Harry Potter fans are needed for a study on fiction reading and interpersonal relationships. This is an online survey on reading habits, your Harry Potter knowledge and reactions to other people in social situations that takes approximately 30 minutes to complete. You must be a fluent English speaker and at least 13 years old to participate. Thank you for your help!

The link is here.

by Emily Strand

My favorite English teacher in high school used to begin each new Shakespearean play we tackled by running into the classroom, shouting, “Off the page and onto the stage!” I still remember the particular gleam in his eye on such days, reserved for the cusp of a Shakespearean work, and how he would creep around the room, carefully selecting people to read the different characters. (Unlike most in the class, I always hoped he’d pick me, as I’d rehearsed them all the night before.) We’d try our best to give voice to the verse, stumbling over the Elizabethan strangeness of it all, our slightly unhinged teacher shouting us down if we dared display insufficient enthusiasm or gravitas.

My teacher may have been unhinged (it’s why I liked him), but his point was coherent, and important. It was that theater is meant to be seen, heard and experienced, not read. One can’t appreciate the impassioned vitriol of a Kate, the joyful mischief of a Puck, or the infuriating inertia of a Hamlet from the flat confines of the printed page, no matter how well-penned.

My teacher’s catch phrase, “Off the page and onto the stage!”, has crossed my mind more than a few times in the lead-up to the release of Jack Thorne’s script of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child this week. More than our host’s fine arguments for why this work may be poised to disappoint, more than the hastily-compiled and unflattering plot summaries anyone can find online, it is this realization of the incompleteness of what we’re receiving in Cursed Child that has kept my own expectations low. We’re receiving what Louise Freeman rightly described as only about 10% of the magic of the story. We’re receiving a bare-bones skeleton: the flesh, sinew, organs and skin of which, we’re just supposed to imagine from the words on the page, and a handful of cast pictures.

I’ll admit that my imagination is not that good. And as my teacher always suggested, it’s not supposed to be. Plays are meant to be acted, not read. So, to Potter fans, no matter how die-hard, who rush out and purchase their copy of the script on July 31, I say: don’t be disappointed when you don’t like – or perhaps don’t even understand – the so-called “eighth Harry Potter story”.

Now please don’t confuse me with the imaginatively indolent: those who Tolkien said roundly reject fantasy due to their discomfort with the “arresting strangeness” of the genre: those who are too tired, or too preoccupied with the “real world,” or simply too lazy for the hard work of filling in the mental details of what a school of magic or a hobbit might look like. That’s not where I’m coming from. I truly believe that our imaginations are mighty muscles that, if trained to their full potential, will move us a long way toward saving the world. And, as an exercise toward that end, I love the work of supplying the mental images of characters and settings which are foreign to this mundane world in stories like Potter. Even outside the fantasy genre, I love letting my brain make movie versions of the beautiful emotion and the narrative tension to which the words on the page of good stories merely point.

But plays are not supposed to be words on a page. Like liturgy, they are supposed to be enacted, either by us, or by a competent crew of actors, directors and dramaturgists.

Which begs the question: if Cursed Child really is the eighth installment in a very complete, internally interdependent, seven-part series (a bold claim in itself, as John Granger has wisely insisted), a series that so many millions (billions?) of fans lay claim to, then why this medium? Isn’t it necessarily a bit exclusive, even elitist, for what it claims to be?

Rowling has tweeted that, once people have seen the play, it will be clear that the theater is the “only proper medium” for Cursed Child. Sadly, her reasoning for this statement will remain a mystery for us Muggles with no access to the work in its intended form. We’re left, as the Syrophoenician woman from the Gospels described it, like dogs beneath the table, snapping up the crumbs that fall from children’s plates. We can only hope that, like the woman, our faith will be rewarded someday. But given what we know about the relative racial and socio-economic exclusivity of Broadway audiences, it’s hard to see how.

Carve the Mark, Veronica Roth’s next book, is set for publication next January.  However, eager readers can get a preview of Chapter 7 here.

The series is being promoted as science fiction rather than dystopia, so the tone of the series will likely be quite different. However, the preview suggests quite a few parallels with Divergent: an orphan female narrator born with a special gift that makes her both powerful and vulnerable, fancy knife work, and a brother who’s a really nasty piece of work.

And no doubt the scores of Allegiant Abhorers will be relieved to hear that this is intended to be a two-part series rather than a trilogy.  What will be interesting to me is if this series proves to be as strongly rooted in psychology as Divergent was.  Good science fiction usually starts with at least some grounding in science, and I am hoping the behavioral neuroscience will be front and center again.

Update: Another article provides much the same information, but adds the tidbit that Ms. Roth has developed a “fascination” with North Korea, the familial political dynasty and what it means for the son to grow up with a dictator for a father.  Then she goes on to say North Korea “was not a direct line of inspiration” for her new series.

Given that she had an “obsession” with personality testing prior to writing Divergent, and the Factions wound up as perfectly analogous to the Big Five Factors–Ms Roth’s claimed lack of planning notwithstanding–I’d recommend reading up on North Korea before starting Carve the Mark.

I recently had the privilege of chaperoning a Mary Baldwin College field ornithology May term course in Costa Rica. Among the interesting critters I got to see and photograph  were real-life basilisks in the wild. I even got to see a few do their two-legged run across the water. No one got petrified, but they are fascinating creatures.