Activity: Rock, Paper, Scissors

Disparities of power and status are dominant themes in A Tale of Two Cities. The following activity from SCT's Education Department, written for use in a classroom setting but appropriate for any type of group, invites participants to think about power and status, their relative nature, and all of the factors that contribute to status.

Rock, Paper, Scissors

Standard Version

- Establish a gesture or specific body position for the following prompts: egg, chicken, dinosaur.

- Players all begin as eggs. The objective is to raise your status from egg, to chicken, to dinosaur by playing Rock, Paper, Scissors to grow more powerful. You may only play against people with the same status as you.

- The rounds go like so:
Egg vs Egg: winner becomes a chicken, loser stays an egg.
Chicken vs Chicken: winner becomes a dinosaur, loser becomes an egg.
Dinosaur vs Dinosaur: winner gets to stay a dinosaur, loser becomes a chicken.

- Once most players have become dinosaurs, the game is over.


Discussion Prompts

- Discuss status and how it relates to each of the characters above (egg, chicken, dinosaur). Why does an egg have lower status? Why does the dinosaur have higher status? What makes people have high and low status? Money? Education? Strength? Supernatural powers? Social Position?

- When did your status change in this game? When, in real life, does a person’s status change? If participants have seen A Tale of Two Cities, can they think of any characters whose status changes?


A Tale of Two Cities Version

- Discuss with players which characters in the play have higher and lower status. Rank three characters in order of their status. Choose which character is the egg, the chicken, the dinosaur and discuss why.

- Our Example:
Egg = Gabelle (low status: low ranking social position, poor, afraid of the Marquis)
Chicken = Lucie (middle status: comfortable life away from violence of France)
Dinosaur = Marquis (high status: noble, life of luxury, makes others do things they don’t want to do)

- Establish a gesture or specific body position for each character.

- Play Rock, Paper, Scissors as before, using the characters from the play