Arizona Theatre Matters Education · Digital Engagement Toolkit
Red Earth, Long Shadows Toolkit
Toolkit · A companion to Jeanmarie Simpson’s symphony in three acts for audio theatre, based on the life of Daphne Sheldrick.
Six practical activities, timed facilitator plans, and reproducible worksheets for older teens and adults.
Before or after the performance: each activity has a preparation option and a reflection option. Start with Preparing to listen or choose a 30- or 60-minute preparation plan. No prior knowledge of the story is needed.
Purpose and use
A companion to Jeanmarie Simpson’s
A Symphony in Three Acts for Audio Theatre
Based on the life of Daphne Sheldrick
Purpose and readers
This guide supports close listening, discussion, and creative investigation of Red Earth, Long Shadows. It is designed for older teens and adults in classrooms, libraries, theatre groups, and community conversations. The central task is to notice how the play turns attention into action—and to test our interpretations against what actually happens in a scene.
The study guide explores the drama, its historical setting, and the ethical questions it raises. The toolkit provides activities, timed facilitation plans, and reproducible worksheets. Participants may respond through conversation, writing, drawing, or practical sound work; no single mode of participation is required.
Learning goals
- Distinguish an observation from an interpretation and identify evidence that could change a conclusion.
- Explain how sound, silence, repetition, and the Witness shape the listener’s experience.
- Examine the tensions among care, control, independence, responsibility, and loss.
- Recognize conservation as collective work and investigate whose knowledge and labor a story makes visible.
- Develop a practical response to a need while considering consent, capacity, and continuity.
Ways to use this guide
Before the performance, use Purpose and use, Preparing to listen, and the toolkit’s preparation options. Afterward, explore The dramatic journey, People animals and the Witness, the discussion questions, and the reflection options. Each activity includes a way to begin before hearing the play. Workshop times do not include the performance.
The dramatic journey, character details, and later discussion questions reveal events and the ending: save those sections until after the performance. The preparation sections introduce ways to listen and questions to carry into the experience. Historical context has its own sources; invented dialogue and the Witness’s exchanges should not be treated as records of historical events.
Preparing to listen
The invitation
The play begins on a veranda in Tsavo. Daphne asks the Witness to listen, then challenges the Witness’s wish to translate an elephant’s call into a human story. That exchange establishes a useful practice for the audience: notice the event before deciding what it means. Attend to the elephants as individuals and allow a sound or silence to surprise you.
Before the performance
- What distinguishes looking from seeing, or hearing from listening? Give an ordinary example without deciding that one person’s perception is the standard.
- What do you expect from a biographical play? Which expectations might limit what you notice?
- How can an audio performance suggest distance, time, movement, or an absent person?
- When does helping expand another being’s choices? When can it narrow them?
Listening prompts
Choose one recurring sound: a cup, engine, bottle, telephone, clock, bird, or elephant call. Track when it returns and what has changed around it. A sound can remain recognizable while its dramatic function changes.
Notice when the Witness asks for an answer and when Daphne redirects attention to an action, a body, or a particular animal. Also notice when Daphne herself assumes too much, resists a question, or admits uncertainty.
Follow the spaces between words. During the movement Silence, a long pause leaves the surrounding world audible. Ask what that duration does to your attention and to the exchange between Daphne and the Witness.
What to expect and investigate
Red Earth, Long Shadows is audio theatre: voices, everyday objects, animal sounds, distance, rhythm, and silence help build its world. Daphne’s conversation with the Witness opens into remembered experience. Listen for changes of place and time, for the difference between a question and an answer, and for how an individual animal becomes recognizable.
Prepare a listening question rather than a prediction of the plot. Choose one: How will I know where we are? What can I infer from a sound? When does care require action, and when might it require waiting? Whose work will I notice? Keep your question nearby and leave room for the performance to change it.
Content and participation
The play includes animal death, bereavement, gunshots, a description of mutilation for ivory, and distressed calves. Give this information before the performance and any discussion of those moments. Allow participants to step away, pass, or choose a less intense moment for an activity. Do not ask people to reenact rescue trauma or share a personal loss.
Provide readable worksheets and discussion prompts in advance where possible. Offer spoken, written, and drawn responses. Participants may use the guide’s scene summaries to orient a discussion. Eyes may remain open; headphones are optional where audio equipment is used. Discuss participation needs with participants rather than treating a listening exercise as a test of hearing ability.
Toolkit for observation and sound
Activity 1 Notice before naming
Time 15 minutes. Materials: a cup and saucer or another safe sound-making object; Worksheet 1. Before the performance, ask what a sound can establish and what it leaves uncertain. The facilitator makes a brief sound sequence twice, such as lifting a cup, stirring, and setting it down. Participants record three events before assigning meanings. For example, a cup touches its saucer is an event; someone is at ease is an interpretation.
In pairs, compare one interpretation and identify another plausible account. Hear the facilitator’s sound sequence again and record what changed. Ask which missing evidence would distinguish the readings. Before the performance, choose one kind of sound to attend to and one assumption to question. Afterward, apply the distinction to a remembered moment. Label uncertain recollections rather than treating them as exact quotations.
Activity 2 Build a transition
Time 25 minutes. Materials: paper, a cup and spoon, a bottle or safe substitute, and a phone recorder if desired. Before the performance, choose two everyday places or times, such as a kitchen at dawn and a busy street at noon. In groups, invent a 45–60 second transition between them using no more than four sound sources. Establish the first place, introduce a shared rhythm or texture, and let the second place become clear. Afterward, compare your choices with a transition you remember from the performance.
Present once without explanation. Listeners report the sequence they noticed before naming the locations they inferred. Present again after one revision. Ask what the sound did that explanatory dialogue would have done differently. Participants can supply a written cue sequence instead of performing or recording.
Activity 3 Give silence a job
Time 15 minutes. Before the performance, experience twenty seconds with ordinary room sounds continuing; participants may follow a visual timer. Notice how a pause changes attention without assigning it a single emotion. Afterward, recall the movement Silence and discuss what you remember Daphne doing or resisting during its long pause. Separate the recollection from your interpretation.
In pairs, invent a brief everyday exchange: one person asks whether the other is ready to leave; the other waits before answering. Try two different actions during the pause, such as searching for an object or deciding whether to speak. Discuss what listeners could observe and what they inferred. Participants may describe or draw the alternatives instead of performing. Do not require emotional disclosure or use the exercise as a simulation of bereavement.
Facilitator checks
Keep volume comfortable and announce abrupt sounds. A participant’s inability to identify a cue is useful information about the cue or its presentation, not a failure of attention. Offer object demonstrations, written descriptions of the workshop’s sound sequence, and visual timing as alternate ways to explore the exercise.
Toolkit for care and collective work
Activity 4 Redesign shared care
Time 25 minutes. Materials: Worksheet 3. Before the performance, choose a fictional human project such as maintaining a community garden or supporting a rehearsal process. Identify one essential task currently held by one person. What happens if that person is absent? Afterward, connect the exercise to Aisha’s story and Daphne’s reconsideration of shared care, using the guide’s summary if helpful.
Design a small change that shares knowledge and responsibility. Specify a backup, handover information, the affected person’s choices, and a check that will show whether the change helps. Test the plan against a two-day absence. Revise any assumption that depends on unpaid availability or unlimited energy. Discuss what the elephant story helps you notice and where the analogy stops.
Activity 5 Follow the work
Time 20 minutes. Materials: Worksheet 2. Before the performance, map the people and tasks that make a community event possible, from planning through cleanup. Mark what you know and what you infer. For each role, note the knowledge, resource, or action needed and what happens if it is missing. Afterward, make a second map of a calf’s journey from discovery through rescue, care, and independence using remembered moments and the guide’s summaries of Ivory and Long Shadows.
Choose one role whose contribution is easy to overlook. Before the performance, write a 100-word account of its work in your fictional community event. Afterward, write about a role in the play using a remembered moment or the guide’s summary. Mark imagined details as invention. Ask whether the revised account changes the story’s apparent protagonist or its definition of expertise.
Activity 6 Revise a measure of success
Time 20 minutes. Materials: Worksheet 3. Before the performance, consider a fictional project helping someone learn a practical skill. Choose an early measure of progress and a later measure that includes the learner’s own choices. Ask what each measure can miss. Afterward, consider care in the play: milk taken, weight gained, sleep, or continued proximity. Recall Sobo, Dika, or Emily and Eve. Design a later measure that accounts for an elephant’s independence, including evidence and uncertainties.
Discuss how the question applies to an educational or artistic project. Does success mean participants keep needing the organizer, or that they can make choices beyond the organizer’s control? Avoid making independence a universal demand: ongoing support can remain necessary and freely chosen.
A voluntary next step
Invite participants to choose one bounded act of attention for the following week: document an overlooked task, ask someone what support would help, research one claim, or revise one routine. Name who is affected, what consent is needed, what time or resources are available, and when to review the result. Taking action is an option; a well-formed research question is also a valid outcome.
Facilitator plans
A 30 minute preparation before the performance
0–5: introduce audio theatre, the play’s premise, content information, and participation choices. 5–20: run Notice before naming with the facilitator’s sound sequence. 20–25: explore one question about care or waiting using an everyday example. 25–30: each participant chooses a listening focus and writes a question to revisit afterward.
A 60 minute preparation before the performance
0–5: introduce the premise and participation choices. 5–20: run Notice before naming. 20–45: run Build a transition with invented settings. 45–55: discuss how shared care might work in a fictional community project. 55–60: choose one question and one recurring sound to listen for. Save plot summaries and ending-related questions until afterward.
A 30 minute conversation after a performance
| Minutes | What to do |
|---|---|
| 0–3 | Offer a moment to settle; explain the option to pass or write. |
| 3–8 | Collect specific remembered sounds, actions, or lines without interpreting them yet. |
| 8–18 | Explore one question about care and one about sound using remembered moments or guide summaries. |
| 18–25 | Compare two interpretations; ask what evidence could change either. |
| 25–30 | Write an exit response and invite an optional question for further study. |
A 60 minute study session after the performance
| Minutes | What to do |
|---|---|
| 0–5 | Introduce the play, content information, and available participation modes. |
| 5–15 | Recall the opening; demonstrate a short sound sequence and use the observation worksheet. |
| 15–20 | Discuss Aisha and the move toward shared care. |
| 20–45 | Run Redesign shared care in small groups. |
| 45–55 | Recall Sobo or Dika using the guide’s summary; examine choice and the limits of control. |
| 55–60 | Return to the opening observations and complete an exit response. |
A 90 minute theatre workshop
Use 10 minutes for orientation, 15 for Notice before naming, 25 for Build a transition, 15 for Give silence a job, 15 to explore how a question changes a relationship, and 10 for reflection. For the final exercise, invent a short exchange about an everyday decision. Ask the same question while trying to probe, invite, correct, or reassure. Compare the partner’s response and what listeners notice. Before the performance, choose a question about dialogue to carry into your listening. Afterward, relate the experiment to a remembered exchange between Daphne and the Witness. Participants may write or draw the alternatives instead of acting.
Keeping the inquiry open
When a broad claim appears, ask which remembered moment or guide summary supports it. When a personal story appears, let the speaker decide how much to share and return to the play without extracting a lesson. Treat uncertain recollections as questions. When historical uncertainty appears, record a research question. Do not settle factual disputes by majority vote. Invite contributions from people who have not spoken and offer the same invitation to write.
Exit response: Name one observation, one interpretation you revised or still question, and one specific question you want to investigate next.
Worksheet 1 Observation and interpretation
Name or group ______________________________ Date ____________________
Sound exercise or performance moment __________________________________
Record events before meanings. A sound or action can support more than one interpretation. Before the performance, use the facilitator’s sound sequence. Afterward, use a remembered moment or the guide’s scene summaries; identify which. Mark a paraphrase as a paraphrase and an uncertain recollection as uncertain.
| Observed event or remembered words | My interpretation | Another reading or missing evidence |
|---|---|---|
After comparison and discussion
What changed in your account? Name the detail that changed it.
What remains uncertain, and what would help you investigate it?
A sentence to try: I noticed ____________. I first understood it as ____________. Another possibility is ____________, because ____________.
Worksheet 2 Sound and work maps
Name or group ______________________________ Date ____________________
A recurring sound
Choose one sound or object _____________________________________________
| Appearance and scene | What happens around it | Its possible dramatic function |
|---|---|---|
Before: compare two versions of a sound exercise. Afterward: how does a sound’s return change your understanding of its first appearance?
The people who make an action possible
Choose a community task or, afterward, an event in the play _________________
| Role and remembered moment | Knowledge or resource contributed | What depends on this contribution |
|---|---|---|
Whose contribution could your account make more visible?
Worksheet 3 A practical care experiment
Name or group ______________________________ Date ____________________
Choose a bounded, real or fictional task. Use the play to sharpen the question rather than assuming animal care and human relationships are interchangeable.
Notice the current conditions
What happens now? Describe a specific event or routine.
Who is affected, whose perspective is missing, and how could you ask?
Propose one change
What will change, who agrees to it, and what choices remain available?
Who carries the work? Name time, resources, backup, and handover needs.
Review the result
What evidence would count as help? What evidence would tell you to stop or revise?
When will you review it, and with whom?
After review: What changed? What did you assume incorrectly? What is the next small step?