Strutting And Fretting Upon The Stage

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judi bandarqIn hindsight, I made the mistake of playing football in high school. I should have taken more art classes and music classes. Or I really should have tried out for drama. But it was a real jock school and I wanted desperately to be on a team, even if it meant only playing in the fourth quarter during blowouts.

I began wishing I had done some acting the moment I started my high school teaching career and realized how well drama worked in the classroom. Years before I read Jeff Wilhelm’s You Gotta BE the Book, I had students acting out parts from Romeo and Juliet and The Crucible, A Streetcar Named Desire and Arsenic and Old Lace. I’ll never forget this one student I had who had been placed in foster care with a woman in our town. Gwen was one of the most difficult students I ever had in class, but she was stellar as Juliet, sitting on a chair perched atop a table to simulate the balcony scene of Act II, scene ii. Nothing else that whole year captured her imagination like playing that part.

Recently, my wife and I and a friend who teaches high school English went to see The Crucible at the Hartford Stage, and it was excellent. The three hour-long play was never tedious because the acting was so good. And I love the way the Hartford Stage is set up, with the seats in a horse shoe pattern around the perimeter of the protruding stage. There are no bad seats and the actors are in the midst of the audience.

Amy and I were season ticket holders for years when we lived in the Farmington Valley and then later the Hartford area. We’d buy tickets for the Thursday preview shows, which were cheaper. One time we were fortunate to have the playwright and director sitting directly behind us during a preview show, and we were able to listen to them discuss the play and make decisions about changes they wanted to make. Just fascinating conversation for us to overhear.

When I started at RHAM High School in the mid-90s, the school purchased one class set of season tickets every year, and I often volunteered to chaperone those trips. During the first or second unit of my first year, I read Romeo and Juliet with four sections of freshmen, and when I chaperoned the trip to see the play, I had at least one student from each section with me, which was terrific. We went while we were in the middle of the play, and afterwards I had a fourteen-year-old expert in each class. I could turn to one of these students and ask him or her to explain to the rest of the class how the stage was set for this scene, or what the actors did while speaking certain lines.

Calista Flockhart played Juliet, before she broke through with Ally McBeal. I still remember the reaction of one very innocent freshman named Shelley when Flockhart sensuously stroked one of the beams of her balcony as she said, “What's Montague? It is nor hand, nor foot, nor arm, nor face, nor any other part belonging to a man.” Shelley gasped and shouted, “That’s what that means?!”

Another time I brought seniors from an AP Lit class and from two sections of Creative Writing to see a production of Oedipus, and afterwards the actors came out to talk to the students. A middle school girl from one of the Hartford schools asked the lead actor why Oedipus’ family was so ill fated, and he gave an evasive answer, but one of my seniors, Rachel, raised her hand and answered the younger girl’s question, that as a young man Oedipus’ father Laius had violated the laws of hospitality and marriage, and for that his line was cursed.

My wife acted throughout high school and into college, as well as during her three year stint teaching at a boarding school, and then again in her MA jadwal in Spanish at Middlebury College. As a high school kid she won awards playing Titania and Blanche DuBois. I saw her play a great drunk in A Man of the People, and one of the first dates we ever went on was to see Arms and the Man, where we became smitten with Raina and her Chocolate Cream Soldier.

Over the years we have seen perhaps a dozen Shakespeare plays, a good six or eights productions of A Christmas Carol, as well as many plays by Wilder, Shaw, Williams, Foote, Leroi Jones, O’Neill, Beckett, and Dylan Thomas, as well as many by less well known playwrights. We have a great playbill hanging over our bed of Phylicia Rashad as Angel in Pearl Cleage’s Blues for an Alabama Sky. Hanging in our upstairs hallway is a collage I made for our tenth anniversary of all the ticket stubs from every show we went to—theater and music, as well as many other events—during the first decade of our marriage.

We like taking our kids to see plays at Jorgensen on the UConn campus and occasionally at the Windham Theatre Guild downtown in Willimantic. Our son is too shy to act in front of a crowd, but every summer in camp, our daughter volunteers to take a speaking part so she can get up in front of everyone and perform.

Next month Amy and I are going to see Wilder’s Our Town at the Connecticut Repertory Theater. I always loved teaching that play alongside Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio and Edgar Lee Masters’ Spoon River Anthology. Students love discovering the complexities hidden within the seemingly simple, small town characters. The tamat act of Our Town always pulls at my heart strings, which is hard to do.

I keep telling Amy that once the kids are a little older and our time is commensurately freed up a bit, she should get into community theater. Maybe, just maybe, I’ll give it a try.