Devising Theater with Elementary School Students

Kids are my favorite part of humanity. I like the eleven-year old variety; the ones that are just starting to get wise to swear words and private parts, but still talk to their teddy bear. I’ve spent a serious amount of time with these creatures too, as both a camp counselor and a YMCA tutor.  The Middlesex School Summer Arts camp (MSSA) springs to life every summer in Concord MA, one of the wealthiest towns with one of the best school systems in the country. During the school year the YMCA runs an after school program at the Mason Pilot Elementary School in Roxbury MA, one of the lowest income neighborhoods in greater Boston. At MSSA nearly all of the children are white and come from upper middle class families, and at Mason all of the children are black or Hispanic and come from blue-collar families. What do they all have in common? They love to play pretend.

They also love me. I’ll just say it, I’m a big hit with kids, mostly because I’m about a hundred feet tall in their eyes, I can often match or surpass them in energy, and I listen to them. It’s amazing what happens when you start treating a child as a peer. The thoughts in their head are unadulterated. I’m sure many would agree, it is the kids we teach that often teach us the most.

One of my favorite people is a red-headed girl named Eliza. She’s eleven now, but I’ve been babysitting her since she was seven and she is one of the smartest people I’ve ever met. One night, as we were up talking well past her bedtime, as we were wont to do, she confided in me that Peter Pan would come to visit her every evening. I nodded my head inquiringly, as every adult does in these situations, but as she recounted the conversations and adventures she had shared with the boy who won’t grow up, I started to believe her. She was telling me about her friend, and so what if he lived in her imagination. As I closed the door and went downstairs to wait for her parents, I listened intently for a patter of footsteps from her room. But as much as the sound of the polar express, all was silent to my aged ears.

There is a wondrous phenomena that happens with children and actors; when they believe strongly enough, others believe too. For the younger kids, believing comes naturally. But, so often it seems, we lose the ability we had as seven-year olds to believe so readily and fully. A huge part of my training at the BU school of theater has been rediscovering what it means to believe again, or releasing the inner child who has been buried under years of social codification. I have learned so much about acting from the children I’ve taught and tutored. So much about life too.

This week on HowlRound, Theater educators from across the country have been discussing their own experiences with their young students in the high school theater series. The Weekly Howl was “High School Theater” and on Wednesday playwright Don Zolidis moderated a discussion on twitter hashtag #newplay. As I happened upon this archive, I was pleasantly surprised to see a familiar name attached to an article on Devising Theater with High School Students. Joel Sugerman, theater director at Laurence Academy is a close friend of Tom Kane, theater director at Middlesex School and my former director and high school advisor. Tom often called Joel over to Concord as an outside eye during tech for our productions. I remember seeing him in the audience as I dangled 10 ft off the stage in a cheerleading uniform, harnessed to the grid as a teenage superhero in our production of Chris Mathews and Jake Minton’s 2007 play The Sparrow. Reading his article brought back fond memories, and got me thinking about how far I’ve come since my high school days. In reading his article, I have come to realize that I can now relate to his experiences as a teacher:

For the last two summers at camp, Eliza has taken my Fractured Fairytales class. It is in effect a class in adaptation. The first summer, I co-taught with an instructor who wrote all of the adaptations for the kids. I personally am of the same mind as Joel who believes “when we devise theater with students instead of starting with a script (and roles you have to fill them into like square pegs into octagonal slots), we can work with what is actually in the room.” So this past summer, as the sole instructor, I decided to endeavor upon a devise approach with this group of spunky 8-12 year olds. In our initial discussion about fairytales, it became clear that everyone was a fan of Alice and Wonderland. So I gave them a box of hats and props and asked them to tell their version of the story. Over the next week, under my occasional direction, they created the story of Alice and the Wonderland Mix-up. I was amazed at their improvisational abilities to create conflict, narrative, and character. I believe that kids are the greatest improvisers. Their dedication too was unwavering, and every afternoon we came back to the story and worked on clarifying and expanding our little play. The story came from them pure and simple. The play emerged from play. Now, although my brain and body are far from the innocence of my younger days (see my previous blog post) I strive to create with the same spirit of play that comes so easily to Eliza and my other students.