Kat is trying out for a school play after school today. Like a good mother, I managed to put her hair in a bun as she wished for the audition. It took a bit to pull my wits together, but I did. I wish her luck. She�s going to need it. She�s trying out for the varsity team without the benefit of any bench positions.

She doesn�t need the luck because she lacks talented. She is a fairly talented actress and has a stage presence that causes her to glow. She needs the luck because of the casting system at the school. As one mother of a child in the group that is always cast put it, Grease was The Diary of Anne Frank with music. She wasn�t referring to any similarity between the plays. She was referring to the similarities in the cast.

The theater director seems to love to pick plays with as few parts as possible and then re-cast the same seven kids over and over and over in each of the four or five plays he does each year. He even calls them his �varsity� team. The problem is that he has no junior varsity and no development program, other than the acting classes that he is required to teach. He used to have a children�s production where he cast the �B� team but he has decided that that production is beneath him and has handed it off to some English teacher.

I�m not worried that Kat won�t eventually break into the group. I suspect that she will. I just think that it is no way to run a railroad---or a high school theater. The high school boasts of its wonderful theater department. The school doesn�t explain how limited opportunities to participate in it are. They need more truth in advertising. At the high school level, is the point doing nearly perfect performances or providing some education about theater. Maybe it is good for the kids who have stars in their eyes to be provided with some of the truths about theater but the program is billed as wonderful for kids who already know that their paycheck is unlikely to be dependent on their acting abilities.

I expect elite behavior from places that bill themselves as elite programs. The local theater school separates its teens into the very-serious and the just-wanna-have-funs. Kat auditioned for the serious group and I have no idea whether she�ll make it. The competition is fierce and she knows it. It probably helps that she wants to do their classical theater program and she adores Shakespeare and understands him as few teens do. Her audition and interview went long because she and the person in charge of auditions were discussing the relative merits of various Shakespeare plays and characters. Even this elite program, though, provides for non-elite opportunities.

I�ll stick to supporting our come-one-come-all middle school productions. What they lack in polish, they make up in enthusiasm and excitement. Whatever they lack in snobbery, they provide opportunities for teamwork and discipline that add to the school day. I�ve seen kids take leadership roles on stagecrew who never get to lead elsewhere. I�ve seen kids who seemed very shy suddenly blossom on the stage. I�ve seen kids who have little success in other areas of school, succeed at learning lines and saying them on stage.

According to Kat�s high school, at her school �the arts are fine.� For Kat, who likely will become one of the elite, they probably will be. For the others, the theaters arts are, at best, okay and that may be a generous assessment.

|