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Keeping in STEP with today’s theater students

Joella Blount smiles her broad smile. Well, I was thinkin’ about goin’ to the Army. But I don’t think I am anymore. I plan to work for a while and I want to save up money to go to college. Her smile broadens and she laughs at the irony: that she has been considering joining the army and yet the training program at the Cleveland Public Theatre’s STEP program is wearing her out.

Joella will be a senior this coming school year and this is likely her last year in the Student Theatre Enrichment Program (STEP). She also has the lead role of Keisha in CPT‘s production of [amazon_link id=”1408126702″ target=”_blank” ]Chalk Circle[/amazon_link], in which the fate of a child prince is divided between the biological mother, the queen, who callously abandons him, and the adoptive mother, a servant girl, Keisha, who gives him love and protection.

To those with no experience in the theater, putting up a play may not seem like all that much work. But to the students in the STEP program this summer there’s no doubt about it: it is work–good work–but the young actors still must spend an intense five to seven hours every weekday to stage their play. Each day begins with a demanding round of exercises, stretches, and running activities, and ends with rigorous rehearsals which include an excruciating repetition of carefully choreographed scenes.

The process of generating material for the play starts early in the summer and is slowly and meticulously guided by Raymond Bobgan, Education Director, [now Executive Artistic Director] and Chris Seibert, Director of Education.

One of the first material elements generated for the [amazon_link id=”1408126702″ target=”_blank” ]Chalk Circle[/amazon_link] was a series of spontaneously generated motions with a wooden stool. Each young actor created three actions with his or her stool, and later certain of these were formalized and then incorporated into the final performance. In fact, the final performance features a stunning utilization of the stools as musical instruments, props for swinging and tossing, and a harrowing scene in which stools are dynamically moved elliptically, like the tread on a Caterpillar bull-dozer, as Joella walks across the stool-tops; her character, Keisha, threading the top of a mountain peak.

“I just enjoy how they fit an action, like the action that we do with the stools, how we started off just messing around with it and they incorporated that into the play, I just love the way they do it,” says Anthony Brooks, who plays the part of Simon, a young warrior whose love for Keisha is in conflict with his service to the queen.

Another element of the play that is generated early on is the text or script. Prompted by Chris Seibert, the students are fed single words or single sentences in carefully designed stream of consciousness writing exercises. During these sessions, each participant generates material from his or her own life and experience and, very like the activities with the stools described above, the written material is incorporated as part of the play.

For Gina Ferguson, playing the part of the queen, this style of creating a script presents an opportunity to shine. “[We are given] a line or something to write down, you write and you think–this is never gonna get put in the play, this is never gonna get put in the play, and then it might turn out to be one of your own lines, then it’s like, ‘I wrote this,’ so it’s exciting, knowing one of the first lines in the play is something I wrote. So, it’s like–it feels good seein’ something that I wrote in the play. So it encourages us to keep writing and just be open and don’t stop.”

Taking advantage of the skilled eye of Raymond Bobgan, Director of Blue Sky Transmission and Assistant Director in the Tony Award-winning production of [amazon_link id=”B004NVH1N6″ target=”_blank” ]Death of a Salesman[/amazon_link], the play utilizes a startling array of movements, materials and props, which, besides the stools, include activities with flags, vocal performances, choral arrangements that are very like the strophe and antistrophe in Greek theater, and precisely choreographed dance: each element building to create an aesthetic theater that is very fulfilling and highly engaging.

“Out of the many years that I’ve been doing theater, I’ve never seen anything like this. The movements are so timed and detailed, the people are dedicated to the point where, thankfully, every day, faithfully they’re doing something, changing something, adding new ideas–So, seeing these guys come out here, the movement with the stools, the eye contact, the camaraderie on stage between them, it’s just amazing, it’s magical–it’s 100% art; it’s what art is,” says Quinton Perry, a veteran of the STEP Program and an assistant to Chris and Raymond.

Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?

[amazon_link id=”1408126702″ target=”_blank” ]Chalk Circle[/amazon_link] has several iterations in literature, and it is difficult to pinpoint which is the origin. The Chalk Circle is both a Chinese tale and a biblical story of Solomon from 1 Kings 3: 16-28. The Chalk Circle for STEP is based on a combination of the Chinese tale and [amazon_link id=”0806501944″ target=”_blank” ]Bertolt Brecht[/amazon_link] [amazon_link id=”1408126702″ target=”_blank” ]Caucasian Chalk Circle[/amazon_link]. But the adaptation is wholly that of the STEP participants, made all the more real by the choreographed creations, vocal arrangements, and student writings.

For Raymond and Chris the choice of the play is as much about fitting the subject with the young actors as it is about choosing a ‘literary’ piece of theater. And the wisdom of their choice shows: the Chalk Circle touches a chord with the students, who see in the struggle of the young prince to discover his true identity a theme that is painfully familiar to them as young adults.

Todd Siwik, who plays both a doctor and lawyer in Chalk Circle agrees: “I think the whole question of ‘who am I?’ That’s probably what the play’s on. It’s [a question] a lot of people have, or what they want to do in life, where they came from, and the play has a lot to do with that.”

“It reminds me of the movie [amazon_link id=”B000M9BPEY” target=”_blank” ]Big Fish[/amazon_link],” says Quinton, smiling from under his New York Yankees hat. “It’s the story of a boy trying to learn exactly who his father is.”

Tyler Slaughter, who plays the prince as a grown young man, feels that the story resonates with him, too. “I guess what you can say with me, like, with my character trying to find his way, and trying to figure out where he came from; I’m somewhat trying to just figure out what I’m going to do with my life, you know? How am I gonna catch the bus tomorrow or somethin’ like that, that is just tryin’ to find my way.”

Theater has the power to transform lives

The STEP Program at CPT is now in its twelfth year, and has grown from a summertime program to a year-round, long-term theater program for at-risk teens. Throughout the year students from all over Cleveland come to CPT to learn the craft of theater from professional artists.

The benefits of the program are well-documented. Five years ago, the U.S. Department of Education and the National Endowment for the Arts generated Champions of Change, a report that summarizes education research from across the country. This report, available online through the Arts Education Partnership (http://www.aep-arts.org), demonstrates that arts programs make a significant impact in bridging the gap in academic and job performance between children in inner-city disadvantaged school systems and those in more affluent programs. The report also showed that low-performing students demonstrate significant growth in achievements after becoming involved in arts programs.

Fittingly, the STEP Program is itself a sort of Chalk Circle. Like Keisha picking up the abandoned prince, STEP provides marginalized students with an opportunity and a chance at artistic fulfillment and expressive participation. But more than that, it provides participants with a sense of community that may be lacking elsewhere.

“I have enjoyed being a friend–to mainly everybody, like when they’re sad or something I can come to them or they can come to me and we can cheer each other up, give each other hugs, or words of encouragement. And my scene partners, we could go over our lines, go over our things together, that’s what I really liked,” says Joella. And the strength and opportunity for friendship is a sentiment that is echoed by nearly all the students who participate in the program.

But to focus exclusively on the educational benefits of the STEP Program is to trivialize the role that each student plays as a professional actor, for each young performer takes his or her role very seriously, with a dedication in time and energy that even a corner-office CEO in Key Tower would admire.

“I like how they tell me to do it over again, it gets me more energized and, you know, sometimes it’ll get me real tired and exhausted but I keep going–it’s understandable, ’cause I see that they want the play to be perfect,” says Samantha Robinson, who plays opposite Todd Siwik as the second lawyer and doctor.

Coming to a theater–or a park–near you

The Cleveland Public Theatre provides Cleveland residents with many opportunities to see the plays that STEP puts up. The Chalk Circle alone will have nine performances at nine separate locations throughout the city: seven at public parks and two in downtown Cleveland. The final performance of [amazon_link id=”1408126702″ target=”_blank” ]The Caucasian Chalk Circle[/amazon_link] is Friday, September 2^nd, [2005] at Public Square during InGenuity Cleveland (http://www.ingenuitycleveland.com), A Festival of Art and Technology.

By taking theater on the road, the STEP program aggressively asserts not only the importance of having its productions seen, but the importance of bringing theater to the community, to making it available in the places where people live and work and play. Often nowadays, there is a disconnect between what people think theater is: a highbrow form of entertainment often following a wine and cheese tasting, and the reality of a theater that can relate to their everyday lives.

The STEP program actively confronts this notion by using the actions and words of its students to create its plays and by choosing subjects that are of material importance to every person in the community: Who am I? Where I am I going? What does this life I’m living mean?

“I think a lot of people can relate to it,” Joella says when asked why people should come to see Chalk Circle. “If there’s somebody and they’re kind of lost in who they are–maybe they can come to the play and it could give them ideas, like what should they do if they wanna know. And plus it’s a bunch of teens–and I know a lot of people are saying that teenagers are just problem-causers, you know, they just cause problems–but we show that it’s not really true, there is some teens out there that like to do something with their summer, instead of just hanging out with their friends. They made a commitment to be here, to perform in front of them, so that they can enjoy themselves, and we can enjoy ourselves.”

But perhaps more importantly, as Joella points out, the STEP program provides Clevelanders a chance to experience the creativity, imagination, and energy of the youth of their community, to participate in the magical transformation of their youthful life experience and energy into a story that transcends time.

Again, the biggest thing about the play experience is seeing the play versus reading the play; which should be no surprise really, considering that is how plays are intended to be experienced. This really held up for me as I read Bleed Rail, as I didn’t think until after reading it, how Mickey had the set designed to be the slaughterhouse. That is, seeing that whole play take place inside a slaughterhouse with red-stained walls, etc, the ominous metallic and mechanical nature of it, that would loom depressingly–heavily, over the whole of the action on the stage.

This wasn’t the case at the Play House. Alas, Sarah Ruhl’s set was there in the splendor and excruciating detail of which I, as a young playwright, can only dream: the white interior and furnishings tastefully displayed; the balcony, etc. I hadn’t been in the Play House for two or three years so I forgot how it looked and, since that time, have been in so many odd places for plays that I was never really aware of the gross luxury of that theatre space. Of the evening, that was one of the things that most impressed upon me: the opulence of the stage and the theatre environs. I have been continuing to read a book on the History of the Theatre in what spare time I have, so I was very interested in the stage itself: I don’t know that it’s a proscenium stage, but it is set up to look that way–with the distribution of curtains around the sides and the low-hanging curtain across the top. The curtains worked to frame the space, but I don’t recall a physical arch. Alas, another example of my Sherlock Holmesian deductive reasoning failing–I look but fail to see,’ as Holmes would say. One thing that did stand out to me was the acoustics, which were not very good. I had to cast my mind about and remember if that is always a problem with theatres of this design, or just the Drury space. The acoustics required a very artificial manner in the speaking of the actors just in order for them to be heard. There was also that ‘theatre persona’ visible: the sort of swagger that stage actors have when they coyly address the audience as a ‘knowing’ confidant, but with that burstingly loud voice that one would never use in an aside. The Great Lake Theatre downtown suffers from the same problem. In there to see [amazon_link id=”B001M3T7KI” target=”_blank” ]A Midsummer Night’s Dream[/amazon_link]A I was appalled at how terrible the sound was. To add Shakespeare to the mix only made things dreadful. The Drury was nowhere near as bad acoustically as the Palace, or whatever theatre that is in Playhouse Square. I was also interested in the depth of the stage. Even with [amazon_link id=”1559362669″ target=”_blank” ]The Clean House[/amazon_link], the set was deep. I wondered how deep it could go. I thought of the great Italian stage designers who first brought perspective to the stage sets: deep perspective–mountain scenes in the background with little parts in motion to give the illusion of animals or carts or whatever moving along…

The visual elements of the space itself give way to the thing that struck me the most about [amazon_link id=”1559362669″ target=”_blank” ]The Clean House[/amazon_link]: namely, how all the elements of the play, in action, created multiple levels of meaning that existed at multiple times, to which the audience had access at any given moment. The layering occurs in both physical space and in cognitive space–in the physical activities occurring on stage, and in the requirement of the audience keeping track of storyline, plot, etc. For instance, meaning was created by what characters said, and what they did, of course, but it was also created through the objects that characters used: apples, ropes, trees, large dust mops; their memories or acts of imagination (Matilde seeing her parents) and through the use of text captioning, as well as the playful inclusion of different locales: Alaska and the oceanfront. So, while Virginia and Matilde talk at stage right, Charles enters at left in a snow suit, carrying the accoutrements of a polar explorer. At once there are different times present on stage and different locales–one can almost descend into a [amazon_link id=”029271534X” target=”_blank” ]Bakhtinian[/amazon_link] analysis of all the dialectics and discourses of time and space in this play–and yet, the audience is perfectly, pleasantly, happy to take all of this into the mind and let it drift and bauble about. In fact, it is, I think, this play of time, space, and the many different ways of presenting it on stage that make The Clean House so successful and such a delight. The audience must work, and Ruhl keeps things (meaning) bouncing back and forth and one thing happening in one place inflects upon the other and Ruhl is not shy about stating it on stage–to being metatheatrical in her drawing attention to these intersections; perhaps the best being when Lane is imaging her husband and Ana together and Matilde walks in. In the good old fashioned theatre, we as the audience would see this, but expect that the characters on the stage would overlook it. Not so. Matilde flatly asks, ‘Who are they?’ and the audience, at least in the performance I attended, was unhinged with joy at that allowance by Ruhl. It would be as if everyone in [amazon_link id=”B002RKRGEE” target=”_blank” ]Hamlet[/amazon_link] could see the Ghost and that ghost went about the play being put out all the time and everyone else, losing interest in his depression, just ignored him–or worse, got sick of his moaning altogether and told him to bugger off. (There’s a stout idea for a comedy.) There is something very childlike in the theatrics by Ruhl that allows for this release of joy. It is very like the play of children who just say, ‘let’s pretend this is Alaska,’ and suddenly, boom, it is and everyone will be cold in that area. That is what, I think, theatre should be and what she is accomplishing.

Not that Ruhl of course is alone in this–this metatheatre. Some might say that she is reaping the benefits of the Off Off Broadway groups from the 60s that worked out of churches and basements to recreate what theatre should be–open, not forced into the well-made structures that stifled and restricted what theatre can be: restricting, for instance, my own imagination about theatre such that all my life I’ve conceived of play only in the formula of what is well-made and structured well and [amazon_link id=”0472061666″ target=”_blank” ]Aristotlean[/amazon_link] by design.

I enjoyed this play very much, as did Kirsten. She stated it was one of the best plays that she has ever seen–and said it with a conviction that I believe. The production values were high and much credit is due the Play House for it. It seemed as strong to me, in terms of production, timing, execution, design, etc, as many [amazon_link id=”0307474879″ target=”_blank” ]Noel Coward[/amazon_link] productions I have seen at the [amazon_link id=”0195446119″ target=”_blank” ]Shaw Festival[/amazon_link]–and had a bursting energy and happiness exceed only by two other plays I’ve ever seen (both at Shaw): [amazon_link id=”6302593344″ target=”_blank” ]Three Men on a Horse[/amazon_link] and [amazon_link id=”B001GLX6TY” target=”_blank” ]You Can’t Take It with You[/amazon_link]; the latter winning hands down because they actually let honest-to-god fireworks off on stage. There is a magical realism to the play that enhances the joy and sorrow of it, and some real humanness. I am not utterly convinced though that what I saw was a humanness or an imitation of humanness and not a genuine depth of feeling; I’m still trying to put my finger on that. At points the play seemed like a farcical Indie movie; like [amazon_link id=”6305291403″ target=”_blank” ]Il Postino[/amazon_link] or [amazon_link id=”0805063749″ target=”_blank” ]The Milagro Beanfield War[/amazon_link]. But The Clean House is a comedy, a realization driven home to me at how much of the laughter in the audience came at moments that were not, to me, comic–or if so, blackly so–such as Virginia’s morbidity at the outset. In the end, though, I found, as Kirsten stated, the whole of it to be believable and empathetic–especially in light of some things, such as Charles and Ana coming to ‘visit’ Lane, and the discussion of the bashert, where one in real life might be tempted to just say, ‘You know what? Get the &$%# out of my house.’ That is, it required no willing suspension of disbelief.