Everybody's a director

As part of today's lecture on "Job and the Arts" I had students break out into groups of 3 and spend 10 minutes thinking about how they might stage the Book of Job. This is an activity I planned last time I taught the class but, running short on time, dropped. I nearly dropped it again this year, as it was planned for the end of last week's class (about Theatre of War's Book of Job project), and time again ran out. But I'm glad to have tried it today - and not just because it's the perfect set-up for Carol Newsom's dramatization of her interpretation of Job as a piece of avant garde theater.

Here are some of the ideas the students came up with. Who knew many of them see Job as some kind of dark comedy?

Experimental theater, modern clothing, Job is constantly bathed in red light

Midsummer Night’s Dream inspired, casting job as a fairy, God as head spirit of the forest

New York Jewish community setting; big rotating lazy susan, each friend has section of circle; set rotates between city (reality) and nature/mystical

Job as a woman, God played by multiple people/a collective of voices speaking to Job 

One man show: Job has to make the sets himself, do all the costume changes, suffering through having to change all the scenes himself; especially funny that he is asking “why me! What has happened!” after he sets it all up himself; have the friends of Job in the crowd, give the script to the entire audience 

God speaks to himself as God/Satan

Live improv sketch; actors should bring in their own grievances to the sketch to make it their own 

Set in a suburban high school; friends are all stoners skipping class getting very existential; God is cast as very cartoonish principal with walkie talkie and dangling keys 

Musical comedy set in an office; watercooler talk every week, Job complains about life and fear of being fired; boss is Elihu 

Each friend is in a different room

Brechtian or “epic” theatre style. Very artificial feels almost sit-com like… alienating the audience from Job asking the audience to think objectively about the material rather than empathetically

Comedy of Q Anon believers, suffer and experience horrible situations all the while blaming the world for their issues not aware of their own absurdity (believing obama is a satan worshiper)

Over-the-top debate style; all of the actors sitting at a table in “Job’s home”; God is the “moderator” 

We would put the audience in Job's position and have them play Job. Somehow puts the audience through pain and suffering. Hire actors that are good at improvising. Interact with the audience and make them feel as though they've had something taken from them. Give the audience an experience of loss and replace their loss with something “better” at the end

Elihu as an actual child

I'm not sure how all of these would work but many seem to me quite inspired! The prevalence of comedy may have something to do with the fact that the class began with one of the TA's giving a mini-lecture of comedy as a performance of the problem of suffering, linking "A Serious Man" and Job, but I also suspect that being thrown together with strangers in a zoom breakout room may have made comic settings easier to propose. I told the class I thought these were terrific but that if, in the impossible task of agreeing on something with people they didn't know they found themselves thinking of different stagings of their own - so much the better. 

After a short lecture on interpretations which take Job apart and those which put it back together again, I sent them on their way with the imaginary staging of Carol Newsom (some of whose work was assigned this week). Newsom thinks every component of Job plays its part, not in producing a seamless production but rather in ensuring a jarringly "polyphonic" experience which "shifts to the audience much of the work" of grappling with the problems being explored. 

We have work to do... but the work has commenced!