Student Performance Series

The Lottery
adapted by Jeffrey Hatcher
from the short story by Shirley Jackson 
directed by Douglas Mercer

The Acting Company offers one-hour productions specifically designed for the classroom using minimal sets, costumes, and a small cast of  actors.  The presentations encourage students to use their imaginations and to let the magic of the theater transport them. 

	2000-2001 Staff Repertory Director, Doug Mercer, fields questions from student audience members during a post-show Q&A session.

The Lottery by Shirley Jackson is one of the most celebrated and most popular American short stories and a staple of the required curriculum of high school English programs across the country.  Teachers love its simple, readable, no-words-wasted style.  Students enjoy its depiction of the “dark” aspects of the human spirit that remain covered by the niceties of everyday life.

First printed in the New Yorker in 1948, Shirley Jackson depicts a small town celebrating its annual summer lottery.  Why are the children gathering stones as the story starts?  Why are the people filled with both excitement and dread?  And why is Mrs. Hutchinson upset as her family is chosen as the lottery winners?  The ugly flow of blood that will undoubtedly accompany the story's end is left to the imagination of the reader.  Jackson avoided graphic violence or gross-out horror at all times – the ugliness, like that in The Lottery’s town, is deep within each of us.

Jackson generally refused to explain the meaning of the story, but suggested in private to at least one friend that anti-Semitism in North Bennington, Vermont was at its heart. (Her husband, literary critic Stanley Edgar Hyman, was Jewish). On another occasion she told a journalist, "I suppose I hoped, by setting a particularly brutal rite in the present and in my own village, to shock the readers with a graphic demonstration of the pointless violence and general inhumanity of their own lives."

Its depiction of gothic terrors lurking just beneath the surface of everyday life still resonates, especially with young readers, almost 60 years after its initial publication.  It is The Acting Company’s belief that a stage adaptation will have an even deeper impact on the student audiences that will experience it with the adaptation by Jeffrey Hatcher transporting the audience to the town so they can share in the townspeople’s paranoia and silent conspiracy.

For further information about any of our programs or to inquire
about booking a Literacy Through Theater residency,
please contact Paul Michael Fontana or Justin Gallo
in The Acting Company’s Education Department
by phone at 212-258-3111 or by E-mail.