Arizona Theatre Matters Education · Study Guide
Pineapple and Other Options Study Guide
A study guide for audiences, students, educators, and community groups preparing to experience Pineapple and Other Options, a play about despair, interruption, survival, education, history, embodiment, and the strange, stubborn ways people give one another air.
What can keep a person connected to life when pain, illness, isolation, and hopelessness make nothing seem worth carrying forward?
About the Production
Pineapple and Other Options is a play about a single phone call that becomes much more than a phone call. What begins as a crisis-line conversation between AJ, a new volunteer, and Helen, a woman in acute suicidal despair, opens into a layered theatrical world shaped by illness, grief, embodiment, education, indigenous history, memory, imagination, and the possibility of return.
Helen is not presented as a symbol or “case.” She is funny, furious, intelligent, exhausted, and deeply wounded. She is living with the aftermath of breast cancer, a bilateral mastectomy, medical debt, professional dismissal, isolation, and the shattering feeling that her work and life no longer matter. AJ, meanwhile, is caring, unprepared, anxious, overextended, and trying to do something meaningful while her own home life strains under need and resentment.
As Helen moves closer to death, the play shifts into a visionary space where she encounters Betsy, a historical figure whose life, memory, and questions about education become both challenge and invitation. The result is a play that refuses to flatten despair into a lesson. Instead, it asks how people survive when the world is broken, and what kinds of air, story, work, and witness might still make life possible.
Big Ideas to Listen For
What keeps someone alive?
The play never offers an easy answer. Instead, it suggests that survival may begin in interruption, conversation, memory, imagination, and the smallest possible thread of connection.
What does it mean to “matter”?
Helen’s despair is tied not only to pain, but to the belief that she is useless and forgettable. The play keeps pressing against that belief.
Why education?
Helen’s proposed project about Elizabeth English Pennington becomes more than academic research. It becomes a way of asking what education is for, and whom it should serve.
Why the pineapple?
Pineapple becomes pleasure, memory, ritual, comfort, absurdity, hospitality, and the sensory reminder that life still contains sweetness.
What is broken, and what can be rebuilt?
The play keeps returning to injury, surgery, broken systems, shattered statues, failed institutions, and the labor of putting something together again.
What does history do in the present?
Betsy’s story is not a detour. It becomes a living force in Helen’s crisis, asking how unfinished histories continue shaping the world.
Context and Background
The play moves between two realities. One is immediate and contemporary: a suicide prevention hotline, medical trauma, economic precarity, caregiving stress, and institutional neglect. The other is visionary and historical: Helen’s encounter with Betsy, based on Elizabeth English Pennington, and the educational and cultural questions attached to Pennington’s life and legacy.
Helen’s crisis is shaped by several overlapping losses: her body has changed after cancer treatment, her financial burden is enormous, her professional identity has been destabilized, and her support network has thinned in ways that feel humiliating and profound. The play is especially attentive to how illness can alter not just health, but social visibility, desirability, work, and self-perception.
At the same time, the play critiques institutional education. Through Helen’s work and Betsy’s story, it asks how schools can become places of hierarchy, erasure, and control rather than inquiry, making, and mutual discovery. The script also names colonial violence, especially the devastating impact of white educational systems on Indigenous children and communities.
Why this matters now
The play speaks to mental health, suicide prevention, cancer survivorship, educational reform, isolation, and the urgency of trauma-informed care.
Why the historical thread matters
Elizabeth English Pennington and Betsy’s world give the play a wider frame, connecting personal crisis to long histories of teaching, erasure, survival, and repair.
Synopsis
AJ, newly volunteering at a suicide prevention hotline, arrives for a shift already overwhelmed by her own home pressures and uncertainty. Because of weather and staff complications, she ends up alone in the office sooner than expected. Helen, meanwhile, is at home in crisis. Living with the aftermath of a mastectomy, enormous medical bills, the loss of her teaching contract, and a collapsing sense of purpose, she calls the hotline after a mentor pressures her to do so.
The phone conversation between AJ and Helen is jagged, funny, painful, awkward, and increasingly urgent. AJ tries to keep Helen talking while improvising her way through procedures and panic. Helen reveals the depth of her despair, her professional passion for rethinking education, and her research into Elizabeth English Pennington. As the call continues, Helen overdoses.
In the visionary world that follows, Helen encounters Betsy. Through dream logic, humor, argument, and story, Betsy challenges Helen’s assumptions about death, value, waste, education, and what it means to continue. Their encounter includes reflection on Pennington’s life, Cherokee history, violence, healing, survival, and the work of making something one piece at a time.
By the end of the play, Helen survives. In the epilogue, AJ reveals that Helen returned to life after being presumed dead and eventually founded the Elizabeth English Pennington Institute. The play closes not in sentimentality, but in hard-earned continuation: work resumed, meaning rebuilt, and gratitude spoken in the phrase, “You have given me the air.”
Key Characters and Images
AJ
A former social worker and new hotline volunteer. Anxious, compassionate, funny, imperfect, and trying hard to keep someone alive while barely keeping her own world in order.
Helen
A history educator in acute despair. Brilliant, biting, wounded, and passionate, she is living through cancer recovery, economic strain, isolation, and professional loss.
Jan
AJ’s supervisor on the hotline. Practical, experienced, and present by phone, Jan helps frame the realities and limits of crisis work.
Betsy
A visionary presence based on Elizabeth English Pennington. She becomes teacher, challenger, witness, and guide inside Helen’s dream-like crossing.
The Narrator
A lively framing voice who shapes the play’s tone, pacing, theatricality, and shifts between realism and the visionary.
The Statue of Venus
A powerful recurring image of damaged beauty, reconstruction, embodiment, loss, and fame. It becomes a mirror for Helen’s relationship to her own altered body.
Pineapple
A symbol of sweetness, memory, appetite, hospitality, absurdity, and the sensory pleasures that still tether a person to living.
Breath / Air
Breath is everywhere in the play: AJ’s asthma, panic, speaking, survival, and the gift of “air” as a metaphor for hope and life.
Themes and Big Ideas
Suicidal Despair and Interruption
The play takes suicidal crisis seriously without turning it into spectacle. It focuses on interruption, contact, and the fragile, difficult work of staying with another person through their despair.
Embodiment, Illness, and Loss
Helen’s experience after mastectomy is not treated as symbolic alone. The play attends to scars, sensation, phantom pain, self-image, desirability, and the social meanings attached to a changed body.
Education and Inquiry
Through Helen’s research and Betsy’s story, the play argues for learning by inquiry, making, collaboration, and lived relevance rather than rigid institutional control.
History as Living Presence
History is not just something in books here. It arrives, speaks, interrupts, and insists. The past becomes active in the present crisis.
Colonial Violence and Educational Harm
The script critiques the arrogance of white educational systems and names the devastating effects of cultural erasure, segregation, and imposed schooling on Indigenous communities.
Brokenness and Reconstruction
The breast cancer scars, the shattered statue, and the rebuilding of Helen’s purpose all point toward a central question: what does it mean to continue as something visibly changed?
Humor as Survival
The play is frequently funny, even in crisis. Humor becomes a way to breathe, connect, deflect, endure, and make room for the unbearable.
Giving Air
“You have given me the air” becomes one of the play’s clearest metaphors for survival. Air is breath, room, possibility, recognition, and the opposite of suffocation.
Vocabulary
- Bilateral mastectomy: Surgical removal of both breasts.
- Phantom pain: Pain or sensation that seems to come from a body part that is no longer there or has changed dramatically.
- In-service: Professional training or continuing education for educators already working in the field.
- Montessori: An educational approach that emphasizes choice, hands-on learning, independence, and development through meaningful activity.
- Assimilation: Pressure to adopt the dominant culture’s language, values, or systems, often at the cost of one’s own traditions or identity.
- Trail of Tears: The forced displacement of Native peoples, including the Cherokee, by the United States government.
- Lazarus Syndrome: A rare phenomenon in which a person is declared dead and later shows signs of life again.
- Allegory: A story or image that carries symbolic meaning beyond its literal level.
Before You Experience the Production
- What might help a person feel that they still matter when illness and loss have stripped away so much?
- How do systems like medicine, education, and social support sometimes fail people when they are most vulnerable?
- What is the difference between being “saved” and being accompanied?
- How can history become personally urgent rather than distant?
- What sensory experiences, such as food, weather, touch, smell, and memory, most strongly connect people to being alive?
During the Experience
- Notice how AJ and Helen use humor differently across the call. What does the humor protect, reveal, or delay?
- Pay attention to how breath functions in the play: asthma, panic, speaking, silence, and “air” as metaphor.
- Listen for the shifts between realism and the visionary world of Betsy.
- Consider what the pineapple means each time it appears.
- Notice how the statue of Venus changes your understanding of Helen’s body and self-perception.
- Pay attention to the sounds of weather, heartbeat, animals, and shifting environments. How do they shape the emotional world of the piece?
- Listen for when history becomes argument, comfort, challenge, or mirror.
After You Experience the Production
- What do you think most effectively kept Helen connected to life?
- How did the play represent suicidal despair without reducing Helen to that one moment?
- What role does Elizabeth English Pennington play in Helen’s transformation?
- How does the play connect personal healing to educational and historical repair?
- What did the statue of Venus come to mean for you by the end?
- Did the ending feel miraculous, earned, unsettling, hopeful, or some combination of those?
- What stayed with you most strongly: a line, a sound, a food image, a historical detail, a joke, or a silence?
Activities and Writing Prompts
Quick Reflection
Write for five minutes about one image from the play that stayed with you: the pineapple, the statue, the ladder, the sycamore, the basket of fruit, the phone, or something else. Why did it matter?
Discussion Activity
Discuss the statement: Sometimes survival begins not with certainty or healing, but with one person refusing to let the conversation end.
History and the Present
Track how Betsy’s story changes Helen’s crisis. What does the historical material do emotionally, morally, or intellectually in the play?
Creative Writing Prompt
Write a short monologue from the perspective of the Venus statue. What has it witnessed about damage, beauty, reconstruction, and the way people look at broken things?
Sensory Map
Make a list of the play’s recurring sensory details: rain, thunder, tea, cigarettes, pineapple, breath, leaves, scars, wind, water. Then discuss how sensory language keeps the play grounded in embodiment.
Performance Activity
Choose a short exchange from the hotline call and perform it in two ways: once as straight realism, and once emphasizing the emotional subtext beneath the words. Reflect on how urgency, humor, and fear change the scene.
About Arizona Theatre Matters
Arizona Theatre Matters is a theatre company building universally accessible work from the ground up. Through performance, education, sound, history, and storytelling, the company creates engaging, thoughtful experiences that invite audiences into theatre in inclusive and imaginative ways.
This guide is designed to support classroom conversation, community engagement, and deeper reflection before and after experiencing the production.