“Don’t Go in the Worknest!”: Responding to rules and rule-breaking in Anne Negri’s With Two Wings

ABSTRACT

In “Don’t Go in the Worknest!”: Responding to Rules and Rule-Breaking in Anne Negri’s With Two Wings,” I explore a generative “collision” between the focus on rules and rule enforcement in contemporary discourses around parenting, the actual lived experience of parenting, and the representation of rules and rule-breaking on stage. I begin by examining the role of rules and rule-setting in popular parenting books. I argue that the discourse around rules, rule-breaking, and rule-enforcement creates a particularly fraught environment for Negri’s play, not only because of the way in which Lyf, the play’s protagonist, deliberately and repeatedly breaks his parents’ rules but also because the rules are based on a lie. Using my own experience as a model, I argue that Negri’s complex consideration of “rules” presents a profound opportunity for caregivers to reconsider the role of rules in the life of children in their care, and the rule-breaking within the play offers critical opportunities for dialogue between caregivers and youth about growing up and pushing beyond the boundaries of the family nest.

Notes

¹ There are dozens of books that seem to address similar parental concerns and reflect our contemporary anxieties around raising “spoiled,” “entitled,” or “defiant” children. See for example, Cleaning House: A Mom’s Twelve-Month Experiment to Rid her House of Youth Entitlement, The Entitlement Trap, Setting Limits with your Strong-Willed Child, and Who’s The Boss?: The Win, Win Way to Parent Your Defiant, Strong Willed Child.

² Hunt references the controversy around Steppenwolf’s 2014 production of This is Modern Art. The play focuses on young graffiti artists in Chicago, as an example of how theatre critics have responded negatively to the representation of young people engaged in bad acts, particularly when those acts go unpunished.

³ Throughout this article, I discuss my experience with the play and my personal considerations about rules as my child’s primary caregiver. While I have a loving partner who actively co-parents our daughter, I do not presume to speak for him.

⁴ This difference between the parents’ approaches to rules suggests some standard gender tropes about the difference between fathers and mothers (at least in cisgendered heterosexual couplings), but it also underscores their very different relationship to flying.

⁵ It might also present space for parents to consider

⁶ In the myth, Daedalus is a great inventor and builds a pair of wings for himself and his son Icarus out of wax. Before giving his son a pair of wings, Daedalus warns Icarus to fly a middle course and to avoid flying too close to the sun lest the sun melt the wax and send Icarus plummeting to the ground. Unfortunately, Icarus fails to take his father’s advice seriously and flies higher and higher. The heat of the sun melts the wax sending Icarus plunging into the sea and to his death.

⁷ Obviously, there remains a lot to unpack here in the play about parents with disabilities and their interactions with children who are able-bodied. I think Negri’s rendering of a family whose members are differently-abled is quite nuanced, which my reading solely for the role of rules and rule-breaking risks flattening.

⁸ She was not actually able to read at this age, but she had begun performing these types of early literacy behaviors, such as holding books and pretending to read their contents.

⁹ This phrase is from my father’s memory. In his more recent book The New Strong-Willed Child, Dobson includes a chapter called “Shaping the Will.” Critics of Dobson’ approach have, like my father, described Dobson’s work in the same way. Dobson grounds his approach in conservative Protestant ideas, which includes corporal punishment as a valid form of discipline.