Sideways Stories from Wayside School Cast Facilitates Workshop for Community Youth

Yasu Shinozaki Arts & Culture Editor

This weekend, Oberlin College students will perform Sideways Stories from Wayside School at the Kander Theater for an audience of local children. After the performance, based on the book by Louis Sachar, the cast and directors will host a “talk back” in which they will answer questions from the audience and discuss their interest in theater. There will also be a workshop on acting and comedy improvisation for children interested in the performing arts. The production is the capstone project of fourthyear Theater majors Caris Gross and Maggie Elsen.

Gross and Elsen both said they wanted to do something for their final project they had not yet done at Oberlin. They hope to introduce local children to an art form they feel passionate about and give back to the community where they’ve lived for four years.

“I was in a class with Caris last semester, and we had a response post on Blackboard, and Caris mentioned being interested in working with kids,” Elsen said. “I was like, ‘Wait, this is perfect.’”

She approached Gross, and the pair started planning the production. Elsen directed the play, while Gross served as stage manager and community engagement manager.

“I would say a lot of the senior capstone shows are very, very serious because they give the actors and the director a lot of material to work on their acting chops and their directing skills and things like that,” Gross said. “I think those are wonderful shows, and I myself have been part of many of them, … but we wanted to do something that we hadn’t had the opportunity to do at Oberlin before and that we felt could serve a new part of the community that hadn’t been served in recent years by Oberlin College.”

Gross and Elsen chose Sideways

Stories from Wayside School because they felt its wacky scenarios and zany humor would be well received by the young audience.

“I felt [even very beloved scripts] were very coddling to kids and were telling them, ‘This is the life lesson in this,’” Elsen said. “I think this show has lessons, but it’s also just kind of silly.”

Sachar wrote Sideways Stories from Wayside School after working as an elementary school teacher’s aide and recess supervisor during college. Due to Sachar’s experiences, the stories are attuned to young children’s accep-

Nikki Keating Managing Editor

Michael Boyd Roman is an assistant professor of design and Black visual culture in the Studio Art and Africana Studies departments. He focuses on exploring the concepts of beauty and divinity within the Black community. Recently, he facilitated a collage workshop titled, “Collaging and Storytelling Circle,” inspired by Mickalene Thomas. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What type of art do you create?

My work is dealing with this large theme of divinity within Blackness and what that looks like on an everyday level. The great thing about being an artist is that I don’t have to be an expert in all these different fields in order to have a conversation about it. But so much of Black culture and history boils down to a disconnect with this sense of divinity in ourselves as a people. We are one of the few peoples in the world where our spiritual belief system does not revolve around creatures that look like us. For example, in a Black American context, we were given white Jesus. We don’t have images of Black Jesus in our art. So it was this idea that we don’t have a belief system — a spiritual belief system that revolves around us — and my art explores what that does to your psyche.