical way. Where religion’s certainties had left me bitterly bereft of comfort, quantum uncertainty allowed for unimaginable possibilities. Whatever measurement I took of the universe, I understood now, could be only partial. There would always be something that eluded my grasp. This was an enormous comfort. It was not only uncertainty that captured me. Because this new physics was all about time and space, Einstein spoke to me like a voice from a burning bush. I, who lived in a time and space from which my love had disappeared, found respite in considering the ways that time and space were linked. “Any two points in space and time are both separate and not separate,” David Bohm said. What a salvation that seemed! As incomprehensible as this new space-time was, it was more lively with possibilities than linear and planar realities. My separateness from Bob was real, but in some way, we were also still together. In some way — this was most important to me. For this was not a metaphoric togetherness, a trick of language. This was science, after all. And not just science but the queen of sciences, physics. Physics, which did not ask me to believe, did not ask me to have faith. Physics, which observed and experimented. Physics, which offered a description of the world, admittedly bizarre but as accurate as blundering language could make it. I did not have to believe. I only had to wonder. The fact that, as Max Born pointed put, the quantum world is utterly unvisualizable presented no problem to me. Visions of the subatomic world were metaphors, whose richness and limitations I amply understood. But unlike religion, which seemed hypnotized by its own articulations of the ineffable, physics acknowledged that any picture we hold of the subatomic world is by definition inaccurate, limited, inexact. No one has ever seen a quark, much less a Higgs boson. But they act; we see their traces. Such quantum strangeness spoke to my condition. I had witnessed something deeply incomprehensible when Bob died. Studying what Bohm called the “unanalyzable ways of the universe” mirrored that experience. My grief did not disappear, for grief is a chronic disease which exists in the body. My body would still regularly writhe with sudden memories: when I automatically reached for Bob’s favorite juice at the Jewel, when I passed the lake where we had taken our last walk, when someone uttered a phrase he had relished. The tape loop of his last hours ran constantly in my mind, so that I would see the doctor, my friends Natalie and Barbara arriving, Bob’s son Michael leaving, the amaryllis, Bob’s paralyzed face, the doctor, Natalie, the amaryllis, the doctor... Because of the power of these death-watch memories, relativity especially absorbed me. The paradoxes of time preoccupied me for days on end. Einstein had seen the connection between the study of time and awareness of death’s approach, arguing that death really means nothing because “the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.” I envisioned those points in the universe where radio waves of Bob’s voice, from a long-ago interview, were still new and bright. I invented scenarios in which I stretched time out like taffy, making Bob’s last days as eternal as they had subjectively seemed. I relished that consoling insight that Einstein’s equations were time-reversible, that perhaps time does not move in one direction but can flow backward as well as forward. I imagined moving backward through time, intersecting with a healthy Bob and recreating our life, always hopping back on the time machine before the diagnosis, living those happy times over and over and over. I knew these were fantasies, but I also knew that I no longer knew what time really was. There, once again, were limitless possibilities. If my grief did not disappear, that crazed existential doubt did. Life no longer was so utterly senseless. It made sense again, but in a more marvelous way than I’d ever imagined. I found myself staring at graphs of the Schroedinger wave collapse, imagining a cat alive, dead, alive, dead, all at the same time — imagining Bob’s continued existence as such a wave. I pondered the complementarity between particles and waves, especially the way an observer seems implicated in the emergence into reality of each. Particles dancing and leaping in a virtual world, flickering in and out of measurable existence. Or perhaps they were not even particles at all, but what Henry Sapp called “sets of relationships that reach outward to other things.” To David Bohm, too, particles exist not so much as nuggets of virtual and actual matter, but, as “ongoing movements that are mutually dependent because ultimately they merge and interpenetrate.” Matter disappeared, at this scale, into flashing energy, particles into momentarily observable comets of being. Bob had been composed of these miraculous particles, these miraculous relationships reaching outward toward me, these mutually dependent and interpenetrating movements. And perhaps he still was, in some way, in some

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unmeasurable place. Our lives together had been lived in a space and a time, within a universe through which the mighty and unfathomable river of space-time flows. Were we still connected, as Bell’s Theorem hints, in some intricate and inexpressible way? Was I somehow still affected by the changes that he experienced — in whatever state those blinking-into-existence particles that had been Bob were now? And did my changes affect him still as well? Far from compelling me toward certainty about where and how Bob still existed, quantum theory removed from me any urge toward stapling down reality within one interpretation. In the quantum world, Nick Herbert has pointed out, there are at least eight possible pictures of reality, any of which is more consoling than the Newtonian vision of the universe. Maybe there is an “ordinary reality,” as de Broglie and Einstein believed; in that case the hard stuff that made up Bob is somewhere still in existence, and even now I am breathing atoms that had been part of him during his life. But the Copenhagen hypothesis of Bohr and Heisenberg questions whether there is any such “reality” at all. In their view, Bob and I had lived something like a dream together, and that dream had as much reality without him as it had with him. An alternative reading of the Copenhagen hypothesis is that we create our own realities, that reality exists only as we observe it doing so; in that case, I could create the reality of his continued existence by believing strongly enough. These were only some of the possibilities. There was David Bohm’s theory of the implicate order, which argues that there is an undivided wholeness that could wrap both Bob and me, in our varying current states, in what he called “indivisible quantum processes that link different systems in an unanalyzable way.” There was the fantastic many-world hypothesis, which permitted me to envision that Bob and I still lived happily in another space-time, after he had survived cancer; in that reality, we are writing an essay together, perhaps this very one. Or possibly, the quantum world is based upon no logic that we would recognize. In that case, life’s either/or does not exist, and Bob’s apparent lack of existence is no more true than his apparent existence had been. Or perhaps I created him, or he me; perhaps neither of us existed before we met, we came into being complete with memories when we created each other, and thus he continues in me, his creation. Perhaps, as Fred Alan Wolf has argued, the mind does not “exist in the physical universe at all. It may be beyond the boundaries of space, time and matter. It may use the physical body in the same sense that an automobile driver uses a car.” Or maybe all of this is simultaneously true. Maybe this world is so full of mystery that we cannot ever grasp its actual probabilities and probable actualities. I pondered these extraordinary possibilities as I moved through my ordinary life. Slowly, the pain of my loss began not to diminish, but to find its place in my life. If I did not feel joy, at least my pain had become a familiar companion. I continued reading physics, but with less crazed compulsion. I even began to accept the cruel existence of thermodynamics, with its arrow of time that threatened my happy time-travel imaginings, once I realized how connected to the richness of chaos it was. Every once and again, I thought of the lost keys. In fall, as I was raking the front yard, I imagined that perhaps I had gone to the car for something, that spring day, and had dropped my key ring into the crowded bed of hosta by the door. But no. In winter, when I decided to move the piano, I thought that perhaps I had missed the hidden keys during my frenzied cleaning by not moving that massive upright. But no. That next spring, after preparing for a dinner party, I sat in Bob’s recliner and noticed a side pocket I had missed. There? But no: the keys were not there either. The seasons passed, and the keys remained lost. Each time this happened, I thought to myself that finding the keys no longer mattered. That I had moved beyond the challenge I had flung out to Bob, to the universe, on that wild sad day. That unless the keys found their way back to me in some utterly strange way, I could not regard it as an answer to my desperate plea. I said to myself that finding the keys would be —just finding the keys. That if I found them in some ordinary way, it would prove nothing, one way or the other: I had lost the keys, I found them, there was no connection. And then I found the keys. Friends were coming to dinner, and I was sitting in my study feeling sad, as I often did, and thinking of Bob, which I always did. I wistfully imagined him being with us, thought how much he would have enjoyed it. I felt my loss again, but poignantly this time, as a sad melody rather than as painful cacophony. Then, for no special reason, I looked at the door of my study. It was open after having been closed all day. I kept it closed to keep my dog out and to keep visitors from wandering into my private space. That door had been opened and closed scores of times in the preceding year. When I entered, nothing unusual had caught my eye. My study door is decorated. There is a Celtic knocker in the shape of a squirrel, a St. Bridget cross made of Irish rushes, and a poster. The poster, mounted on heavy blue cardboard, is a memento from the publication of my first book. Issued by my publisher for promotional parties, it shows the book’s cover, my name, and the huge black words “it’s here!”

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The door is one of those old wooden doors with six deep panels. The poster is tacked tightly to the middle of the door, covering the two center panels and resting on the lower. The edges of the poster are flush against the door, especially at top and bottom, with the exception of two areas on each side, halfway down the cardboard, where small gaps exist. From one of these gaps, I noticed a key coyly poking out. I walked to the door and pulled sharply. Immediately, out tumbled the entire missing set. I held the keys loosely in my hand and stared at them. I looked up at the poster, with its emphatic proclamation. And then I smiled and said aloud, “You always did have a great sense of humor, Bob Shea.” It would make a good story to say that everything suddenly fell into place, that all my questions dissolved, that I was somehow transported to a place of certainty and confidence in life’s meaning. That I no longer felt that the universe was a place of uncertainty and chaos. That I recognized and accepted the proof of Bob’s continuing existence. But that would not be true. What I felt was bafflement and curiosity, together with a startled amusement. This could not be the answer to my crazed prayer. No. There had to be some other, more commonsense answer. The keys were behind the poster: effect. Someone must have put them there: cause. I had been alone when the keys disappeared. Ergo, I had put the keys behind the poster. I did not remember doing so; it must have happened accidentally. Somehow, it was clear, I must have dropped the keys behind that poster, that day a year previously when I’d lost them. I set out to prove my thesis. I tried to drop the keys behind the poster. I stood at the door, held the keys up in my right hand, and dropped them on the door. They caught at first on the cardboard’s edge, then bounced off the door molding and slid down to the floor. I tried throwing the keys at the poster from a few feet away. The same thing happened: they slid down and did not hold. I tried walking past the door with the keys dangling from my hand, to see if they would catch in the poster and hold. They did not catch and hold. There was only one way to get the keys into the position I had found them. I had to pull the poster forward, push the keys along a little groove in the door, and shove the poster back in place. Anything else would result in the keys either not lodging behind the poster at all, or dropping out as soon as the door was moved. I spent a half hour trying to make the keys stay behind that poster. Natalie, when I told her the mystery of the found keys, did the same. We stood in the green-carpeted upstairs hallway, two grown women flinging keys at a door, over and over. Thinking of more and more peculiar ways that the keys might have wound up resting on that hidden shelf. Unwilling at first to accept that only careful, conscious effort could bring the keys to rest as they had been, but unable to find any other way to make the keys stay in that place. A year previously, the answer that I had wanted was a simple one: that Bob still existed and, hearing my call for help, would return my keys to me. But once this particular and peculiar miracle had occurred, I resisted accepting it as an answer to that crazy challenge. I attempted to catalog all possibilities. I had gone into a fugue state, placed the keys behind the poster, and forgotten all about them. A visitor had found the keys and whimsically placed them behind the poster. A worker — the plumber, say — had found the keys and hid them rather than giving them to me. These scenarios are possible, though fairly unlikely. Were this a court of law, I would argue that there was no motive for anyone else to hide the keys, and no evidence that I have either before or since gone into a state of mindless fugue. That my beloved Bob had somehow answered my request seems as likely as any of these interpretations. Also: Bob had a unique sense of humor, and he tended to procrastinate. So it would be in character for him to have taken a year to get around to giving me the keys back, and then it would be in a suitably clever fashion. I have, many times since the keys reappeared, asked myself how I would have responded had I found the keys, in exactly the same place, during my original frenzy of grief. I would, I think, have accepted it as a dramatic proof of Bob’s continued existence. Look, I would have said to myself, he returned to me in my hour of need. He loved me still; I could still call upon him and rely upon him; there was life after death. In retrospect, I am glad that I did not find the keys then. Although my pain might have been greatly lessened at the start, I would have been left with only an odd anecdote which, over time, would have grown less and less vital, would have held less and less consolation. Instead, the loss of the keys had propelled me into discovering a way to live with the unresolvability of our most basic questions. During my period of grief, I became familiar — even comfortable — with relativity and uncertainty. Indeed, those theories polished the world so that it shone with a strange and compelling luster. The

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world could never again be ordinary once I had plummeted through the rabbit hole of quantum mechanics. If there was uncertainty at the basis of the universe, there was also a ravishing mystery. After the keys reappeared, as I considered the various possibilities for how they got where they did, I did not feel compelled to prove any one or another. I did not call every visitor and worker who had entered the house in the previous year; I did not have myself examined for unsuspected fugue states. Neither did I convince myself that I had proof of life after death. I was, and I am, willing to live with all the possibilities. I will never know exactly how those keys got on my door, but it does not matter. The loss of the keys did not pose a question to me; it set me on a journey. Finding the keys was not an answer to my question; it was just another station on the way. I once asked a techno-junkie friend where my e-mail is stored. I think I pictured a huge computer somewhere, where I had the electronic equivalent of a little mailbox. I think I pictured that mailbox sometimes full with mail, sometimes empty. But where on earth was the mailbox? My friend guffawed. “There’s no big computer,” she said, “it’s all in the fiber-optic network.” This answer was utterly mysterious to me. In the fiber-optic network? Where is that? How can messages be in a network, rather than in a place? My mind boggled. But quantum theory teaches us that this is not, ultimately a universe of hard mechanistic reality where mail has to rest in mailboxes. It is a universe of connections and relations, of particle waves in space-time where order explicates itself in form and enfolds itself in pattern: the universe is not a great machine, Jeans said, but a great thought. A great thought that expresses itself in matter and energy, ceaselessly changing places. Whatever part of that great thought once appeared as Bob Shea still exists, I now believe, somewhere in the network of this universe. He has only “departed from this strange world a little ahead of me.” Perhaps, as Einstein said, “That means nothing. People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.” If I cannot access the codes to find Bob in the universal network, it does not mean that he has ceased to be. But “being” in that other world must surely be something beyond our imagining in this one, something as different as messages surging through networks are from little metal envelope-filled boxes. I am comforted by having my keys again. We live in story, and the story of the keys now has a pleasing symmetry. But I do not know what that story means. Or, rather: I know that it can mean many things, some contradictory, but perhaps all true at the same time nonetheless. And I am most deeply comforted by knowing that I cannot ever truly know, that the universe is so far beyond our understanding that miracles, even peculiar and rather silly ones like this one, are very likely to keep occurring.

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SO YOU WANT TO BECOME A PHYSICIST? Dr. Michio Kaku, a strong voice in the study of theoretical physics (whose thoughts on wormholes and higher dimensions are also found in this guide), has advice for aspiring physicists. You may wish to share this article with students who are especially intrigued by the concept of rabbit holes explored in the play. “So You Want to Become a Physicist?” by Dr. Michio Kaku: www.mkaku.org I've often been asked the question: how do you become a physicist? Let me first say that physicists, from a fairly early age, are fascinated by the universe and its fantastic wonders. We want to be part of the romantic, exciting adventure to tease apart its mysteries and understand the nature of physical reality. That's the driving force behind our lives. We are more interested in black holes and the origin of the universe than with making tons of money and driving flashy cars. We also realize that physics forms the foundation for biology, chemistry, geology, etc. and the wealth of modern civilization. We realize that physicists pioneered the pivotal discoveries of the 20th century which revolutionized the world (e.g. the transistor, the laser, splitting the atom, TV and radio, MRI and PET scans, quantum theory and relativity, unraveling the DNA molecule was done by physicists). But people often ask the question: do I have to be an Einstein to become a physicist? The answer is NO. Sure, physicists have to be proficient in mathematics, but the main thing is to have that curiosity and drive. One of the greatest physicists of all time, Michael Faraday, started out as a penniless, uneducated apprentice, but he was persistent and creative and then went on to revolutionize modern civilization with electric motors and dynamos. Much of the world’s gross domestic product depends on his work. Einstein also said that behind every great theory there is a simple physical picture that even lay people can understand. In fact, he said, if a theory does not have a simple underlying picture, then the theory is probably worthless. The important thing is the physical picture; math is nothing but bookkeeping. Steps to becoming a Physicist: 1) In high school, read popular books on physics and try to make contact with real physicists, if possible. (Role models are extremely important. If you cannot talk to a real physicist, read biographies of the giants of physics, to understand their motivation, their career path, the milestones in their career.) A role model can help you lay out a career path that is realistic and practical. The wheel has already been invented, so take advantage of a role model. Doing a science fair project is another way to plunge into the wonderful world of physics. Unfortunately, well-meaning teachers and counselors, not understanding physics, will probably give you a lot of useless advice, or may try to discourage you. Sometimes you have to ignore their advice. Don't get discouraged about the math, because you will have to wait until you learn calculus to understand most physics. (After all, Newton invented calculus in order to solve a physics problem: the orbit of the moon and planets in the solar system.) Get good grades in all subjects and good SAT scores (i.e. don't get too narrowly focused on physics) so you can be admitted to a top school, such as Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, MIT, Cal Tech. (Going to a top liberal arts college is sometimes an advantage over going to an engineering school, since it's easier to switch majors if you have a career change.) 2) Next, study four years of college. Students usually have to declare their majors in their sophomore (2nd) year in college; physics majors should begin to think about doing (a) experimental physics or (b) theoretical physics and choosing a specific field. The standard four year curriculum:

a) First year physics, including mechanics and electricity and magnetism (caution: many universities make this course unnecessarily difficult, to weed out weaker engineers and physicists, so don't be discouraged if

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you don't ace this course! Many future physicists do poorly in this first year course because it is made deliberately difficult.). Also, take first (or second) year calculus. b) Second year physics - intermediate mechanics and EM theory. Also, second year calculus, including differential equations and surface and volume integrals. c) Third year physics - a selection from: optics, thermodynamics, statistical mechanics, beginning atomic and nuclear theory d) Fourth year physics - elementary quantum mechanics

Within physics, there are many sub-disciplines you can choose from. For example, there is solid state, condensed matter, low temperature, and laser physics, which have immediate applications in electronics and optics. My own field embraces elementary particle physics as well as general relativity. Other branches include nuclear physics, astrophysics, geophysics, biophysics, etc. Often you can apply for industrial jobs right after college. But for the higher paying jobs, it's good to get a higher degree. 3) So then there is graduate school. If your goal is to teach physics at the high school or junior college level, then obtaining a Masters degree usually involves two years of advanced course work but no original research. There is a shortage of physics teachers at the junior college and high school level. If you want to become a research physicist or professor, you must get a Ph.D., which usually involves 4 to 5 years (sometimes more), and involves publishing original research. (This is not as daunting as it may seem, since usually this means finding a thesis advisor, who will simply assign you a research problem or include you in their experimental work.) Funding a Ph.D. is also not as hard as it seems, since a professor will usually have a grant or funding from the department to support you at a rate of about $12,000 per year or more. Compared to English or history graduate students, physics graduate students have a very cushy life. After a Ph.D: Three sources of jobs

a) Government b) Industry c) The university

Government work may involve setting standards at the National Institute for Standards and Technology (the old National Bureau of Standards), which is important for all physics research. Government jobs pay well, but you will never become wealthy being a government physicist. But government work may also involve working in the weapons industry, which I highly discourage. (Not only for ethical reasons, but because that area is being downsized rapidly.) Industrial work has its ebbs and flows. But lasers and semi-conductor and computer research will be the engines of the 21st century, and there will be jobs in these fields. One rewarding feature of this work is the realization that you are building the scientific architecture that will enrich all our lives. There is no job security at this level, but the pay can be quite good (especially for those in management positions - it's easier for a scientist to become a business manager than for a business major to learn science.) In fact, some of the wealthiest billionaires in the electronics industry and Silicon Valley came from physics/engineering backgrounds and then switched to management or set up their own corporation. But I personally think a university position is the best, because then you can work on any problem you want. But jobs at the university are scarce; this may mean taking several two-year “post-doctorate” positions at various colleges before landing a teaching position as an assistant professor without tenure (tenure means you have a permanent position). Then you have 5-7 more years in which to establish a name for yourself as an assistant professor. If you get tenure, then you have a permanent position and are promoted to associate professor and eventually full professor. The pay may average between $40,000 to $100,000, but there are also severe obstacles to this path.

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In the 1960s, because of Sputnik, a tremendous number of university jobs opened up. The number of professors soared exponentially. But this could not last forever. By the mid 1970s, job expansion began inevitably to slow down, forcing many of my friends out of work. So the number of faculty positions leveled off in the 1980s. Then, many people predicted that, with the retirement of the Sputnik-generation, new jobs at the universities would open up in the 90s. Exactly the opposite took place. First, Congress passed legislation against age-discrimination, so professors could stay on as long as they like. Many physicists in their seventies decided to stay on, making it difficult to find jobs for young people. Second, after the cancellation of the SSC and the end of the Cold War, universities and government began to slowly downsize the funding for physics. As a result, the average age of a physicist increases 8 months per year, meaning that there is very little new hiring. As I said, physicists do not become scientists for the money, so I don't want to downplay the financial problems that you may face. In fact, many superstring theorists who could not get faculty jobs went to Wall Street (where they were incorrectly called “rocket scientists”). This may mean leaving the field. However, for the diehards who wish to do physics in spite of a bad job market, you may plan to have a “fall-back” job to pay the bills (e.g. programming) while you conduct research on your own time. But this dismal situation cannot last. Within ten years, the Sputnik-generation will finally retire, hopefully opening up new jobs for young, talented physicists. The funding for physics may never rival that of the Cold War, but physics will remain an indispensable part of creating the wealth of the 21st century. There are not many of us (about 30,000 or so are members of the American Physical Society) but we form the vanguard of the future. It also helps to join the APS and receive Physics Today magazine, which has an excellent back page which lists the various job openings around the country.

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TEACHER RESOURCES

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FIELD TRIP 101 Here are some tips to help make the field trip experience smooth and enjoyable! We have made it a checklist for ease of use.

Four weeks ahead:

Attend the teacher seminar.

If for some reason you have missed the seminar, arrange to pick up your materials at the theatre with the Education staff.

Begin working with your students on the materials in class.

Two weeks ahead:

Confirm that your paperwork approving the field trip is in order.

Confirm the order for the bus.

Confirm payment for the bus.

Pass out field trip slips to students.

Solicit chaperones. It is preferable to have chaperones who do not require special seating or accommodations. Chaperones are expected to function as an extension of you within the group. Asking around your school to see if there are any student teachers that you could borrow for the trip is a great way to have an energetic adult, as well as providing a learning experience for the young teacher. Ask your LSC members, or teachers recently retired from your school. If there are Cadre Subs assigned to your school, they can be a great resource as well. And, of course, your students’ parents are always encouraged!

One week ahead:

Remind any students missing permission slips to get them in to you.

Send a copy of CHAPERONE 101 and THEATER ETIQUETTE handouts to chaperones so that they may review them. We also recommend that you create a document that is specific to your expectations and rules to give to your chaperones. For example, will you be assigning a small group of students to them to watch over? Are they empowered to confiscate small electronics if they are being used in the theatre?

Two days ahead:

Check the weather forecast. If there is inclement weather expected on the day of the matinee, take appropriate action. If you have hired a bus, call and ask for an earlier pick up to adjust for traffic. If you are taking public transportation, discuss appropriate attire with your students.

Confirm with your chaperones. If they are meeting you at the theater, direct them to our website,

www.goodmantheatre.org for directions and parking instructions. Please remind them to meet you in the lobby at the appropriate time; you may even suggest they arrive 10 minutes before you expect to arrive, just in case. It is much easier for us to seat you this way.

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The day before:

Pass out a copy of THEATER ETIQUETTE to your students, and go over it in class as a reminder of your expectations.

Tell the students who the chaperones will be, and their connection to the school. Remind students that

chaperones are fully empowered to assist you with behavior management, and that if there were no chaperones, there would be no field trip opportunities. Ask the students to help you ensure that there will always be volunteers so that there will always be field trips.

Call your bus company to re-confirm the bus, with arrival and pick up times and addresses. It is alarming how

often those details seem to disappear between booking the bus and the day of the matinee.

Give students a specific assignment for during the show, something to look for, some element of design to pay particular attention to, let them know you will be discussing it after the show. This will help them focus.

The day of the matinee:

Your arrangements should put you at the theatre between 11:15 and 11:45am. Any later than that, and seating becomes problematic. If your bus arrives late, or you are stuck in traffic, please call THE BOX OFFICE at 312-443-3800 and give them a message. We are not at our desks or checking voice mail. By calling the box office, a message will get to us in time for us to respond appropriately.

When you arrive, check in with the following information: TOTAL number of people in your group…don’t forget

to count your chaperones and yourself.

Turn in any relevant paperwork to Education staff.

Ensure that your chaperones are seated one per 10 students. If a mistake is made in seating and you find chaperones seated together or very close together, please move them. It can be helpful to seat chaperones between the last student from a different school and the first student from your group.

Before the pre-show announcement, remind students to turn off all electronics and keep them in their bags or

pockets. During the show:

If one of your students is being disruptive, put a stop to it immediately. If you are not within arms reach or a whisper distance, tugging the sleeve of the students closest and indicating that you would like the attention of the student who is behaving inappropriately is a good way to send information down a row.

If a student from another school seated near you is being disruptive, attempt to get the attention of the nearest

teacher or chaperone from that group. During the Post-Show discussion:

Please continue to monitor appropriate behavior.

Discourage your group from excessive shouting and cheering when one of your students asks a question.

Require respect for all students while they are asking questions.

Since the discussion time is so limited, and we never get to all of the student questions, please do not give into the temptation to ask questions yourself. The time belongs to the students, and we want to get to as many of their comments and questions as possible. If you notice that one of your chaperones is raising his or her hand for a question, please gently ask him or her to refrain.

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CHAPERONE 101 On behalf of the classroom teacher, the students, and everyone at Goodman Theatre, thank you for your participation in this field trip. Offsite educational excursions literally CANNOT happen without the dedication of volunteers like yourself, your presence makes it possible, and for that, we are all extremely grateful.

We know that it can be a somewhat nerve-wracking experience to accompany an energetic group of young people out in the world, and we hope that the following tips and suggestions will help you enjoy the day, and want to continue to support these opportunities. Some things to remember:

• Theater is a live experience. Appropriate response to the production is expected and desired. The actors want the students to respond, to laugh at the funny parts, to sigh at the sad parts. It is okay for a response to be vocal. We aren’t looking for an audience of zombies. Only when a student attempts to make the show about him or herself is it disruptive. Please exercise caution when managing student behavior, a spontaneous “No way!” can actually feed the actor energy, whereas attempting to yell specifically at an actor, pull focus away from the performance, or shouting anything offensive cannot be tolerated.

• The reason that the Chicago Public Schools require one adult per 10 students on all field

trips, is that outside of a normal classroom situation, it is difficult to manage much more than a small group of students. For that reason, you should try to keep about that many students within your sight at all times. Your classroom teacher may in fact assign a particular group of 10 to you specifically, or you may simply be in a large group. But it is important that your focus is on the students.

• As tempting as it may be to engage the teacher or other adult chaperones in conversation,

with the exception of controlled environments, like the school bus, it is better that you are actively engaged with the students. Talk to them! Ask them about their studies, particularly about the play. They have been working with our materials for almost a month; ask them to tell you something interesting, something they are looking forward to about the production, something they are curious about. You will find that they are far more likely to be respectful of your authority if you have attempted to get to know them a little bit.

• If you are volunteering because your child (or a child in the class with whom you have a personal

connection) is attending, talk to them ahead of time about the field trip. Ask for his or her help in encouraging their classmates to have a good time in an adult and appropriate manner. On the day of the trip, ask the child to introduce you to friends, and ask the classroom teacher to allow you to sit near that particular group of students.

• Chaperones will be seated in the theatre amongst the students for maximum adult presence.

If you are accidentally seated next to or very near another chaperone, please bring it to the attention of the classroom teacher so that you can be moved to a better location.

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• Any student within five seats of you on any side is your direct responsibility. If a student in that area is doing anything disruptive, such as text messaging, listening to headphones, or acting out vocally, we are relying on you to put a stop to it. The basic theater etiquette that we expect of our student audiences is attached, and the classroom teacher has gone over these items with the students. Please help us to enforce these rules so that the performance is as enjoyable as possible for everyone.

• As instinctive as it is to ‘Shush’, the hissing noise is usually more disruptive than the talking

itself. Feel free to use the students around you to help make contact with the student who is misbehaving. Usually some clear eye contact and strong body language are enough to put an end to the problem.

• Ask your classroom teacher ahead of time if you are empowered to take away items such as

cell phones, gameboys, or music players. These items can be returned at the end of the performance. If you are not able to remove the item, be sure you see the student put it away.

• As difficult as it can be, remember that anger begets anger. If you are perceived as ‘mean’

by the students, they are less likely to accept your authority. Be firm, but not overly harsh. A look that conveys the message “C’mon, help me out and stop talking, okay?” will serve better than one that seems to say, “Shut up right now, or you are in big trouble!” If you correct a student’s behavior during Act One, be sure to positively reinforce their cooperation during intermission. If they behave appropriately during Act Two, pull them aside after the show to thank them for their cooperation.

• The post-show discussion is a very important part of the experience for students. Please

continue to assist with behavior during the discussion, so that it can go as smoothly as possible. And while there are always lots of questions that we have about the production, the very limited discussion time belongs to the students. We never have enough time to address all of their questions, and therefore we ask that you refrain from asking your own questions during this time.

Thank you again for your assistance in making these matinees a success, and we’ll see you at the theatre!

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TEACHER RESPONSE FORM Please complete this response form and return it to us no later than Wednesday, May 2nd. This form can also be found on the ECP Teacher Blog or taken on-line through a link on the Blog. Please remember to send us your Student Response Letters, as requested in the Student Guide, by May 2nd as well. Name: School: Subject/Grade of class you brought to the matinee: 1. How helpful was the Teacher Seminar in preparing you for teaching Rabbit Hole in your classroom? How can we

improve the seminar in the future? 2. How did you and your students interact with the text of the play? Please give examples of exercise used

and/or assignments given. 3. How useful was the Teacher Guide in helping you prepare your students for seeing Rabbit Hole? How can we make

it more useful in the future? 4. How useful was the Student Guide in helping you prepare your students for seeing Rabbit Hole? How can we make

it more useful in the future? 5. Please describe how you used the Student Guide in your classroom, specifically telling us which sections you used

and which projects your students completed.

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TEACHER RESPONSE FORM (CONT.) 6. Which activities/discussion questions in the Student and Teacher Guides best prepared your students for seeing

Rabbit Hole? Which were least helpful? 7. How useful were the Additional Resources found in your Teacher Guide in preparing your students to see Rabbit

Hole? Did you use them? If so, how? 8. How did your students react to the performance of the play? Did any of them make any memorable comments? 9. Was your class able to stay for the post-show discussion at the theater? How was the experience? If you could not

stay, why not? 10. How useful did you find the Backstage at The Goodman DVD? Did you show it to your students? How did they

respond? 11. Describe your students and your own overall reactions to Rabbit Hole in your studies and in performance.