Arizona Theatre Matters Education · Toolkit
Unexpected Toolkit
Practical pathways into adaptation, character, choice, theatrical storytelling, and the many contradictory forms love can take.
Start Here
This Toolkit accompanies John Perovich’s Unexpected. Use it before or after the recorded reading, with the Study Guide, or as a stand-alone set of theatre exercises.
Essential question: How can theatre expose the difference between loving someone and controlling the choices they are allowed to make?
Facilitation with Care
The play includes stylized family violence, threats, death, abandonment, controlling behavior, grief, and romantic themes. Tell participants what they will encounter. Allow people to pass, pause, observe, write instead of speak, or choose a different activity. No participant should be required to disclose personal experience with family harm, grief, identity, or relationships.
Choose a Pathway
Theatre Classroom
- Explore objective, obstacle, and tactics.
- Stage direct address and fourth-wall breaks.
- Test tonal shifts between comedy and danger.
Writing Classroom
- Adapt a myth without copying its plot.
- Write from a minor character’s point of view.
- Turn an abstract conflict into a physical object.
College Survey Course
- Compare classical myth with contemporary adaptation.
- Examine pastiche, tragicomedy, and direct address.
- Discuss agency in inherited stories.
Community Group
- Discuss protection, choice, and belonging.
- Map several definitions of love.
- Create a collective story of unexpected change.
Toolkit in Action
Love Is
Individually complete the phrase “Love is” five times. Include at least one answer that feels comforting and one that feels difficult. Combine the answers into a group poem without identifying their authors. Discuss where the definitions agree and collide.
The Wall
Name something a character wants to keep out and something the same character wants to keep in. Draw or build a simple wall between those desires. Decide what would make the wall crack, move, or become unnecessary.
Protection or Control?
Place four signs across the room: Protection, Control, Both, and Unsure. Read a character decision aloud in paraphrase. Participants move, point, hold up a card, or mark a response privately. Ask what evidence shaped each choice.
Objective, Obstacle, Tactic
Choose a relationship from the play. Identify what each person wants, what blocks that desire, and the tactics each uses. Perform a short improvised exchange, then change one tactic without changing the objective.
Myth Remix
Select a familiar myth or fairy tale. Keep one relationship, one object, and one impossible event. Change who has agency, who narrates, and what counts as a happy ending. Present the new version as a one-minute pitch.
Break the Fourth Wall
Stage a short invented scene twice. First, keep the audience outside the action. Then add direct address in which a character asks the audience to understand, approve, or excuse a choice. Compare how responsibility shifts.
Comedy Beside Danger
Create a scene that moves from comic exaggeration toward a serious consequence. Identify the exact beat where the audience’s understanding should change. Experiment with pace, silence, distance, and focus.
Trial and Return
Design three theatrical tasks for a character who wants something urgently. Each task should test a different quality, such as patience, courage, honesty, or care. Decide how completing the tasks changes the character rather than merely earning a reward.
Design Lab: Make the Inner Conflict Visible
Unexpected turns emotion into theatrical objects and environments. Choose one image and develop a design response.
- The wall: How can its size, sound, material, or movement reveal Taylor’s emotional state?
- Wings: Do they represent freedom, innocence, burden, beauty, or dependence?
- The knife: How can staging acknowledge danger without glamorizing violence?
- The snake: How can an offstage or symbolic creature remain present in the audience’s imagination?
- The tree and underworld: How can a small space transform without requiring expensive scenery?
- The river of forgetfulness: What might light, sound, fabric, movement, or caption design make visible?
Create a sketch, sound list, movement score, model, collage, tactile map, or written design statement. Any medium is welcome.
Directing Experiments
Who owns the story?
Stage the opening with the Merchant in three relationships to the audience: trusted guide, unreliable showman, and implicated family member. Note what changes before the audience knows his history.
Ann’s contradiction
Stage one invented moment of Ann caring for a daughter. Repeat it with a different physical distance, pace, and point of focus. Explore how tenderness and control can occupy the same action without becoming the same thing.
Vickie’s interruptions
Create three distinct performance vocabularies for Vickie’s appearances. Test whether they feel like lessons, cabaret turns, philosophical interruptions, or another play breaking through this one.
The land of the dead
Stage the underworld using only bodies, chairs, breath, and one light source. Focus on the rules of the space rather than literal scenery.
Writing Prompts
- Write a monologue in which a wall explains whom it protects.
- Give Olivia’s snake a brief account of the day’s events.
- Write the letter the Merchant never sent after leaving.
- Write Phoebe’s definition of usefulness at the beginning and again near the end.
- Invent one additional task Vickie might assign and explain what it reveals.
- Rewrite a mythological ending so the person with the least power makes the final decision.
- Create a new “Love is” interlude focused on listening, consent, or repair.
Stage to Screen
Because Metro Arts works across theatre and film, this activity examines what changes when a theatrical fable moves between forms.
- Choose one sequence involving direct address, a transformation, or the underworld.
- Storyboard six shots for a film version.
- Create a stage version using one fixed audience viewpoint.
- Compare what film gains through framing and editing with what theatre gains through shared space and live address.
- Decide which form better serves the sequence and defend the choice.
Multiple Ways to Participate
- Offer the recorded reading with captions and allow pausing or divided viewing.
- Provide character and relationship maps before discussion.
- Let participants respond through speech, writing, drawing, movement, selection, or observation.
- Describe visual choices and identify speakers during audio-only exploration.
- Use tactile or high-contrast materials for maps, walls, and design activities.
- Do not require eye contact, personal disclosure, physical touch, or participation in romantic scenes.
- Make scripts, prompts, and schedules available in advance when permissions allow.
Closing Reflection
Invite each participant to complete one sentence in any medium:
- A choice I noticed was…
- A wall that changed was…
- A definition of love I questioned was…
- Something the play made possible was…
Continue Exploring
This Toolkit summarizes and responds to the play for educational purposes. It does not reproduce the script. Performance and reproduction rights remain with the playwright.