Book Description:
Gerontologists and all aging adults will recognize the fundamental issues that lie at the heart of these short plays written by a leader in the related fields of lifespan human development, aging, and thanatology. After all, everyone who enters midlife becomes a student of aging, willingly or not. Each play offers a set of encounters with what the human spirit encounters at the depth and edges of its experience. The plays can be effective in gerontological and thanatological education at both beginning and advanced levels. Defining Acts consists of 8 plays, each followed by an Afterword offering suggestions for in class as well as staged productions. The plays are suitable as fully staged productions; script in hand performances at conferences and in class; and, assignments and discussions in theater and gerontology courses. But Defining Acts does not stop here, it offers a challenge to the way gerontologists go about their business. For instance, Arnie's Junkyard Or How to Get Aging Out of the Trenches and Gerontologists Down from the Clouds suggests that many researchers are still toiling in the grips of 19th century scientific models and still dealing more with the SIP (Statistically Invented Person) than with real people in real situations. Kastenbaum argues that 'Gerontology has not yet succeeded in providing comprehensive, coherent, and theoretically invigorating account of its subject matter.' He proposes systematic attention to the arena of dramatic encounter; interaction, conflict, and transformation which 'provides a natural testing ground for thoughts, doubts, fears, yearnings, and intuitions that tend to be denied expression in the scrimmage of everyday life as well as in the projects of researchers and policy makers. Aging is drama.'
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