8 minute read
A JOURNEY OF DISCOVERY
KATI KOERNER
"WHY WERE YOU PLAYING THE VICTIM?" an eleventh grader from Manhattan’s High School for Fashion Industries named Cameron asked Anika Noni Rose. The rest of the kids in the audience clapped and cheered because they clearly wanted to know, too. The curtain had just come down to thunderous applause after a matinee of Anton Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya for nine hundred and ten New York City public high school students in the Beaumont Theater. Ms. Rose, who played Elena in Lincoln Center Theater’s production, had just taken her bows. Now, she was back onstage with her fellow cast members, in her own sweatpants and baseball cap, for a post-show talkback with the student audience. The houselights were on. The actors settled into chairs placed by a stagehand and passed a single microphone among themselves to answer the students’ questions. It was clear that they were no longer in character. And yet the students weren’t done with the story. They wanted to know what Elena was thinking, beyond the words that Chekhov had given her, as she found herself caught between her marriage to the much older Professor and her passion for the idealistic Doctor Astrov.
Ms. Rose leapt to Elena’s defense. She explained, “Elena was a victim in many ways. She’s in a situation that she didn’t expect to be in. She married a man she loved, and her life turned out very differently. She’s in a situation that is now untenable, and she has a choice: she can stick with a situation that is dead, or she can leave and be with this man who she has a lot of passion for, or she can choose herself.”
Logically, Cameron and the other students knew this was a play. And yet, they remained immersed in the story: one foot in the imagined world of Uncle Vanya, and the other in the real world of the Beaumont on a Wednesday afternoon.
In my twenty-one years running the education department at LCT, I have sat through almost a hundred student matinees. Every single time the lights fade to black at the top of these shows, the student audience lets out a scream, as if they’ve just been buckled into a roller coaster. And in a way they have. Collectively, they’re being plunged into an imaginary world and into the unknown, both in terms of the story and the experience of being in a theater.
Sean Chapel, an English teacher at Pelham Preparatory Academy in the Bronx and a longtime participant in LCT’s education programs, explained that he shepherds his students onto the #2 train for the 55-minute journey from his school to LCT twice a year so they can enjoy the total experience of coming to Lincoln Center. It starts with what they know: an afternoon off from school and a trip to an iconic New York City location. But it ends up being a journey of discovery: a performance with amazing actors that feels surprising, relevant, and emotionally resonant. Chapel listed some of what he believes to be our birthright as New Yorkers: “You’ve got to eat a pastrami sandwich at Katz’s. You never go to Times Square on New Year’s Eve. You walk by the Empire State Building but you don’t go up. And you go to the theater. I want my students to be steeped in this New York tradition. Being from the Bronx, it can sometimes feel far away for them. It’s incumbent upon us as educators to cultivate a new generation of theatergoers. And then, one day, when they grow up, they’ll take their children.”
About thirty percent of the students that we bring to see our shows have never seen a professional production before. Eighty-one percent of our students live in poverty; ninety percent are students of color; and about a quarter of them are recent immigrants who are still learning English. Sometimes, students find that their identities and lived experience are affirmed by our shows. At other times, students find themselves getting to know and care deeply about characters across great divides of culture, time, and place.
Everyone loves a good story, well-told. In the education department, we believe that knowing the story and context of a piece before coming to see it and grappling with the same questions that the artists asked themselves during the design and rehearsal process allows our students to come to the theater with a sense of intellectual and artistic ownership. Having accessed their own artistry and imagination in the classroom, they can appreciate the storytelling in the theater in a deeper way.
Students’ willingness to dive into a story or engage meaningfully with a character doesn’t require the grandeur of the Beaumont, the brilliance of a professional actor like Anika Noni Rose, or even a spectacular onstage rain effect like the one that Mimi Lien included in her set design for Uncle Vanya. In our work in schools, the classroom becomes a theatrical space. This work is led by LCT’s teaching artists, highly experienced educators who are also professional actors, playwrights, or musical theater lyricists or composers. Teaching artists juggle their work in the classroom with their lives as working theater professionals, drawing upon both their artistic and pedagogical skills to engage students in critical thinking and creative problem-solving.
In a post-show workshop following the all-student matinee of Uncle Vanya, Cameron, the eleventh grader who wanted to know more about Elena’s choices in the talkback, got to keep puzzling them through in an improvised in-class activity. This time, LCT’s teaching artist pretended to be Elena. Cameron, and all the other students in our program, assumed the role of Elena’s college friends, invented characters who don’t appear anywhere in Chekhov’s text but who might have feelings about what Elena decides to do. Within that dramatic framework, students gave the character improvised advice on whether to stay in her marriage or return to Doctor Astrov. The teaching artist’s job was to draw upon Elena’s given circumstances and the students’ own ideas to problematize her choices.
The bridge between experience and imagination is particularly poignant in LCT’s Learning English and Drama Project (LEAD), an in-school program that works with multilingual learners, mostly recent immigrants in New York City’s public middle and high schools who are still learning English while also navigating a new culture and school system. In LEAD, students act out texts they are reading in English class that have been adapted and dramatized by us with their language proficiency level in mind. These texts can be pretty much anything: the comic book Ms. Marvel, Malala Yousefzai’s memoir, or an existing play like A Raisin in the Sun, among many others. LEAD scripts are rehearsed over ten class sessions under the guidance of our teaching artists. They’re performed informally, often in the classroom but sometimes in a library or auditorium, to an audience of fellow students or a few teachers. The structure of the script and the conventions of theater—rehearsal, character work, improvisation, artistic collaboration, physical and vocal expression—allow nervous speakers to gain confidence in their new language.
One day not long ago, a LEAD student at Emma Lazarus High School for English Language Scholars came into class extra early to consult with LaTonya Borsay, one of LCT’s longtime teaching artists. He was playing the monster in his class’s fifteen-page dramatization of Frankenstein and he felt his entrance in a key scene wasn’t right. In fact, the moment had troubled him since the previous LEAD class, several days before. In LaTonya’s words, “he was supposed to come in hot” in the scene and confront his maker, Doctor Frankenstein. The student felt the staging, a long cross across the width of the classroom before saying his first line, made it hard for him to launch into the emotional intensity that the top of the scene required. So, he took ownership of the situation and pitched an alternate entrance to LaTonya, which upped the emotional stakes for his character and helped the dramatic moment click into place for him. In LEAD, as in all our education work, students don’t just follow a script, they develop their own artistic ideas and learn to act on their creative impulses. So, when you’re Frankenstein’s monster and your entrance feels off, it creates a powerful incentive to communicate your creative ideas in your new language.
LCT has worked with many of its forty-four school partners for more than ten years. As these partnerships have evolved, we’ve sometimes found ourselves doing multiple programs in the same school. So, in a happy accident, just a week after coming to see Uncle Vanya and confronting Anika Noni Rose about Elena in the post-show talkback, Cameron, that eleventh grader from the High School for Fashion Industries, returned to LCT’s Tow Theater to hear a song he co-wrote in our Songwriting in the Schools Program performed by a company of six Broadway professionals. In one week, Cameron got to applaud Chekhov’s work in the Beaumont and have his own creative work, and that of his classmates, applauded upstairs in the Tow.
Whatever path our students find themselves on in life, I hope they will hold on to the joy they found in seeing our shows, working on scenes with their classmates, analyzing the language of a script, or writing an original song. And I hope they’ll remember LCT as a place to encounter characters and stories they can feel passionate about and that they will return for more. ▪
