Hungarian students as Americans

I've had the opportunity to work with the drama students here on an American play about test anxiety. This gives me a peek into Hungarian perceptions about Americans as well as straight comparison of interpretive choices of how a student might react to anxiety.

The twelfth grade students were working with a translated text in Hungarian while the ninth graders were working, partly with me, on the original English version. I am fortunate to see the first public performances of both, each as part of a separate contest, whose results I'll know soon.

Praises to Nagy Barnabás, their director and teacher. Barna seems to be all over the school all the time, organizing, building, set-directing: whenever there is any kind of assembly, like the 1848 assembly pictured in the last blog, he's in the middle of it; and his students are always rehearsing and preparing for performances little and big at any hour of the day, singing in the big hall, dancing, enunciating; and he seems often to be taking calls from various people around the country and outside it in ongoing programs planned or sought for the theater students. He somehow finds the time during all this to teach Stephanie and me some Hungarian also. Above all, his performances are creative and energetic and make great use of materials at hand.

For this particular play, not only did Barna introduce several new subplots and relationships into the story and direct the students with flavor and discipline, he also built and painted a paper-mâché head for a Chinese dragon dance he researched and choreographed (his own idea); designed a sign reading 9d or 12d out of spoons and scissors and other things mentioned and placed during the performance (seen in the first picture); and engineered a remote-controlled car to collect and deliver notes from student to student on the stage.

In this play, the main character is an insecure bundle of nerves facing a test that quickly gets away from him. At least, this is the way I've always thought of him. The first instinct of the boys playing this character, though, was to see in his distress anger everywhere at everybody. Hungarian men, I may have said before, are more chivalrous in deed and attitude than American men; and perhaps this is the same piece. When we watch television, Stephanie and I have noticed that what happens to the voices dubbed over American actors is a gruffifying, deepening in almost every case. Homer Simpson's voice in America isn't high, but it has a charming infantile lilt; here, it is dubbed with manly poise, and the humor is retained by his obliviousness and not childishness. And so the character in our American play likewise loses a familiar insecurity to which we might relate, but gains an unhinged quality we might recognize and fear.

In the two pictures below, Marci's character demonstrates the manly rage of a student about to fail a test.

Ricsi, also featured in the 1848 blog, had originally interpreted the character much the same way. But over time, his portrayal softened, a point I will emphasize below with a soft light photograph. 

One feature of American schools everyone seems to know about is its cheerleaders. Dráva Völgye Középiskola has cheerleaders, except they don't lead at games, and they don't perform gymnastic or acrobatic feats, or sly erotic gestures mixed in their choreographed routines; they are what I think of as a drill team or majorettes, with white boots and batons, and they perform during town events and festivals. But American cheerleaders, people around the world see from movies, are the popular girls with long legs and cleavage so worshipped and feared that they call for and get away with anything. While there were no cheerleaders in the original play, a male character who walks into the classroom late and leaves with a perfect score in less than two minutes quickly evolved into a female cheerleader.

While the ninth grade performance above captures the cheerleader stereotype well enough, despite much experience with the activity in Hungarian schools, the twelfth grade performance below goes the saucy step further. The video below captures something else, too: the teacher and her crush on a student. I don't think we would risk making this kind of joke on a school stage in America, at least not as a casual sub-plot. Maybe we would. Gréta received special recognition from the jury for her role as the teacher, so her courage (and moves?) were perhaps rewarded as well as her acting. Meanwhile, back in Seattle, a math teacher was charged Tuesday with her own misbehaviors with a student, while another pled guilty the same week. Gréti was shocked when I told her, much to my relief. 

In terms of stereotypes, though, nothing prepared me for what another school was performing during the English play festival which I attended with Barna and the ninth graders. While other participating schools chose things like Oscar Wilde adaptations and capitalism allegories and existentialist confrontations with death, a school from Hungary's northeast adapted a Canadian play from Manitoba, a highly ironic play clearly written by a Native American, and intended, most assuredly, to soak an audience in ugly stereotypes and confront Natives with their reification of such types. It's not the kind of irony or self-criticism non-Indians can pull off easily... or Hungarian teenagers...

Below is a picture of a character named N----r. He's the one in blackface. He's bleeding from the leg where a dog attacked him (see his torn pant leg?); he's shot himself by accident too; he's got a toothache, and the woman below is preparing to pull his tooth with pliers but will end up straddling him, and, after recommending alcohol, gambling, and sex, will punch him in the jaw instead. Later they will smoke cigarettes rolled from pages of the bible. 

A final part of the festival experience was going before the jury and listening to their criticism, which lasts about 40 minutes. As an American, I think I am unsuited to the patience and grace that such listening requires. The twelfth graders in Pécs faced three very unsmiling men who continued not to smile while they delivered their feedback and advice; and the students, in turn, received the criticism, which lasted as long as the play itself, with silence and poise. The ninth graders received their feedback in the cellar below, and I was grateful for the smiles and laughter of the first two judges, and wondered about the third, who sat as gravely as those judges in Pécs, and who finally opened his mouth to criticize the heavy Hunglish used by our students, for 15 straight minutes, tearing into them for not taking the English of the English festival seriously enough to learn how to pronounce better. And, because I am an American, and because I understood enough Hungarian finally to be insulted, I wanted nothing more than to defend our students, who are ninth graders new to the language, and to defend me, me!, because wasn't he talking about me? 

It wasn't an anxious, nervous response: it was a manly rage. But I kept it in, trying to match the quiet grace and chivalry of the fifteen year olds around me.