Ghetto is a state of mind. This is one the lessons learned by the students of Compton's Dominguez High who participate in the school's first theatre production in over 20 years, as documented by Scott Hamilton Kennedy's OT: Our Town. In the course of the documentary, filmed in 2000, the students who warily take on Thornton Wilder's classic contend with a text that initially seems removed from their own experiences. Grovers Corners ain't Compton, after all. The teens eventually learn, however, that Compton and Grovers Corners are not as far apart as some may think. As the Stage Manager in the play notes, "This is the way we were: in our growing up and in our marrying and in our living and in our dying." Living, dying, growing up, getting married--no matter where you're from, these universals are easy to relate to.
OT, which opened in limited release last weekend, is as much a tribute to the transformational power of theatre as it is an antidote to the image most have of this infamous neighborhood from daily news reports and rap-music legend. Teacher Catherine Borek's savvy students are well aware of how Compton is perceived nationwide; they even toss off jokes in the film about being "ghetto." But despite the stigma--and a school more interested in a basketball team featuring future NBA player Tyson Chandler than an English teacher with theatre dreams--a production of Our Town successfully hits the boards (of the cafeteria) by the end of the movie, changing the lives of its participants and shifting the focus of the Dominguez High community ever so slightly but irrevocably.
Living on the Edge
It might not be so outlandish to draw a parallel between the average theatre maker and the average Compton high school student in OT. Both exist in a ghetto of sorts, perceived or otherwise. In the current climate of budget cuts and crises, California schools are struggling to make sure their students simply have a sufficient math and science education. If some money in addition gets parceled out to in-school art programs, music and visual arts traditionally gobble it up before theatre gets consideration. Anyone who has ever tried to get a buzz going about his 99-Seat theatre production in L.A. might be sympathetic to this kind of marginalization.
Though it may sometimes seem like theatre has been left out in the cold, the national mood is not particularly hostile. President Bush's 2002 education act, No Child Left Behind, built on President Clinton's Goals 2000 act by including the arts among the "core academic subjects." This means, in theory, that in-school arts can more easily vie for federal funding. However, No Child also requires schools to yearly test students, grades three through eight, in reading and math. Low-performing schools face serious penalties, which means the average principal might be even less concerned with the arts today if he or she can't be made to see that art has a direct influence on academic abilities in these two areas.
There is quite a bit of research out there on just this correlation, of course: namely, that students exposed to the arts--and specifically theatre--perform better in their other subjects, as well. No study is more persuasive than James Catterall's 1999 report, "Champions of Change: The Impact of Arts on Learning." Analyzing the Department of Education's NELS database of 25,000 students, Catterall shows that "arts-rich" students outperform "arts-poor" students in virtually every area. More important, he shows that this distinction is not just the result of an economic divide, of arts-rich students simply being rich students at better-funded schools. Instead, Catterall specifically compares the performances of 14 high-poverty Chicago schools with strong arts programs to similar high-poverty schools, and the results are significant.
Philosophically, the center of Catterall's argument is that "while learning in other disciplines may often focus on development of a single skill or talent, the arts regularly engage multiple skills and abilities." The report is available through the Arts Education Partnership website: http://aep-arts.org.
In the Trenches
This kind of information is the type Karen Greene, a theatre teacher featured in OT co-directing Our Town with Borek, probably wishes were more prominent in the minds of administrators and parents in the L.A. Unified School District that she serves. Beyond helping students perform better in classes, said Greene, "I've seen theatre change lives."
As part of an organization called the Arts Prototype Program, Greene travels from school to school in LAUSD, training teachers in 12-week sessions to use art forms to help teach the rest of their curriculum. "I serve seven different schools throughout the course of the year and four or five teachers at each school on average, so I see a lot of different grades, a lot of different teachers," said Greene. "And the teachers are constantly talking of how different their kids are during an arts experience."
One of Greene's favorite stories is of one of a pair of twin girls in a class she visits. After a particularly good session, the classroom teacher wrote Greene, saying, "'You are my hero, because you got this little girl to speak and she never speaks.' And I didn't know that," she recalled. "I just asked her a question and she answered it. These are the things that change kids' lives. The most important function of theatre is in helping people to develop their own voice--to realize that what they have to say and how they feel is important."
Programs such as Arts Prototype are proof that no matter how bleak things may seem, there are always those toiling away in the arts making a difference. However, now more than ever, these toilers have their work cut out for them. The current prospects for theatre educators are not rosy. A 1999-2000 report by the National Center for Education Statistics revealed that drama/theatre instruction was available in less than one quarter of elementary schools (19 percent to be exact) and in only 48 percent of secondary schools. Borek herself, the woman who spearheaded Our Town, is actually an English teacher, not a theatre teacher.
"We've had four years with one drama class, which is Drama One and Drama Two combined," explained Borek. "And the fact of the matter is, I am completely underqualified to teach this class. The last time I had any theatre training was in high school." Seeing Borek's commitment and care on-screen, one doesn't worry too much about Dominguez High's theatre students. But, nonetheless, as Borek points out, her students "deserve to have a program where you have a separate Drama One, Drama Two; where you have a drama players society, where you do all the backstage work. Because that's the kind of stuff that you can go and have a career with."
Besides the low number of schools employing theatre teachers, there is also the problem of facilities. In the documentary, Our Town is rehearsed and staged in the school cafeteria, an all-too-common occurrence at American high schools. As the NCES report points out, of the 48 percent of secondary schools that do offer drama/theatre, only 53 percent have dedicated theatre spaces with special equipment. And as Borek noted, "There are three high schools in Compton Unified; two of them do not have theatres. And they were built, I think, in 1957. The idea that the district or architect said, 'Hey, no theatre, no problem,' is baffling to me."
Our Country's Good
Jim Palmarini, editor of Teaching Theatre journal and associate editor of Dramatics Magazine, sympathizes, explaining that building theatre spaces has always been an issue for school administrators.
"I get calls from schools all the time saying, 'We've finally got some money and we're going to build a new facility and we don't know what to do about it,'" he said. "And facilities that do get built are according to certain specs. People don't have the money or the wherewithal to hire a specialist. So suddenly you find there is no wing space or no greenroom or the acoustics are no good."
For Palmarini, however, the main obstacle facing theatre teachers today is not space but assessment. "In the last couple of years, theatre educators and dance educators--we're not talking about visual arts and music because they are already in the big house--have been fighting for curricular time," he said. "Therefore, there was an effort to do two things. One, create an AP test for theatre students, in the same way that there is for AP in visual arts and music. Simultaneously we were trying to get more standardized board-certified teachers. Both of those things have pretty much been put off the table again just in the last couple of months. The College Board [which decides which subjects deserve an AP test] essentially told us to forget it. And the certification--I mean, there is certification, and every state has their own certification standards, but the idea was to create some sort of national certification that uses the national standards for arts education that were issued some years back--became difficult because of the problem of money."
Palmarini, who is based in Cincinnati, is not just talking about money on the federal level. Indeed, to some degree he sees federal funding as less significant than local funding. The current Labor-H bill, in fact, which is sitting in the Senate awaiting approval, would allocate a mere $35 million for arts education programs, a piddling sum when spread over 50 states. That is, if it even makes it down to the schools in need.
"Like a lot of people after Goals 2000, I was really excited, because what it meant was that federal money was available for arts education programs," said Palmarini. "But it seems to me more often it's states that determine how that money is spent. And I'm just not sure how many programs are directly benefiting from that [federal] money. You see it here and there, but if you asked me if any Ohio school is benefiting from federal funds, I'm not sure I could answer that question."
Thanks for the Memory
In line with Palmarini's comments, despite Borek's achievements money for the Dominguez theatre program has not been forthcoming from any level, federal to local. While Borek has gone on to helm three more shows at Dominguez since Our Town, she's done it with little financial assistance from the school.
"The fact of the matter is we get most of our donations for the drama department from outside sources," said Borek. "The only thing that [the school] really pays for is our stipend; teachers staying after school get a little stipend. And they once gave us $5,000, but the problem was you had to spend it three months in advance, and if you've ever been in a play you know there's nothing you can buy three months in advance. You can buy lights, of course, some of the big-ticket items, but that's it."
Borek's main financial contributor, in fact, "was one of the cameramen on the final night of shooting and a friend of the filmmaker's from college. His family has to give a certain amount of money away each year, and they've decided to give it to us the past three years. It's been very fortunate." And though the necessity of this kind of outside support might be a little discouraging to other theatre teachers looking for similar resources, it's also perhaps another testament to the ability of theatre to transforms lives--of donors as well as teens.
As for Borek's students, have their lives really changed? Though the majority of the students involved in the production went on to UC schools--a significant accomplishment coming out of Dominguez--Borek admitted: "It's such a hard question to answer, because none of them went to Harvard after the film. None of them started a company when they were 18. A lot of them are just sort of doing what they were doing before, but they do have that memory. And that's what I think theatre is in a lot of ways--that memory of being a part of this team, of going through that stress."
Theatre makers throughout the Southland can understand that stress and the joy of coming through it. That's just life in the 99-Seat theatre scene in our town. And it's only a ghetto if we think of it that way.