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Six city teachers explain how Roundabout’s education program
helps students develop the most important character of all: their own.
Joe Thorsen - Grover Cleveland High School
My experience with Roundabout proved to be a refreshing reminder of the power of the spoken word. As an English teacher concerned with standards and Regents testing, I often focus my students with specific learning strategies. Roundabout’s summer training and visiting artist programs, however, present some alternative, thought-provoking techniques for approaching literature. By looking at novels as well as plays through a writer and director’s eyes—and not just a reader’s—I found my class and myself re-energized in our studies.
Just recently we were doing Cyrano de Bergerac, a play that poses two challenges: an opening scene with dozens of characters who barely utter more than a single line, and a depiction of a society completely alien to my students. Instead of simply conducting business as usual (i.e. plowing ahead with reading comprehension), I asked them not only to be actors but directors. "How would you direct this scene? How could this line be said to make the irony more apparent? How can we add more tension between these characters?" I queried. Voilà! Suddenly a play came alive which might normally have appealed to only half the class. They are now reading for feeling, and their writing has become more vibrant as a result.
Mark Lord - Robert F. Kennedy High School
Teaching for more than twenty years can often take its toll on one’s energy level. But at Roundabout’s four-day professional development workshop in summer 2000, I was sufficiently invigorated to approach the school year with a level of enthusiasm I hadn’t felt in years. In fact, I was so taken with the workshop that I decided to involve one of my classes in Roundabout’s Page to Stage program. The results have been impressive. I’ve always been a lover of theatre, but the summer workshop offered a whole new perspective on how to incorporate theatre into the curriculum of my regular English classes. I was particularly impressed with the so-called Postcard Production, during which we actually created a fully-staged small-scale theatrical production in a matter of hours.
This term, my class was scheduled to read, among other works, Pygmalion and its musical adaptation, My Fair Lady. When we began the Page to Stage program, the teaching artist, Pamela Seiderman, and I worked closely to plan activities that would tie the two works to the two plays we would be seeing on Broadway, Design For Living and Follies. We decided to focus on developing students’ writing skills. Working in groups, students were asked to write their own modernization of scenes based on Shaw’s original, including lyrics to original songs. Under our supervision, the students wrote, directed, and designed their own presentations. In the process, they developed an understanding of the difference between narrative and dialogue, the function of songs in musical theatre, and the interrelation of all the various elements of a production. Overall the Page to Stage program has been a most effective educational experience—not only for my students, but for myself as well.
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Alyson Miller - Computer School II
My eighth-grade students were afraid of "acting," afraid of expressing themselves alone or in front of their peers, afraid of risking their voice—that junior-high self. When I told them we would be writing and performing monologues based on the Greek myths as a final project with Reneé Fleming from Roundabout Theatre Company, the groans echoed across the classroom walls. I heard their thoughts loud and clear: not up there, not alone, not in front of my peers, no way, not me! However, as the weeks went on, many students forgot to be afraid, and in spite of their better adolescent judgement, they began to take the risks needed to succeed.
The uncomfortable giggles from weeks one and two vanished as Reneé continued to lead acting games in focus, determination, decision-making, and inner thoughts. The risks my students took with her became more and more apparent during my daily English classes. More students volunteered to read, to create tableaux of scenes from a book, or to act out a poem while it was read out loud. After attending performances of Follies and Juno and the Paycock, they immediately applied the skills they had learned to understand the plays in English class. They could analyze characters, make conclusions about a character’s actions, and assess the role of a character’s environment. When the students performed their monologues at the end of the residency, they were proud of their work, of each other, and of their abilities to become leaders within a school community. They recognized that the elements of a successful performance mirrored the skills needed for academic success. One participant summed it up neatly: "I learned that when you are performing and acting it usually helps to not hold anything back, to just let it out. Don’t let anything distract you from performing."
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Margie Castleman
- Public School Repertory Company
Without our partnership with Roundabout there would simply be no theatre at Public School Repertory Company (psrc). About five years ago we hatched a scheme to replicate a professional theatre company at psrc using Roundabout as a model. Perhaps it was a bit ambitious. But guess what? It worked, it is working, and it will continue to work. We now have a thriving program, not to mention our own black box theatre with lighting board, sound board, black velvet curtains and an order for permanent risers.
Our production this year—a full length quasi-musical entitled "The Ghosts of Town Hall"—was written, acted, and technically produced entirely by students in the psrc theatre department. It was truly a zenith in my nine-year career as an acting teacher to watch audience members fall out of their chairs laughing at the ghost of Ruth Saint Denis dancing to "Whip It to Me," and to observe our principal, Jean Issman, deeply moved by the ghost of Langston Hughes reciting "I Too Am America." And how gratifying to look back at the light booth and to see Cristina from the Theatre Tech class calling the light and sound cues for Thomas and David: students competently in control. The standing ovations were simply icing on the psrc cake.
Ron Saltz - The Heritage School
This morning, Jessica handed me a copy of her play, Breaking Through. It was her fifth revision since December, and the play has grown to a twenty minute one-act. She handed it to me and asked me to look at the ending to see if it is strong enough. I know that for me it probably is, and I know that for Jessica it probably is not, so I suspect that the play will continue to change and grow before it goes up four weeks from today.
I like the title, Breaking Through. It comes from a line in her play, spoken when one of the characters, a seventeen-year old girl, is trying to get out of her role as mother of her eight-year-old little brother. The title makes a fitting description of our Producing Partners experience: we do a lot of escaping of our circumstances, too.
Most of our cast members did not come to the class with much theatre experience. One girl recently told me that she didn’t need to rehearse because she knew all her lines. (It comes as a shock to more than one of our cast and crew that acting is about more than memorizing lines.)
Last week, another young lady, Jeneil, tearfully quit the play. She wanted to be in it, but she was too afraid. Last Thursday Jeneil returned to rehearsal, telling me that quitting was a pattern in her life and she had to break it. We agreed that she should take on a smaller role in the same play and work up to larger parts over time. She was so excited to have found a way through her fear that she practically skipped her way through the rest of rehearsal. Another young artist, Alex (the most experienced writer/actor/playwright in the group) complained to me the other day that we are spending so much time on the technical part of the play that we don’t have enough time to rehearse. "I don’t want you to sell yourself short," I told her. We certainly need to rehearse more, but we have an opportunity working with the Roundabout crew to take our plays to levels that our kids haven’t yet imagined because they have never seen it happen. After our next tech rehearsal, Alex expressed shock and delight at the idea that light could convey the arc of a play through color, and that light cues could be more than just "lights up" and "fade to black."
I vacillate between euphoria and terror at the task we have undertaken. I have never called myself a producer before, but that is what I call myself here. The role encompasses everything—filling in for a missing actor in rehearsal; helping to revise scripts; coordinating the theatre professionals; buying pizza for the students to entice them to arrive on time to class; encouraging a child who thinks she’s facing a task too big for herself. When I step back from the moment, I often wonder if we have bitten off too much. That’s where Renee Fleming comes in—our producing partner, and my mentor. The moments when I’m just not sure we’ll actually pull it off are when she listens, gets us a new light board, or makes me realize that this is just how it goes in theatre. It’s solving problems to make a work of art. It’s breaking through our limits and our doubts.
Elayne Shapiro - Washington Irving High School
Anyone who feels the magic when the house lights dim and the curtain goes up on live theatre will understand how important and worthwhile the Roundabout Theatre Education programs are to both myself and my students.
I have seen theatre cast its spell on students who initially come to it with many reservations. The program depends on a partnership between the teaching artist and the classroom teacher. Both the teaching artist and the teacher must contribute their individual strengths if a unit of study is to engage the students, expand their experience of theatre, and give them tools to think critically about the experience. The unit encompasses new standards of English Language Arts and helps to prepare students for the tasks set before them on the English Regents examination. Moreover, as audience members viewing a performance critically, the students begin to feel empowered in a new way.
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