2002-12-28 - 10:20 p.m.
CRY FOR ME, ARGENTINA (aka The Theater Rant)
When Kat was small, she loved to hear stories and songs over and over and over. ��Gain?� she�d plead. ��Gain?� I often told stories rather than reading them and she�d be alert for even the slightest deviation. The more repetitious the story, the better the story in her mind. �Normal preschool behavior,� they told me. �Preschoolers like repetition because it�s reassuring.� Well, judging from the number of times I�ve heard the �Evita� album in the last few days since she got it, Kat needs a lot of reassurance.
Perhaps she does need the reassurance. The theater program, the big expensive program that the school so proudly touts, is very exclusive, even amongst its stage crew. They love small-cast plays. Worse, they love small-cast musicals and keep choruses artificially small. They lavish amazing amounts of money (which the high school, being its own district, still has because its population is growing as the population drop has not yet gotten up that far) on sets and costumes. They pick shows for snob appeal rather than for any larger educational benefit. They train only the most talented.
Take �Evita,� for example. Only an all-boys school in this country has more boys than girls turn out for auditions for musicals. Nevertheless, the school picked �Evita,� a musical with only one female lead role and one female role with one featured song. A few of the �non-varsity� theater girls benefited from the lack of roles but the benefit did not come from design. It seems to have been a surprise to the powers that be. What happened is that many of the �varsity� theater girls figured that they had very little chance at the two roles and really preferred not to be back in the chorus. They suddenly had conflicts with the rehearsal schedule or were �burned out� and needed a break. That situation left Kat�s very powerful soprano a chance and, from what I gather from reliable sources, she sang her very best at auditions.
Several years back, the school had some outlets for kids who were not the top kids. They had a children�s production every year that was far less exclusive and let kids develop, rather than using only kids who had developed their acting quite far. Kat has it from the top: the children�s production is dead. There is no glory in it and it apparently is no longer worth the work. The head of the theater department will retire in a few years and he seems to believe that he will get no benefit from developing new kids. He can make do with the old ones for a few more years.
Other �top� theater programs in area high schools work differently. Some put on only productions with more kids. Some allow kids to be only in a few productions so the roles are spread out. Some have lots of productions and cast a year ahead, promising that each child will have a role, however small, somewhere. Our program generally is satisfied to cast the same kids over and over and over, even in the small parts.
Kat is too much of a realist to be sure that getting into �Evita� means any success elsewhere. She figures it increases her chances�but perhaps only as much as having two powerball tickets instead of one would. She has stage presence but she lacks all the acting classes that most of the top kids had even before they came to high school. She knows she�s in the group that used to get cast in the children�s production to build skills and now has no place to go.
Yet being cast in �Evita� has upped the stakes. Before this audition, Kat had a plan. She was going to start a drama club. She would go find an advisor, agree to cast anyone who showed up, and work out an ensemble piece based on some fairy tale or an other. She figured she wrote well enough that she could write the script if necessary. In other words, she was plotting to bring back the children�s production. She figured that the head of the theater program basically would ignore it. But maybe he wouldn�t and now that she figures she has a ghost of a chance, she is not willing to risk it.
She is glad of one thing, though. While she still may stop by and help build some of the sets, at least on Saturdays, he will have to find someone else to run his spotlights. She thinks it good that he learn to get along without her strong work ethic and good sense backstage. She had come to realize that being too indispensable back stage would cost her. She figured it out after he took her to theater festival and then kept her so busy moving sets and other things that she could attend very few workshops, despite what he told her initially.
So, perhaps playing �Evita� over and over is a comfort�to her. Me, I�m ready to let Argentina cry for me already and get it over with.
LAST YEAR: Family Friends
LAST FIVE ENTRIES:
Hot Water
Chapter Summaries
Driving Distractions
Take a Number
Cooking Day
previous - next
|
Copyright 2006 by Ellen |
