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Aliens, caterpillars, and family drama
June 30, 2009
by Jake Keyes '10
In a small student theater on a Thursday afternoon, two actors rehearse a battle scene. On the right, wielding a sword in one hand and a caterpillar sock-puppet on the other, is drama student Aaron Moss '10MFA. At left is Trai Byers '11MFA, bobbing back and forth in his fighter's stance, brandishing an oversized container of bug spray. The caterpillar steps in with his sword and hacks at his enemy, but he is quickly repelled by the bug spray and driven off with a screech.
In a few minutes the play is over, and another one begins.
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The sixth and seventh graders are chosen for their creativity and their interest in writing.
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In the audience, ten children have front-row seats. They are sixth and seventh graders, part of the School of Drama's Dwight/Edgewood Project. And the plays are theirs. They are students at Troup Middle School and Wexler Grant Community School, selected by their principals for their creativity and their interest in writing. For four weeks, they have worked with mentors from the drama school, taking lessons in acting, set design, costume-making, and other elements of theater. Each young playwright finishes his or her play during a weekend retreat, and the ten plays are performed by drama students during the last weekend in June.
The plays are brief, just 10 or 12 minutes each, and small, usually limited to two characters -- although it can be difficult to control such things, notes Erik Pearson '09MFA, a co-director of the program. "Inevitably the mother or evil aunt or postman makes an entrance." This year's plays include a volcano that falls in love with water, a moth that plays basketball, and an extraterrestrial love story about two alien nemeses who come to love one another. The plays are varied, wildly plotted, and sometimes unintentionally humorous, drawing laughs at rehearsal from stagehands in the wings.
But the plays are also quite sophisticated, in their own way. The sequence of stories opens, for instance, with a young girl trying to talk with her mother. The mother, who's only heard from offstage, has been drinking, and she's paying no attention to her daughter. Soon the girl's brother comes home, crestfallen because he has just lost his job and can't buy food for dinner. Everything seems to have fallen apart. The little girl retreats into her bedroom. Her brother follows her -- but upon opening her bedroom door, he sees that she has vanished, traveled to a make-believe place where there is plenty of food and money. Confronted with poverty and neglect, the characters spend the rest of the play deciding whether to leave this world behind. "On the one hand," Pearson says, "you've got this play with a talking caterpillar. And on the other hand you've got a play about a young 18-year-old who is struggling with the burden of acting as a father to his young sister, a play about a girl who is deeply disturbed by her mother's drinking, who escapes by indulging in her imagination."
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The creativity and emotion the students pack into ten minutes can be surprising.
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Given that it's summertime, when even the most mild-mannered middle schoolers have a hard time concentrating or sitting still, the creativity and emotion the students pack into ten minutes can be surprising. Pearson describes one playwright, Taqir James. "He's a 12-year-old who goofs off, makes fun of people. And then you get him talking about his play. We'll stage a scene and then he'll turn to his mentor [who is acting in the scene] and say, 'You need to have a more sorrowful expression on your face, because you've just lost your mother.' Or he'll say, 'Between this line and this line you need to leave a little more silence.' And he's absolutely right, of course."
Between rehearsals, the drama students laugh and joke with the middle schoolers -- but while the lights are down and the actors are speaking the playwrights' lines, everyone takes the kids absolutely seriously. The mentors aren't there to teach the kids much of anything, Pearson insists. The secret is just to give them the chance to write, and to have it feel meaningful. The rest will happen on its own.  |
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