Rita is an insomniac, and Peter loves the sign at the roller coaster: “Ride at your own risk.” The Huntington Theater has revived Craig Lucas’s Prelude to a Kiss, a romantic comedy that veers off into near tragedy when Rita kisses an old man on her wedding day and magically swaps souls with him. At the Humanities Forum following the Sunday matinee on May 23, I spoke with Charles Haugland about fairy-tale elements in the play, as well as about the folkloric significance of kisses.

In the program, Craig Lucas emphasizes theater’s power to show us “What if?”, to stage counterfactuals and to let us see perils and possibilities. Lucas draws repeatedly on fairy-tale motifs, shuffling them around to produce wry, ironic effects. Rita is a kind of Sleeping Beauty in reverse–her apocalyptic visions keep her up late into the night. She and Peter fall under the “spell” of love, but their love is cursed by an uninvited guest at their wedding, one not unlike the malicious thirteenth fairy at the celebration of Sleeping Beauty’s birth. Allusions abound to Beauty and the Beast, Little Red Riding Hood, and even Bluebeard.

The kiss in the play’s title has a venerable history in literary and visual culture, where toxic kisses and redemptive kisses work their sorcery. There is the kiss of death, the Judas kiss, and all those depleting kisses from the vampire, the succubus, and the equally lethal incubus. Yet there is also the kiss that liberates, transforms, and provides the breath of life. The stories of Pygmalion and Galatea, Sleeping Beauty and the Prince, the Frog King and the Princess, Beauty and the Beast all come to mind.

For a quick tutorial on the kiss in visual culture, the link below gives the obvious examples (Rodin, Klimt, and Munch) along with some wonderful lesser known works by Brancusi, Waterhouse, Fragonard, and others.

 http://www.lilith-ezine.com/articles/sex…

Prelude to a Kiss at the Huntington reminded me of how theater has the power, not just to ask “what if,” but also to touch, move, and transform us. As in Hans Baldung Grien’s Death and the Maiden, beauty and joy are shadowed by decay and death. And, thankfully, the consolations of the imagination in this play about what Byron called love’s heart-quake are not at all imaginary consolations.

Abby Goodnough writes in the New York Times about a charter school in Springfield, Mass, where Thomas Wartenberg and students from Mount Holyoke College use classic children’s books as a springboard for philosophical discussions. Bravo! Stories take children into counterfactuals worlds, challenging them to explore the perils and possibilities that authors have described in response to that great question “What if?” In another post, I described the work of Alison Gopnik and how she views children as philosophers, scientists, and explorers who use their curiosity about the world not only to make discoveries but also to envision how things might be, could be, and should be.

Professor Wartenberg describes the upside to the philosophy lessons, and the children in the Springfield school are already wonderfully wise, as they reveal when asked to explain why they like philosophy.

It’s giving kids a way to figure out what they think, support their own views and reason with one another,” [Wartenberg] says. “So I can’t imagine this isn’t helping them on standardized tests.”

But the pupils in Ms. Runquist’s class said they liked philosophy because it involved reading good books and expressing themselves.

“We can say things about what we believe and stuff,” a girl named Autumn said. “It’s what we feel and what we think.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/18/education/edlife/18philosophy-t.html?pagewanted=1

Heidi Hirschl sent me this article about the new exhibition at the Jewish Museum, “Curious George Saves the Day.” The story behind the Curious George series is fascinating–worth a book of its own. Margret and H.A. Rey fled Paris in 1940 on bicycles, making their way to Lisbon. They went initially to Rio de Janeiro, then New York, and finally settled in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Now that Curious George has become a franchise, he has been tamed to a great extent. The ether scene in one of the early books can no longer be found in versions of George’s adventures today.

Here’s the link to Edward Rothstein’s fascinatingly informative article about the exhibit.

 http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/26/arts/d…

Julie Just writes about the “parent problem” in young adult literature and reminded me that Chapter 6 of Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn gives us the one of the first fully elaborated accounts of child abuse from the point of view of the victim. Here’s a brief excerpt:

But by and by pap got too handy with his hick’ry, and I couldn’t stand it. I was all over welts. He got to going away so much, too, and locking me in. Once he locked me in and was gone three days. It was dreadful lonesome. I judged he had got drowned, and I wasn’t ever going to get out any more. I was scared. I made up my mind I would fix up some way to leave there.

We live in a culture that refers constantly to helicopter parents, yet there are many young adult books with self-absorbed, negligent parents who can’t be bothered to attend to their children’s needs. In children’s literature you need a certain degree of parental incompetence and absence to enable the child’s “triumphant rise.” An earlier age depicted cruel, abusive parents or simply killed off the biological mother and father, but in a very different genre–fairy tales and fantasy. Is the parent problem in YA fiction symptomatic of a new hands-off attitude among parents today?

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/04/books/review/Just-t.html

Nicholas Kristof has an interesting column on the gender gap in verbal skills. Boys may still be ahead when it comes to math skills, but girls are well ahead of their male counterparts in verbal skills. Kristof writes:

Many theories have been proposed. Some people think that boys are hard-wired so that they learn more slowly, perhaps because they evolved to fight off wolves more than to raise their hands in classrooms. But that doesn’t explain why boys have been sinking in recent decades.

I’m not persuaded that gathering helped girls evolve to raise their hands in the classroom. And I wonder if the lag has something to do with the fact that, just as girls can wear skirts and pants, they also can read both the Nancy Drew series and the Hardy Boys. As a student once told me, his reading of The Secret Garden was constantly interrupted by astonished adults, who told him that the book was really for girls. He ended up reading it under the covers, with the help of a flashlight. There are, of course, many other signals sent to boys about books and reading. Rather than “nurturing boys with explosions” and coaxing them into reading books with ghosts, boxers, wrestlers, and bombers, maybe it’s time to change those signals. Still, some great recommendations on guysread.com and happy to see that Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm made it onto the list, even if their book is listed as Grimm’s Fairy Tales.

 http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/28/opinio…

Pieter Brueghel, Children’s Games (1560)

David Elkind, a child psychologist at Tufts, writes about how schools around the country are hiring “recess coaches” to supervise children on the playground. He worries that a decline in “unstructured imagination time,” along with a rise in time spent with electronic media are producing more bullying on the playground.

What happens to children when they are on the playground, unsupervised? Pieter Brueghel’s answer suggests that children’s games are often violent and sadistic and that you need adults present to keep children from harm. I’m not convinced that you need the playground for “unstructured imagination time,” and the really great moments of children at play that I’ve observed have been indoors. As Friedrich Froebel pointed out, however, children do need fresh air and a chance to move around. Having an adult present makes complete sense, although I’m skeptical about professionalizing the role and creating “recess coaches.” How do you train a recess coach? I’d like to see them read Johan Huizinga’s wonderful study Homo ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/27/opinion/27elkind.html

The LA Times has an update on the Warner Brothers movie based on Little Red Riding Hood. Evidently there is a new version of the script from the production company owned by Leonardo DiCaprio, and Amanda Seyfried is being considered for the lead. Courting “Twilight” fans, the film will give a dark Gothic twist to the story first put into print by Charles Perrault. In that version, the girl never makes it out of the belly of the wolf. I’m curious to see how David Johnson, who also wrote the screenplay for Orphan, will adapt the story, especially since there is not much to go on in the Grimms’ version, which is quite short. But this is our cultural story about innocence and seduction, and the brevity of the folktale did not stop Angela Carter from creating a Gothic romance about a girl, a wolf, and an encounter in the woods.

Steven Zeitchick, the LA Times reporter, tells us, tongue in cheek: The biggest thing working against the Warner Bros. movie may be that that it doesn’t derive from Stephenie Meyer’s global bestsellers but from the work of a couple of German academics circa the early 19th century. But when it comes to finding the next “Twilight,” these may be mere details.

 http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/movies/2…

And here’s a review of The Path, a new video game based on the story of Little Red Riding Hood, with six girls who have to navigate the woods. Thanks to Eugene Kim for the alert.

 http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles…