I enjoyed sharing this book with our high school book discussion club; it led to some interesting discussions about the format and the 9/11/2001 eventI enjoyed sharing this book with our high school book discussion club; it led to some interesting discussions about the format and the 9/11/2001 event itself. The book is a transcript of the play these high school students wrote and performed in 2002, after experiencing Sept. 11th from only 4 blocks away, attending Stuyvesant High School in NYC. They used Anna Deveare Smith's technique of interviewing real people (their fellow students, teachers, custodians, even a random "coffee shop guy" who interrupted one of the interview sessions), then performing a script created from the actual words of the interviewees, while portraying those individuals. My students found it a little challenging to follow, because the monologues are literal transcriptions, with "ums" and "you knows" and incomplete sentences, which can be jarring to read. Also in written form it's not so easy to see emotions, to know why the sentences are left hanging, and to understand that the students they saw in the photographs in the book were portraying other people (some of the girls played male characters, for example, or people of different races, and their transformations would have been more evident in video/play form than just reading the descriptions in the book). Luckily there's a very nice YouTube video of another high school's filmed interpretation of excerpts from the play, so we were able to watch that to get the full idea. But everyone thought it was a good idea, an excellent way to express emotions and thoughts about a difficult experience. I hope other schools have dramatized it over the years, or done something similar....more
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