The Strange Case of the High School Plays

       The high school in a northern suburb of Brisbane which I attended in the 1960s used to put on amateur dramatics twice a year. The first was always an operetta, usually be Gilbert and Sullivan, whose copyrights had run out. The second was a collection of short skits and one act plays which we usually wrote ourselves, with the result that they featured broad, very corny humour. However, one of the teachers dug up an old farce by George Bernard Shaw entitled, Passion, Poison, and Petrifaction. Little did we know that over in America, throughout the 1930s right up to the 1960s, there existed a whole genre of plays specifically written for high school performances, and that the pupils regularly chronicled them, along with still photographs, in their yearbooks.

     Take, for instance, Act Your Age, which appears to be a complete farce. The central theme is a couple of young teenage girls pretending to be grown-ups while their twenty-two year old aunt pretends to be a bratty eleven year old. Only the fact that the whole of the cast would be teenagers hides the sheer implausibility of it. Along with a skirt shredded by a parrot and a cook who moonlights as a lady wrestler, it features the aunt, in her alter ego as a teenage brat, being spanked by a sailor. "Harry", the owner of the blog from which I got this account, is a spanking enthusiast with far too much time on his hands. As such, he searched the old school yearbooks now online for photos of the spanking scene. Even more popular was Men Are Like Streetcars, a 1951 play about a meddlesome teenage girl which ran in countless high schools across the country for a quarter of a century.

     You will notice a certain trend here: there was strong tendency for the leading lady of a play, and sometimes two of them, to end up over a male colleague's knee. This also raises a special problem. Filmmakers have developed the art of faking punch-ups to make them look realistic - no doubt because most people have never seen a real one. However, slaps, whether on the face or on the cheeks lower down, are difficult to fake realistically. Essentially, to look genuine they have to be genuine. Of course, the high school performers were rank amateurs, without any special knowledge of realistic acting, but just the same . . .

Lemoyne High School, Pennsylvania, 1946

    Take, for example, A Mind of Her Own, a 1943 play specifically written for high schools, with more parts for girls than boys, because girls were more interested in amateur dramatics. (This was not necessarily my own experience.) The result was that the female star ended up spanked by her stage fiancé with a piece of timber! That must have hurt! In fact, one actress is recorded as complaining about it during rehearsals. I wonder if the female schoolteacher who wrote the play thought about that.

     Of course, all this was part of a wider phenomenon. Readers will no doubt be aware that, during this period, not a few movies featured a young lady getting a spanking. (In the vast majority of cases, I might add, it was not by her husband.) Of course, it was sexy; that was the whole point. This sort of low level sado-masochism dominance-submission is so common, at least as far as fantasy goes, that it must be considered an aspect of normality. For a handful of people it becomes an obsession so pervasive that it should genuinely be regarded as a perversion, but for a high proportion of both women and men the idea is at least titillating. However, the school plays differ from the films in two respects.

     Firstly, as someone who grew up in the 1950s and '60s, let me assure you that what you might see at the movies was titillating fantasy, not a social norm. If it happened in real life, it may or may not have been considered a big deal but, by and large, our mothers and grandmothers had little fear of getting spanked once they had grown up. And that last phrase is the operative one. In the school plays the relevant characters were portrayed mostly as teenagers, the same as the actresses, and here there was a social norm. Corporal punishment was still universal at school - for boys, at least, but often for girls as well. In any case, the girls were well aware that not all their parents considered them "too old" for such punishment. In other words, it was a part of everyday life - common enough not to be frightening or outrageous, but rare enough to be humorous or titillating.

    Secondly, there was the scale of the phenomenon. Although many critics deplore the amount of spanking in the movies, the fact is that even when it was most popular it represented only a single digit percentage of the hundreds of films produced. However, "Harry" managed to record more than forty incidents in high school plays. How many others did not include a spanking? There must have been a lot. After all, the number of schools in the US is astronomical. A 1948 collection of nine Canadian school plays included only one on "Harry's" list. The point is, however, that unless the complete number runs into the hundreds, then this theme is most over-represented in school plays compared to the silver screen. Whatever the case, the popularity of these plays over several decades, the willingness of girls to audition for them, and especially the way photos of the spanking scene were regularly included in the yearbooks as the highlight of the play says a about for the mindset of the teenagers. As I said before, it was sexy.

    What is the current situation? Plays are still written for high schools, and you can find a long list here. However, they appear to be darker, more fantastic, and less connected to everyday life. Some are adaptations of classics. The sort of thing which went on in the middle of last century has disappeared. This is hardly surprising, for a vast number of plays, movies, and novels for grown-ups have also disappeared; the literary world moves on. Nevertheless, I notice that Act Your Age is still being offered under licence, and by the same company that originally licensed it. It would be interesting to watch - especially if it is performed by people of the appropriate age.