TEACHER REFLECTION: Power & Tableau in the Classroom
William FonsecaUsing Tableau to Examine Power in Two Plays
One of things that I did this year was to use Claudia and Krista’s “power pose” game as a way of direc�ng students to look at the role of power in two plays: Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and A Streetcar
Named Desire
In each play, four characters (2 male and 2 female) enter a “rectangle of power,” similar to the psychiatrist Murray Bowen’s idea of “triangula�on” in family systems theory. In these rectangles, characters navigate how to acquire, maintain, and enforce power over other characters, whether that’s through forming alliances (e.g. Blanche appealing to her sisterly alliance with Stella in order to topple the roman�c alliance of Stanley/Stella) or through discovering new sources of power (e.g. Martha using her sexual power to humiliate George, Honey, and Nick).
To get students thinking about these ques�ons, I asked them to play the game, first as themselves, then with certain direc�ons from me. In the first atempt, the students ini�ally established power through physical means – shoulders back, chin up, center stage, etc – and then transi�oned to power that was rooted in knowledge imbalance and perspec�ve – a student stands to the side, looking at the “powerful” posers in the center, and makes an unimpressed face. This gave us an opportunity to pause and think about which characters possess physical power in the plays we look at and which possess knowledge. More importantly, how useful is each? (One student compellingly argued that even though knowledge created power here, knowledge didn’t help anyone in “Streetcar;” it was brute physicality (including sexual) that won out.)
Next, I asked students to play the game again, this �me having to embody a par�cular character from either play. In one intriguing moment, a student who was asked to embody Honey chose to cradle an invisible botle and stand off to the side. When I asked why that was a posi�on of power for Honey, the student responded, “well, whenever the people in this play get in fights, they end up ge�ng humiliated eventually, so when Honey just removes herself and drinks, she is actually protec�ng herself from ever ge�ng humiliated, which is powerful.”
Lastly, we looked at the philosopher James Carse’s dis�nc�on between power and strength, in which power exists insofar as you have more of it than someone else, whereas strength exists insofar as when you give it away, it grows. In the last itera�on of the power game, I asked students to instead invert it into “strength” poses, which allowed us to compare and contrast these poses to George’s “saving” act at the end of Virginia Woolf and the lack of a similarly “strong” act at the end of Streetcar
William Fonseca is a teacher from Brooklyn, NY and an alum of TFANA’s 2022 NEH Ins�tute: Teaching Shakespeare’s Plays through Scholarship & Performance, which focused on “Body Poli�cs: Authority, Sex, & Resistance in Shakespeare’s Plays ”
Approaching Conversations about Power through Performance & Scholarship
In my Senior class, I used the power pose game to direct students to look at the role of power in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao The Seniors made the same moves in the game that the Juniors did: they began by establishing power physically, then evolved into establishing it through perspec�ve and knowledge, i.e. a person standing to the side, looking at the whole scene go down.
When I asked who is the most powerful person in Oscar Wao, they agreed it must be Yunior, who, as narrator, possesses the greatest knowledge advantage. This allowed us to look at two ideas that I borrowed from Julie and Mario’s work with us on scholarly approaches to power.
First, one of the recurring themes of our study of the three Shakespeare plays was the rela�onship between poli�cal power and sexual violence, or more straigh�orwardly, in Julie’s axiom, the idea that “tyrants are rapists.” I wrote this on the board and asked students how the novel’s two tyrants – Rafael Trujillo and Yunior – demonstrate this.
Next, we looked at Louis Althusser's dis�nc�on between repressive state apparatuses and ideological state apparatuses, which Julie and Mario introduced in our reading of Measure for Measure. The students iden�fied how the repressive state apparatus of Trujillo func�oned in the novel (e.g. disappearances, rape, genocide, etc) and how his ideological state apparatus func�oned (e.g. teacher at school turning in student who wrote pro-democracy essay; teacher at school, in a Trujillo-like way, exer�ng sexual power over students). This allowed us to compare and contrast the “tyrannies” of Trujillo and Yunior. When I asked who is the more effec�ve tyrant, one female student, who was not convinced that Yunior changes in any significant way by the end of the novel, remarked, “well, Trujillo’s dictatorship fell; Yunior is s�ll going.”
William Fonseca is a teacher from Brooklyn, NY and an alum of TFANA’s 2022 NEH Ins�tute: Teaching Shakespeare’s Plays through Scholarship & Performance, which focused on “Body Poli�cs: Authority, Sex, & Resistance in Shakespeare’s Plays ”