Photo by Robb Long
Course writer Chris Carlson in front of the Guthrie.
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Bringing bard to the bar: The Guthrie hosts theater-based legal education course
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By Michelle Bruch
Hundreds of Downtown attorneys must continually attend talking-head lectures to earn the 45 legal education credits the state requires every three years. The classes can be a droll chore, but the Guthrie Theater is shaking up the traditional format by hosting classes from the stage. The Guthrie's March 3 class will tackle the issue of gender discrimination in a performance by Sally Wingert (you might recognize her from the film "Fargo"). Wingert will perform selections from "Third," a play about reverse discrimination that ran at the Guthrie last year. A class on the elimination of bias in gender might seem like a no-brainer, but it's an issue that comes up time and again in the legal world. For example, a group of female ski jumpers are suing Vancouver's Olympic committee for gender discrimination, because the women are not allowed to compete at the 2010 games — ski jumping is the only Olympic sport that still excludes women. "It's one of those main points of our CLE [continuing legal education], is that stereotypes continue to exist more so than you'd think," said Chris Carlson, the writer of the course. Carlson works as an immigration attorney and an actor at venues like the Guthrie and Mixed Blood Theater. His South Minneapolis company Narrative Professionals teaches lawyers to become better storytellers through theatrical techniques. When writing the script for each class, Carlson looks for similar threads between Guthrie plays and court cases. Wingert said court cases examined in past classes have proved to be just as dramatic as the Guthrie's material. "In some cases more so," she said. "You can't write a play about a Blagojevich [without someone saying] 'That's a little over the top, isn't it?'" (Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich is accused of trying to sell President Barack Obama's vacated Senate seat.) A past legal education course at the Guthrie featured Shakespeare's "The Merchant of Venice," in which a moneylender demands a pound of the borrower's flesh as collateral for an unpaid loan. The play is widely controversial because its characters embody lots of stereotypical notions about what it means to be Jewish or Christian. Carlson explained that scenes from that play find a real-world parallel in a recent asylum case. A Chinese immigrant who arrived in the United States without a visa in 2006 claimed he was fleeing religious persecution. A judge had to decide whether the man was truly Catholic or just looking for an excuse to enter the country. "It got absurd pretty quickly, with the judge and the lawyer for the government asking the individual, 'What are the books of the Bible? When is Easter?'" Carlson said. "Basically imposing their perception of what it means to be a Catholic on the individual." To produce the show, the Guthrie collaborates with the West LegalEdcenter. Guthrie Education Director Louise Chalfant compared the legal ed courses to a Larry King show — the classes have live webcasts, an audience of 100–200 people, interviews with actors, and panelists sounding off on the issues In the March 3 class, an actor will read an eye-opening Supreme Court decision issued in 1872: "It is true that many women are unmarried and not affected by any of the duties, complications, and incapacities arising out of the married state, but these are exceptions to the general rule," states the opinion. "The paramount destiny and mission of woman are to fulfill the noble and benign offices of wife and mother. This is the law of the Creator. And the rules of civil society must be adapted to the general constitution of things, and cannot be based upon exceptional cases." A follow-up to that quotation is an excerpt from a 1994 Harper's Magazine story about how to confront sexual harassment. The story includes the tale of a little girl who was taunted by boys on the playground with the "I see London, I see France ..." rhyme. The moderator in the class will then point out that 35 courts around the country have recently reported that they regularly see gender-based bias at work in the system. The script is designed to be thought provoking, and the people who produce the legal ed courses have found that the stage is a great way to generate discussion. "Emotion is part of the human condition and so at every trial there is a lot of emotion that is at play and is communicated," Carlson said. "However, it's an environment in which emotion is very distrusted. Appealing to the passions of the jury and making emotional arguments are all things that are not acceptable. ... Theater is our society's most potent means of communicating emotion. ... When you bring that issue to the theater, you're in some senses freed to talk about the root and cause of the topic, and that is, what drives people to be biased." Reach Michelle Bruch at 436-4372 or mbruch@mnpubs.com Details
To enroll in the live continuing legal education course (CLE) or webcast on March 3, visit www.westlegaledcenter.com.
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