Many years ago, I wrote a one-act for the Minnesota Fringe Festival. The title Nineteen Cows Leaving Beirut was a play on the acronym No Child Left Behind. The script was a deconstruction of 1984, my experience as a high school teacher, and, thanks to my friend, mentor, and the play’s director Michael, a music.
The performance was a beautiful atrocity. Consider yourself lucky if you were one of the handful of people in our audiences. The play ended with Winston, a high school student, being forced to shoot his girlfriend Julia in the head under the guidance of his teacher Mr. O’Brien. It was a dark play. It was dark time.
Nineteen Cows Leaving Beirut led to one of my favorite all-time reviews.
“Watching this play,” an anonymous commenter wrote, “was like receiving a lobotomy with a jackhammer.”
I’m still laughing about this review 15 years later.
***
The legendary review of Nineteen Cows Leaving Beirut comes to mind as I work in my office this morning. Earlier this summer, I wrote about moving into a new office. The move remains something of a work in progress.
Currently, I’m sitting in a chair pulled up to a filing cabinet. Old furniture litters the office. Old files, too. Oh, and there is spackle drying on the wall.
The desk in the department chair’s office was a battleship. I kindly requested that it be sunk. It is taking months, but the desk is easing into the ocean like an old man ordering soup in a deli. I await the glorious day when the kind people from the university remove the wreckage and I can begin to humanize this new office. It is hard for me to work in a space that doesn’t feel good. For now, I’m writing emails (and this blog) on an old filing cabinet.
To make matters worse, the same window construction that began when I was hired at Iowa almost 5 years ago continues. At this very moment, a jackhammer is jackhammering the bricks above me.
It occurs to me, as I sit in my office this morning, that this is probably what the audience member who reviewed Nineteen Cows Leaving Beirut felt as they watched Security Guard Mulvana sanitize the standardized testing space with a flamethrower.
I’m laughing 15 years later. Say what you want, but it is special when a piece of literature keeps moving you long after it has been lobotomized by a reviewer.
***
These days, instead of writing dark plays like Nineteen Cows Leaving Beirut, I am awaiting new office furniture and preparing to spend the year as a department chair. Wild.
Things are always changing, and I just change along with them. But, as with good improvisation, what happened before remains with me and informs what happens next. I’m still the same person who resisted the overwhelming pressure to conform to the patterns of this present age by writing a play that lobotomized a poor reviewer who might have thought standardized testing was a good thing.
I don’t want to lobotomize anybody, but I do want to call out the harm that is done when teaching and learning are reduced to standardized ways of knowing, being, and living in this complicated world. That oppressive darkness runs rampant in school and society. In you and me. I don’t know that I can do much to stop that darkness, but I don’t want to be complicit in a lie. And I’ll keep seeking light.
I’ll shine from a department chair’s office this years. Wild.
Samuel Jaye Tanner 