In Preparation for an Odd Exercise in Oral Interpretation (An Essay)

When Oliver Cromwell outlawed the Catholic religion in Ireland, the followers of St. Francis Xavier and Saint Ignatius of Loyola sent in their spiritual army to oppose Oliver and reignite Catholicisim. These were the Jesuits.

I find it semi-ironic that my grandson Oliver is now attending Boston College High School. He takes the train each day to Boston from Duxbury. The train ride takes about forty minutes. Oliver is in seventh grade and his first year of Jesuit education. This is a challenge on many levels.

I went to a Jesuit high school. I wrote a letter of reccommendation for Oliver's entrance into the school. We stay in touch with Oliver about his experience at Boston College High. Back in my day, the Jesuits were big on discipline. If we transgressed we had to serve a detention which was known as a Jug which stands for Justice Under God.

Oliver received his first jug a couple of weeks ago for a minor transgression of which I could relate. Everybody gets jugged in a Jesuit education. No surprise. For Jug punishments in my day we had to gather in the Prefect of Disciplines office and print copies of segments of papal encyclicals which made me that much more sympathetic of Bartleby in Herman Melville's short novel Bartleby the Scriviner

We did get a surprise last week when we learned that Oliver had an assignment to do an oral interpretation and he chose a passage from The Night of the Iguana.

Night of the Freaking Iguana?

How in the world did he come up with that one.

As it turns out, he was given a choice of playwrights: Those playwrights were Arthur Miller....Tennessee Williams....Neil Simon or Eugene O'Neil.

MMMMKKKKKAAAYY.

Oliver plays hockey and football and baseball. I doubt if he had ever read a play in his life.

We speculated on how in the hell he had come up with Night of the Iguana. It didn't lake long to figure that out.

Imagine a 12 year old boy trying to choose a playwright from a list of names of which he was unfamiliar.

Neil, Eugene, Arthur or Tennesse

Pretty sure that kid might pick a guy Named Tennessee.

Having done that, Oliver next had to pick out a play by that author and choose a passage from that play to read.. Having picked out a guy named Tennessee, if I were a kid who had to go by titles alone I'm pretty sure that I would have chosen Night of the Iguana and hoped it was story about an Iguana rather than a Rose Tattoo or a Street Car named Desire or a Cat on Hot Tin Roof or Glass Menagerie or a Suddenly Last Summer.

I'm right widdya kid.

I know a little bit more about Night of the Iguana having seen the sweat soaked movie adaption of the play starring among others Ava Gardner, Richard Burton, Sue Lyon and Deborah Kerr and directed by John Huston. In the movie, Burton is in a constant external and internal feverish battle with his conscience due to his uncontrollable sexual urges which fly against his beliefs as a man of the Episcopalian collar.  There is more than a hint of  lesbianism, nymphomania, even pedophilia in the film at a time when such subjects were tabboo. 

Williams described the play as a love story plain and simple. If there is love in the movie, it's not clear who loves whom and whatever it is they call it, the loves are neither pure nor simple.

Probably the most lingering image of the film is Sue Lyon walking barefoot over broken glass as a consequence of her irresistible, tempestuous attraction to the much older Burton. Lyon was just coming off of her steamy movie debut as the nymphet title character in Kubrick's Lolita.

Pain, guilt and lust are at the heart of the play.

All in all, I couldn't put the play in the context of a seventh grade assignment at a Jesuit school.

But hey, the times as always are a changin'.

Our oldest daughter, Erin contacted us about the assignment. She wondered if we knew how to get  copies of scripts which apparently was also part of the task which Oliver was presented . Not only did he have to select a playwright, select a play but also figure out a way to get a script and make a portion of that script available to his classmates so they could read it before Oliver interpreted it and then analyze both the passage and the interpretation of the passage as presented by Oliver.

Remember this is a class of 12 year old boys, mostly white and mostly Catholic.

His grandmother Lynn got on the case and in a few minutes she had located a free script  which she sent to Erin who gave it to Oliver. 

The passage selected was a poem written by a side character in the movie/play named Nonno who has spent 20 years working on the same poem which he finishes and delivers just before he dies which serves as the conclusion to the movie.

Wow

We read the poem before sending it to Erin and didn't care for it nor could we imagine this passage, coming out of the mouth of a 12 year old kid. I tired to read it aloud to Lynn an my interpretation left Lynn in a state of gobsmacked anger and confusion mixed with pity and annoyance at my stammering and oddly timed accentuations.

That's when we started wondering about the assignment itself and speculating on its genesis towards fulfillment which I have included in this essay.

We can barely wait to see what happens next.

Stay tuned.