A flexible engagement toolkit for audiences, educators, artists, and community groups

Core Frame

When Churchyards Yawn is a divine comedy after Hamlet: the dead of Shakespeare’s tragedy find themselves in Purgatory, where salvation is not private but collective. The central question is not only “What did I do?” but “What did we make together, and what must we repair together?”

This toolkit is designed to help participants explore the play through performance, discussion, writing, movement, sound, and collaborative reflection.

Essential Question

What if salvation depends not only on personal repentance, but on our ability to forgive, be forgiven, and recognize that our lives are inseparably bound to one another?

Who This Toolkit Is For

Educators preparing students for the production
Community groups discussing grief, accountability, faith, or forgiveness
Theatre artists exploring adaptation and ensemble performance
Audience members who want a deeper encounter with the play
Facilitators working with mixed-access, mixed-experience groups

Access-Centered Facilitation Principles

Use these principles throughout the toolkit.

Multiple ways in: Participants may speak, write, draw, move, listen, observe, or respond silently.
No forced confession: The play deals with sin, shame, grief, and forgiveness. Participants should never be pressured to disclose personal trauma.
Observation counts as participation: Watching, listening, or reflecting inwardly are valid forms of engagement.
Complexity over judgment: Avoid reducing characters to hero, villain, victim, or sinner.
Collective care: Because the play asks what people owe one another, the room should model attentive, non-coercive listening.

Toolkit Pathways

Facilitators may use the full sequence or select one pathway.

Pathway	Best For	Core Activity
Before the Show	Classes, audiences, community groups	Soul Pod Mapping
During the Show	Individual viewers	Staircase Observation Score
After the Show	Discussion groups	Trial of the Dead
Performance Lab	Actors, directors, theatre students	Comedy/Contrition Scene Work
Writing Lab	Students, writers, dramaturgs	A Missing Confession
Design Lab	Designers, makers, devised theatre groups	Build the Staircase
Access Lab	Educators and facilitators	Multimodal Purgatory

1. Before the Show: Soul Pod Mapping

Purpose

To introduce the play’s central idea: no one is morally or spiritually isolated.

Time

20–35 minutes

Materials

Paper, markers, sticky notes, or a shared digital board.

Instructions

Place the names of the major characters from Hamlet around the room or on a board: Hamlet, Gertrude, Claudius, Ophelia, Laertes, Polonius, Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, Hamlet Sr.
Ask participants to draw lines between characters who harmed, loved, misunderstood, used, idealized, or failed one another.
On each line, write one active verb: judged, abandoned, desired, manipulated, protected, silenced, obeyed, betrayed, mourned.
Step back and ask: Where is responsibility concentrated? Where is it distributed?

Discussion Prompts

Which character seems most trapped inside someone else’s story?
Which relationship carries the most unfinished business?
What changes when guilt is understood as relational rather than individual?
Can someone be both harmed and harmful?

Access Options

Participants may point, draw symbols, use color, write privately, dictate to a partner, or simply observe the emerging map.

2. During the Show: Staircase Observation Score

Purpose

To help viewers track how physical labor becomes spiritual, theatrical, and ethical labor.

Instructions for Viewers

While watching, notice the staircase.

Track three things:

Who builds? Who takes initiative? Who resists? Who follows?
What changes? How does the staircase alter relationships, rhythm, danger, or hope?
What does it mean? Does it feel like punishment, cooperation, ritual, escape, penance, or art-making?

Reflection Afterward

Complete one sentence:

At first, the staircase seemed like ____.
By the end, it became ____.

Access Options

Participants may respond through speech, writing, drawing, gesture, a sound, or a single chosen word.

3. After the Show: Trial of the Dead

Purpose

To examine accountability without flattening the play into simple moral judgment.

Time

35–60 minutes

Setup

Divide participants into small groups. Each group chooses one character.

Instructions

Each group prepares three statements:

The Charge: What must this character answer for?
The Context: What pain, pressure, ignorance, or inheritance shaped their choices?
The Possibility: What would genuine transformation require from them?

Groups then present their character to the room.

Rule

No group may argue that a character is only guilty, only innocent, only victim, or only villain.

Discussion Prompts

Which character was easiest to condemn?
Which character became more complicated under scrutiny?
What is the difference between explanation and excuse?
What does the play ask us to do with people who are guilty but still capable of change?

Access Options

Groups may present orally, visually, physically, or through a written statement read by a facilitator.

4. Performance Lab: Comedy and Contrition

Purpose

To explore how the play uses comedy not to avoid pain, but to make painful truth speakable.

Time

30–50 minutes

Instructions

Choose a short confrontation, confession, or accusation from the play.

Perform or read it three ways:

As high comedy: Speed, exaggeration, rhythm, irritation, absurdity.
As spiritual emergency: Slow down. Treat every word as consequential.
As both at once: Let the joke expose the wound.

Reflection

What changed when the scene became funny?
What changed when it became solemn?
Which version felt most truthful?
How can laughter intensify rather than weaken moral seriousness?

Access Options

Participants may act, read, direct, observe, give sound cues, describe staging choices, or write actor notes.

5. Writing Lab: A Missing Confession

Purpose

To let participants imagine what remains unsaid beneath the play’s comic and spiritual machinery.

Time

20–40 minutes

Prompt

Write a short monologue or dialogue beginning with one of these lines:

“What I never admitted was…”
“I thought I was protecting you when…”
“The story you told about me was wrong because…”
“I wanted forgiveness before I understood what I had done.”
“If we are bound together, then you must also know…”

Optional Constraint

The character may not ask for forgiveness directly. They must instead tell the truth as clearly as they can.

Sharing Options

Participants may share aloud, exchange anonymously, summarize, or keep the writing private.

6. Design Lab: Build the Staircase

Purpose

To investigate the staircase as object, metaphor, and live theatrical problem.

Time

40–75 minutes

Materials

Paper, cardboard, blocks, classroom objects, found objects, or a sketching surface.

Instructions

Design a staircase for the production using objects from human life.

Each object should answer one question:

What burden does this soul carry?
What memory refuses to disappear?
What must be transformed into a step upward?

Design Considerations

Can actors safely build with it in real time?
Does the staircase look accidental, ritualized, comic, sacred, bureaucratic, or dangerous?
Does it suggest Heaven, Hell, theatre machinery, a courtroom, a storage room, or a construction site?
What sounds does it make as it is built?

Reflection

The staircase is not just scenery. It is an argument. What does your staircase argue about salvation?

Access Options

Participants may sketch, describe, arrange objects, create a sound palette, or make a tactile model.

7. Access Lab: Multimodal Purgatory

Purpose

To align the play’s themes with accessible, multisensory performance practice.

Activity

Create three versions of Purgatory:

Sound Purgatory: What does unfinished business sound like?
Movement Purgatory: What does collective ascent feel like in the body?
Visual/Tactile Purgatory: What textures, shapes, or objects belong in this threshold space?

Facilitation Prompts

How can access tools become expressive parts of the world rather than add-ons?
What might captions reveal beyond spoken text?
How might sound, vibration, light, gesture, or spatial arrangement help tell the story?
How can a production welcome people with different sensory experiences without assuming one “normal” audience?

Access Options

This activity should already be access-forward: participants may use language, sound, drawing, gesture, objects, texture, written description, or stillness.

8. The Seven Deadly Sins as Relationship Map

Purpose

To move beyond doctrinal definitions and examine sin as behavior within relationships.

Instructions

For each sin, ask: What does this look like between people?

Sin	Relational Version	Possible Question
Lust	Turning another person into an object of desire, purity, fantasy, or possession	Who was not seen clearly?
Gluttony	Consuming attention, sympathy, power, or grief	Who takes up too much space?
Avarice	Grasping for control, status, loyalty, or narrative ownership	Who wants to own the story?
Sloth	Refusing responsibility, action, or moral attention	Who avoided the truth?
Wrath	Making pain into punishment	Who weaponized hurt?
Envy	Resenting another’s freedom, love, innocence, or authority	Who could not bear another person’s place?
Pride	Refusing to see oneself as partial, wrong, dependent, or implicated	Who thinks their suffering explains everything?

Discussion Prompts

Which sin seems most transformed by the play?
Which sin is most comic?
Which sin is most dangerous?
Which sin requires the whole group to confront it, rather than one person alone?

9. Community Conversation: Forgiveness Without Sentimentality

Purpose

To discuss forgiveness carefully, especially in groups where participants may hold different beliefs or experiences.

Opening Agreement

Forgiveness is not the same as forgetting, excusing, reconciling, or returning to harm.

Conversation Questions

What must happen before forgiveness becomes meaningful?
Can someone be forgiven without being trusted?
Can a community move forward if one person refuses accountability?
What is the difference between repentance and regret?
What does the play suggest about grace?

Closing Reflection

Invite participants to complete one sentence privately or aloud:

The play made me rethink ____.
One thing I still resist is ____.
One question I am leaving with is ____.

10. Quick-Use Prompts

For a 10-Minute Discussion

Ask: Who in the play is most changed by finally being heard?

For a Writing Assignment

Argue whether the play ultimately revises, corrects, challenges, or extends Hamlet.

For an Acting Class

Choose one character and identify the difference between what they want, what they confess, and what they refuse to know.

For a Design Class

Create a visual concept for Purgatory that avoids clichés of clouds, flames, and darkness.

For a Community Group

Discuss the statement: No one gets to remain the hero of their own story.

Facilitator Notes

Keep the tone spacious. The material is morally intense but often funny.
Let contradiction remain visible.
Do not demand consensus about forgiveness, religion, guilt, or salvation.
Encourage participants to distinguish between personal belief and theatrical possibility.
Return often to the play’s central action: building together.

Final Reflection

When Churchyards Yawn asks whether the afterlife might be less a courtroom than a rehearsal room: a place where the dead must repeat, revise, listen, fail, and try again until they can finally build something that holds them all.