The bully pulpit

The main event in the 2013 Shakespeare Festival St. Louis season, Twelfth Night, doesn’t open for another month but another Festival show, Winning Juliet, opens in just two days, on April 26th.

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Winning Juliet (as you may already know) is a newly commissioned play for young audiences by the Festival for the 2013 MetroYouth In-School Kids for Kids production. The script is written by an award-winning playwright team, Elizabeth Birkenmeier and Christopher Limber, with music by David Toretta and choreography by Melfreya Findaly. It uses the story of a production of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet at the fictional Stratford High School (their mascot: the pursuing bears) to address a very real issue: bullying, both in real life and on the Internet.

Bullying, of course, is not new. I expect most of us have encountered it at one time or another as kids. But the face of bullying has changed in the last decade or two—in ways that make it harder for teachers and administrators to fight and for kids to escape.

When I was a kid, every school had a bully or two. But the range of their persecution was limited. They could only get at you during school hours, and only under very limited circumstances even then. They could still gang up on you, but it wasn’t easy to pull off without attracting the attention and incurring the wrath of school officials. No matter how bad it got, home was always a refuge, as were non–school-related activities and groups.

But that, of course, was back during the Eisenhower-Kennedy-Johnson years. Computers were massive things that took up entire buildings, and phones had rotary dials. Video meant a “big enormous twelve-inch screen” (as they say in Little Shop of Horrors) and audio meant the radio or maybe even a record player.

[Historical note to my fellow cast members: the LP record, to quote my cabaret pal Ken Haller, is a primitive sound reproduction device invented by the ancient Mayans.]

These days bullying, as one of our actors noted, often takes place “below the radar”, promulgated via email, blogs and, increasingly, social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. For teenagers and adults as well, virtual relationships have become as real and important as physical-world relationships. This means that bullying can happen in cyberspace as well as in real space. And when it does, it can leave its victims with no safe haven. Physical barriers are irrelevant when the Internet is in every room and in every pocket.

The teen years are a time of great psychological vulnerability, when concepts of self that can last an entire lifetime are formed. The impact of a pervasive atmosphere of hostility during those years can be devastating. As news headlines have often shown us, kids who are bullied may harm themselves or others.

In our play the bullies are easily identified and dealt with by Dean Duke (my role). In real life things are rarely so simple. Aside from the difficulty of detecting a bullying campaign (especially when cyberspace is involved), school administrators are often faced with a murky legal situation. Laws on bullying (if they exist at all) vary from state to state, and in some cases attempts to create anti-bullying laws have encountered opposition—some of it reasonable, much of it (in my view) paranoid and morally questionable at best.

So bullying, in the real or virtual world, remains a complex and sometimes contentious subject. Winning Juliet will, we hope, spark some good discussions on the subject among students, parents, and educators.  There will be talkback sessions after each show with the creators and performers, so stick around and let your voice be heard.