A penchant for tragedy

On Friday my school had a New Years party where all the parents came, the kids performed dances and songs by class and they raffled off everything from a TV to bags of rice. Some of my 6th graders performed in a short play that was above all horribly depressing. There were really only two actors, an old mother and a grown son, played by two of my favorite students, but all the misfit boys of the class stood on the stage as trees or walked back and forth with cloud costumes on. I imagine they got out of class for this and were thus willing to wear funny costumes and stand there the whoe time. The story as I could tell went something like this. Family is poor, son works the fields, mom makes him food. Everytime she gives him something he complains and yells at her. One day when walking up the mountain to bring lunch to her son she falls off the cliff into the river and drowns. Then the son feels really bad. What was weird about this was not the awful tragedy played out by 6th graders, but that it was almost the exact some theme as the English play Colin and I saw on Christmas eve. There seems to be some sort of draw towards tragedies of mistreated mothers.
On another note, I was one of the 1/3 of the people attending who won in the raffle. Unfortuately I did not get one of the many useful items such as oil or a space heater, or one of the awesome items like a DVD play, instead I got an ugly framed piece with shells and a gold stick glued inside. Lucky me.