Director's Corner
Enthusiasm, excitement, joy – these are difficult
outcomes to capture in assessing an education program. Yet our students
unmistakably display these kinds of emotions (and others as well) in our
theatres at student matinees of MTC productions and in their schools when
their own plays are performed by professional actors during a Write
on the Edge playwriting residency.
The students’ pleasure in the performance of their own work is relatively
easy to explain and perhaps predictable: pride in a ccomplishment, the
empowering experience of hearing one’s words brought to vivid dramatic
life by professionals, the positive reinforcement from peers and teachers
– such benefits, while certainly not to be minimized or disparaged,
are perhaps to be expected from a
successful art-making experience.
What is more difficult to anticipate, and therefore of
particular interest, is the rapt attention our student audiences give
our performances and the spontaneous outpourings of appreciation that
typify their responses at curtain calls. For the raucous cheers and standing
ovations that greet MTC actors when they take their bows at student matinees
clearly have been prompted not by lavish production numbers or dazzling
stage spectacle but by challenging ideas and complex dramatic images.
Nilo Cruz’s Beauty of the Father, which compellingly explored
the mutability of relationships and the many forms of love; David Lindsay-Abaire’s
Rabbit Hole, which powerfully affirmed the possibility of prevailing
even in the face of unthinkable tragedy; and Conor McPherson’s Shining
City, with its poignant depiction of lost souls desperately searching
for connection and expiation – all these, along with the other plays
in our season, moved our student audiences to laughter, to tears, to fascinated
attention, and finally to standing ovations and thunderous outpourings
of approval.
Our preparatory work in the classrooms – described in the following
pages – mediates between the students and the ideas and images and
images in our plays, making them more vivid and available than they would
otherwise be. But ultimately it is the plays themselves that speak viscerally
and powerfully to our young audiences and elicit their enthusiasm and
excitement.
This phenomenon surely epitomizes the most exalted kind of learning experience,
through which young people are literally uplifted by the expressive force
of a challenging, illuminating work of art. Their excited responses affirm
the powerful connection they have made with the new way of understanding
the world embodied in the play they have attended.
Educational evaluators may rightly demand less ephemeral measures of student
learning, but in this age of high stakes testing and quantitative assessment,
the behavior of our students in our theatres and our classrooms must also
be acknowledged as a valid indicator of our Education Program’s
resounding success.
David Shookhoff
Director of Education
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