Tossing Lines, Catching Subtext

Anyone who has taught literature or theatre to teenagers recently will notice a certain tendency to take things literally or at face value when reading. We could blame the general flood of information for this, but that won’t help them learn to read more deeply. What will is gamifying their relationship to text.

Tossing Lines is a technique from the Folger Shakespeare Library’s “Shakespeare Set Free” curriculum that can open the door to this for students. I’ve been using it for years to get students interested in Shakespeare, but this year I’m working with American Literature Honors students on Death of Salesman, and I decided to see what would happen if I applied it to Miller.

What You’ll Need

• A selection of lines from the play on separate little strips of paper. Make sure that you have one for each student, even if there are repeating lines that you want to highlight.

• Luckily, it’s easier than ever to get a random sampling of lines from a text. Just make sure that you don’t use AI for this because it is known to hallucinate.

• A few hackysacks or Koosh balls or beanbags- you are looking for safe items that can be tossed, but that don’t bounce because that will cause distraction from the main event.

What to Do

• Push the desk aside in your classroom or move to an open area.

• Allow students to form groups of five or six and give each group a beanbag or whatever you’re using to toss around.

• Encourage students to say their line and then toss the beanbag to a classmate. Have them do this a couple of times until everyone in the circle has participated.

• Ask them to look at their line and notice any punctuation or charged words, words that are powerful and ask them to do their line again stressing the punctuation or the charged words.

• Now have them do another round of tossing where they emphasize what they feel is probably the emotion behind the line.

A note: They’re going to laugh. They’re going to drop the ball. That is OK as long as they’re moving around and saying the lines.

• Next, have them get into a larger circle and toss the line a few more times.

Get them to turn and talk to other people. If you’re doing this right at the beginning, you can ask questions about who are these people? What is this play probably about? In the case of Death of A Salesman, Students noticed right away that many of the characters talked about finding themselves in some way. Dreams or living up to their potential. This theme came to the forefront a lot faster than it would have. Had we simply just started reading the play and had to muddle through Willie‘s first exchange with Linda where he’s an old man, confused, with two sons who are talking about their conquests.

EXTENSIONS

In the unit, I am teaching on Death of a Salesman, we are focusing on acting, staging, and playwriting.

So I extended this exercise a little further by:

• Having students get a random partner and create a scene for their two random lines, which they performed for the class as a little dip into the water of performing.

Students were asked to show a connection through the action of the people on stage.

This got us into some good discussion about relationship, levels, and stage picture, areas which will be helpful for them, moving forward in staging scenes.

I imagine that it would also work great if you wanted to take a more literary approach to have students pair up randomly or have multiples of the same kinds of lines and use this as an exercise to make predictions about specific characters or themes.

You could also:

• Have students react to this line in a journal entry or bell ringer previous to the tossing exercise

• use these lines as first lines of a poem or prose piece

• Use these lines in an exit ticket for class, making a prediction about what the play will be about

• create some sort of close reading incentive for when the student discovered their line throughout reading the play

Anyway, this is a fun and low stakes way to get students reading, listening, speaking, and writing, either through the process of devising for performance, or in a variety of other creative modalities. Let me know if you try it with another text!