A childish approach to theater

It wasn't as though Coral Reef's teachers never tried to teach us anything. It's just that when they did, it was always a basic and childish approach that effectively disrespected theater. The work and lessons were half-assed, underdeveloped, and pathetic.

Our classes were akin to a bunch of ten-year-olds going to drama summer camp for the first time, rather than high school students preparing for future acting careers. Everything we did was absolutely infantile.

I don't mean to say that I was too advanced to sit through the basics. I mean that most of what we performed or learned was, quite literally, meant for children. Our senior show was written for middle schoolers and many of the scenes we put on in class came from beginner's books. We started with this material in freshman year and never moved on from it.

We were even instructed to think about theater the way little kids are. When given scenes, our only goal was to memorize lines. Typically, our blocking was nothing more than sitting in a chair, standing up, maybe taking a few steps one way or the other if feeling bold enough. Our other directions were simplistic enough for children to follow: project, speed up or slow down, face the audience.

We were never taught to, say, interpret the material and perform it through understanding subtext. We did not examine characters or objectives. We did not look at plays from a social or historical eye. Actually, we never even read plays (other than Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream as freshmen). We never did anything that actually required thought.

Ms. Mxdxxxs was the worst offender. Love or hate her, she could not teach. At her worst, she completely insulted theater as an art form (and us in the process). At her best, she looked at it as nothing more than a cheap hobby. Students quickly learned not to ask her for help because she couldn't be trusted to know what the hell she was talking about.

The rare days she prepared a lesson, her teaching methods were also futile. She'd reduce entire historical topics like Greek and Roman theater, Shakespeare, or Misner into nothing more than a few projector slides, not for sake of brevity, but because she didn't have much more to say about them. Then, she'd dole out the one assignment in her repertoire: to list “five facts” about the subject (ANY five facts, no matter how irrelevant or pointless) and turn them in. That was it. Our work was never reviewed nor discussed, and often never graded. I guarantee nobody in our class ever remembered anything taught from the lessons even one day later.

Mxdxxxs also directed many of the school's shows, and her methods there were no better than in the lessons. She didn't really do anything other than supervise us while we rehearsed. When she did have something to contribute that wasn't an insult, she made very strange, amateurish choices.

Case in point: our senior year straight play, The Brainwave Plays. I played an obnoxious, arrogant, nerdy genius kid, and I tried to play it subtly. After my scene partners and I had already developed a rhythm, Mxdxxxs told us to make a change. Appropos of nothing, she insisted I yell all of my lines at full volume from beginning to end. All of them. She did not attempt to justify the direction with an objective, character trait, story beat, or anything else. Her reasoning was just that the character was “angry” and when you're angry, you yell every word at maximum volume.

This sort of approach to directing actors — telling them explicitly how to say their lines, and in addition, making choices that show no nuance — reminded me of what you do for children who are too young to interpret the script for themselves. You just tell them how to do it.

And then there was Ms. Lxffxxxo, our freshman year teacher who was altogether unhinged in her own right. Her teaching methods and assignments were so strange that they hardly qualified as “childish,” except for one key lesson: when we read and eventually performed A Midsummer Night's Dream. Instead of performing it in any professional way, she had us use Barbie dolls, animal costumes, and other trivializing approaches to tell the story.

(For the record, I don't think using “fun” methods to understand Shakespeare is the worst thing in the world, if it's done right. Here, it wasn't. This approach didn't lead to any greater understanding of the material. It was solely to mask our inability to produce the material properly, and it undermined what a MAGNET program should've been.)

Some people think it's unfair to expect such sophistication from a mere public high school. To them, I point out our rival public high school, New World School of the Arts.

New World was our complete antithesis. They respected theater and put in the proper work to pull it off. Teachers treated students like adults from the beginning and encouraged them to take on mature, advanced themes. Meanwhile, we spent most of our stage time presenting showcases full of inside jokes, immature innuendos, and people screaming at each other. Like MIDDLE SCHOOLERS.

Other schools put on important, meaningful plays like The Crucible. When our class wasn't doing little kid plays, or showcases full of inside jokes, the best we could muster was a slapstick murder mystery parody full of pop culture references. There was never a time where we moved on to anything more important or challenging.

Rather than look to New World for inspiration, Mxdxxxs took every opportunity to insult them. She frequently remarked about how they tried too hard or were full of themselves. It was clear to us even then that she was just feeling insecure about our obvious shortcomings.

Perhaps the biggest insult to our education was the childish approach to preparing us for after we graduated. Remarkably. by senior year, a good half of our class was still interested in auditioning for college B.F.A. programs, and we looked to our drama magnet for help with preparation. How did Coral Reef respond to our enthusiasm? By saying it was not their problem.

That's right, college preparation was not even acknowledged in drama class. If you wanted to work on your audition material, you had to do it on your own. If you had college questions, you'd better hope you could ask someone outside the school. Our teachers made it clear: class time was for classwork, and college planning was not to be done on their watch.

I actually hadn't thought about just how immature this policy was until recently. Here we were, eager to continue exploring what was supposed to be our common passion, but rather than help us reach the next stage of our journeys, our teachers were insulted that we might just have more important goals than memorizing yet another little kid scene. Sometimes we didn't even need help, we just needed them to chill while we submitted applications in down time. That wasn't allowed. Crazily enough, you could do whatever the hell you wanted to waste time during an idle class period — except prepare college material.

Across the four years, Coral Reef's leadership would occasionally come clean with us and point out a multitude of reasons why the program could not live up to its billing: a lack of money, a lack of time, a commitment to academics over arts, even our own immature attitudes. But really, when the teaching is childish… when the assignments are childish… when the works performed are childish… when the outlook around theater is childish… what the hell do you think is going to happen? How could we, or they, expect anything better?  ❒

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