Playing Dead: Mock Trauma and Folk Drama in Staged High School Drunk Driving Tragedies by Montana Miller (review)

In the spring, horribly twisted cars appear on high school lawns in the United States, placed there by concerned adults who hope to persuade students not to drink and drive on prom night. Playing Dead analyzes another kind of effort to prevent drunk driving: the folk drama “Every Fifteen Minutes” (E15M), in which the “Grim Reaper” pulls a student out of a classroom every quarter-hour to transform him or her into a symbolic victim of drunk drivers’ recklessness. Having assumed this role, the student puts on white face makeup and coroner’s tags and stops talking because it is time to “play dead.” This folk drama has a powerful impact upon both participants and spectators. Using frame analysis to explicate this presentation of ritual and dark play at high schools, Miller asks intriguing questions and shares valuable insights.

Since Miller’s book is Volume 2 in the “Ritual, Festival, and Celebration” series, Jack Santino, editor of the series, offers a foreword. Describing performances of “Every Fifteen Minutes” as “didactic drunk-driving morality plays,” Santino suggests that these “hybrid, porous, symbolic” events seem to be “ritualesque”: not fully developed rituals but symbolic enactments meant to change high school students’ behavior (pp. ix-x). He notes that this volume indicates subject matter and theory suitable for future volumes in the series.

Folk drama is certainly an important subject. As Miller points out in her first chapter, most studies of folk drama have examined discontinued traditions such as Christmas mumming and performances related to religion. Children and adolescents enjoy participating in folk drama, but not many folklorists of childhood and adolescence have made folk drama a major category of study. Bill Ellis’s article “The Camp Mock-Ordeal: Theater as Life” (Journal of American Folklore 94:486–505, 1981), with its focus on striking a balance between reality and fiction, provides a helpful model, but otherwise most of Miller’s approach comes from play theory.

Play-frame analysis by Brian Sutton-Smith, Gregory Bateson, Jay Mechling, Erving Goffman, and others provides the inspiration for Miller’s work. Noting that play frames constantly shift, resulting in what Sutton-Smith calls “the ambiguity of play,” she concentrates upon “slippery steps” in play frames. Her admirably thorough approach includes conducting hours of tape-recorded interviews, attending many E15M performances, collecting archival material from media accounts and Internet sites, and planning and presentation in various communities. Her attention to You-Tube videos and comments yields especially interesting results, since YouTube is such a vibrant communication center these days.

In the second chapter, Miller discusses people’s concern about drunk driving in American history and culture. She then explains E15M’s development and change over time. Her third chapter examines play frames’ slippery steps, exploring both internal frame markers and “the larger frame of time and space that defines an E15M event” (p. 52). Noting the significance of markers such as “announcements and voiceovers, T-shirts and tables stocked with snacks and soda” (p. 54), she shows how all of these markers matter. Her discussion of touch, not often included in studies of play frame, is especially perceptive. When students “return to the living” after their period of service as symbolic victims, their fellow students touch them and hug them, reassuring themselves that the E15M was, as stated in an Internet guestbook comment, “just a simulation” (p. 55).

Chapter 4, felicitously titled “Engrossed Out: Every 15 Minutes as Folk Drama,” presents and analyzes participants’ comments on whether the program works and, if so, why it is effective. Although some people comment upon the program’s seriousness of purpose, others (primarily the students) make fun of it. One of the most interesting reactions is enjoyment of the attention that participants in this folk drama receive. The Living Dead are “bathed in glory”: they receive deeply appreciative obituaries at school and sometimes receive...