Bright Star’s david oStERgaaRd and ERin Schmidt teach life lessons through theater. Photo courtesy of David Ostergaard.
ing. It also helps them develop confidence and take personal responsibility for their actions and learn time-management skills. Like many of Bright Star’s performances, they’ll focus on education and integrating social themes that impact the student’s daily lives. “It’s all about character education,” Ostergaard says. “It’s ideas and plays like these that we like to get behind.” Bright Star’s approach to theater aims at merging social issues affecting students and schools with broader historical themes relevant to problem solving. “We study curriculums and work them into shows,” says Schmidt. They even make study guides, Q&A sessions and curriculum outlines available with each play and performance. It enables the conversation to continue into the classroom and beyond. If it’s not already apparent, Bright Star isn’t your average theater company. For starters, they’re certified living wage by local labor advocacy nonprofit Just Economics. And they don’t own or rent a performance space. Everything is mobile. This freedom keeps their company affordable for school systems, Ostergaard says. They’ve got just over 1,000 shows booked this year. That includes four solid weeks of shows in Arizona, over 50 bookings in Raleigh and weekly shows in Pennsylvania, New
Jersey and New York, to name a few locales. “We do shows everywhere,” says Ostergaard. Everywhere else, that is. With the exception of an ongoing partnership with ACT and few ties to area schools, their schedule doesn’t hit to close to home as often as they would like. But that’s something they’re trying to fix by reinforcing the educational value of their performances. Some of Bright Star’s more popular shows focus on historical topics ranging from the Civil Rights Movement and bluegrass-backed mountain folk tales, to highlights from American history. The company also uses the stage as a first line of defense against bullying. They confront the cast and the audience with options on how to handle various scenarios, from those who bully to those getting bullied, letting the students make the calls on what to do. “It’s important that live theater is happening now, right before the eyes of the young audience,” Schmidt says. “It’s one thing to be told how you can deal being a victim of bullying, but to hang out with the student on stage while they are getting picked on, and to see them using tools to help themselves out of the situation, is much more memorable.” X
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SEPtEmBER 18 - SEPtEmBER 24, 2013
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