Youth Onstage!

On Sunday, February 27, following a matinee of Robin Hood: A Political Romance, the All Stars Project and Youth Onstage! hosted a special panel discussion entitled “What are the Possibilities of Youth Theatre?” The panelists included Dan Friedman, the artistic director of Youth Onstage!; Dana Edell, the co-founder and co-director of the ViBe Theatre Experience, which empowers underserved teenage girls through the experience of making collaborative theatre; Melissa Fenton Herrod, executive director of City Lights Youth Theatre, which provides after-school classes, workshops and productions for young people from kindergarten through sixth grade; Meg Hunnewell, managing director of The Knowledge Project, which brings such performance-based programs as “Looking For Shakespeare in the Bronx” into the public schools; Fulton Hodges, director of the Black Spectrum Youth Theatre Company, which produces new plays that examine issues of concern to African American youth; and Margaret Savante-McCann, the former education director of the Roundabout Theatre Company, and currently the pioneering principal of the Manhattan Theatre Lab School, where all learning is performance-based.

The discussion began with the questions: “What is youth theatre?” and “How does it differ from both children’s theatre and theatre in general?” While the consensus seemed to be that youth theatre was, indeed, theatre performed by youth, questions arose regarding the extent to which educators wished to model theatre for young people, and to what extent they would allow them to create their own theatre. According to Dana Edell, “There’s great discrimination against what young people are capable of doing, which is why I shy away from saying youth theatre,” while Fulton Hodges asserted that “Youth theatre is for everyone. It’s possible to create any type of performance and still allow youth to shine.”

Meg Hunnewell said: “I believe it’s essential to introduce students to good theatre, and to professional actors,” particularly in inner-city communities where young people are often denied the opportunity to see Broadway or off-Broadway plays due to lack of exposure and prohibitive costs.”

What is or is not appropriate for youth theatre emerged as a particularly tricky question, in several panelists opinion, for those who work in the field. Should directors allow cursing? If so, to what extent? What is its purpose? Hodges, who is currently directing a show “with a lot of cursing,” spoke of audience members who took great offense to seeing young people onstage using “foul” language. “My response to them is, ‘Good! You should be offended. That’s what I’m trying to do.’ “Swearing,” said Hodges, “is a reflection of today’s climate, and particularly of its depiction in movies, television, and music.So if the audience is offended by swearing, Hodges concluded, “[it has] to speak up.If you’re on the bus, and you hear two kids cursing, don’t be afraid to tell them, ‘Please stop cursing. I find this offensive.’ ” If cursing, and other “offensive” material, is not put on the table, audiences will not have the opportunity to engage young people. Edell concurred, adding that she “encourage[s] her students to be authentic all the time, but it’s not just important to say what you want to say — it’s important to find a more creative way to do it.”

And inner-city students are particularly eager to find and develop new methods of verbal and physical expression, all of the panelists concurred Margaret Savante-McCann marveled, “Often the so-called troublemakers are the most capable actors — the most expressive, the most emotionally engaged.I’ve had teachers come to me and say, ‘Wow! I had no idea that student had all that in him! He’s failing my class, and to see him up there…’ It really forces you to think about the gap between academics and theatre, and how great it is, and what to do about it.” Fortunately for Savante-McCann, as the principal of a performance-based school, she’s able to fuse performance and academics on a daily basis.

In non-performance-based schools, the challenge to close the performance/academics gap, and to create youth theatre, is much greater. Every school should implement a theatre program, the panelists agreed, believing it essential for young people to learn how to fully express themselves. Melissa Fenton Herrod opined, “I’d especially like to see [theatre] groups from different schools meeting and discussing what their respective groups are doing.Kids need to learn what other kids are experiencing, and they need to learn to support and respect each other.”

Dan Friedman, artistic director of the All Stars Project’s Youth Onstage! and head of its free theatre program, is a particularly outspoken proponent of performance-based learning.“I’d like to see every school turned into a theatre,” he said.“Every time you work with new performers and create a new performance, there’s a developmental aspect — not just onstage, but offstage as well. We [at the All Stars Project] don’t just teach young people to perform as actors. We teach them to perform as writers, as mathematicians, and as businesspeople. We also challenge the performers artistically. For instance, our last production, Casper Hauser: A Language Game, had no plot. We were told that young people wouldn’t be able to do it, that there was no way they’d be able to take up the challenge of presenting a play without a plot. Well, they did take up that challenge, and they did a great job with it.”By challenging the idea of what art is, Friedman believes, students learn how to create their own performances and define their own parameters.

Perhaps Savante-McCann said it best: “Every great play asks the question, ‘How should we live?’ In order to answer that question, we first have to examine how we are living. Do we like living this way? Is it working out for us? If the answer is no, we need to explore new ways of living our lives. As we do that, we gain the ability to actively change our lives and our culture. We need to help the education establishment to understand that theatre and education are fused.”