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Scene
2006-7 March Issue 3
THE QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF THE INTERNATIONAL SCHOOLS THEATRE ASSOCIATION
IN THIS ISSUE:
SP
ED E
IT CIA
IO L
N
What’s Happening in Schools?
: The International Theatre Educator
www.ista.co.uk
ISTA – A WHO’S WHO
Editor: Sally Robertson
Artwork: Jo Doidge
Print: Brewers Business Solutions Ltd,
Cornwall, UK
Cover Image: taken by Julie Ladner, Drama
teacher and host of Western Academy of
Beijing, Middle School Festival – Autumn 2006.
Photographs: from Calderdale High School
Festival and Beijing Middle School Festival;
selected from the ISTA archives by Liane
Campbell.
To submit material or comments for future
issues please email Sally Robertson on
[email protected]
© International Schools Theatre Association
(ISTA) 2006-7
ISTA and its editors accept no liability for the
views, opinions and advice contained in this
journal. The editors reserve the right to edit
any materials submitted for publication.
ISTA Contact Information
International Schools Theatre Association
PO Box 74
Helston
TR13 8EE UK
Email: [email protected]
Website: www.ista.co.uk
Board of Trustees
David Lightbody, President – General Manager Cameron
Mackintosh China
Fenella Kelly, Vice President – Cairo American College, Egypt
Darren Scully, Vice President – St Julian’s School, Portugal
Doug Bishop – Taipei American School, Taiwan
Ian Pike – Freelance writer, UK
Michael Westberg – Inter Community School Zurich, Switzerland
Honorary Life Members
Dinos Aristidou – UK
Ted Miltenberger – France
Mike Pasternak – Switzerland
ISTA Global Patrons
The American School in The Hague Community, the Netherlands
Encore! Ensemble Theatre Workshop, USA
International School of Brussels, Belgium
International School of Geneva, La Chataigneraie, Switzerland
International School Hamburg, Germany
Michigan State University, USA
The Robertson Family, UK
St Julian’s School, Portugal
ISTA Personnel
Emmy Abrahamson, Vienna, Austria – [email protected]
Bev Brian, Cornwall, UK – [email protected]
Liane Campbell, Perth, Australia – [email protected]
Sally Robertson, Cornwall, UK – [email protected]
Jo Webb, Cornwall, UK – [email protected]
Regional Representatives
Africa – Fenella Kelly, Cairo American College, Egypt
Latin America – Jeff Aitken, Escuela Campo Alegre, Venezuela
North America – Rob Warren, Atlanta International School, USA
Beijing MS
Editorial
2006-7 March Issue 3
ASKING
MEMBERS...
I’m absolutely thrilled with this issue!
Each year at the Board of Trustees
meeting, I ask various members of the
Board to brainstorm possible themes
for issues of Scene. It was at last
year’s meeting where Darren Scully suggested the idea of ‘What’s
Happening in Schools?’ A collection of plays recently performed/
produced in schools to create a new resource for member teachers.
Brilliant.
One of the most frequently asked questions we receive, throughout
the year, has something to do with teachers needing help or
inspiration as to what kind of production to do. Whether it’s an easy
musical, an all female cast, a play that is devised, a piece to do with
IB students, a full school community project, a middle school play
for over 80 kids etc etc. Teachers are constantly searching for new
ideas and have very specific needs regarding the productions they
want/are asked to do.
ISTA should absolutely be able to help with this. The process of
realising this particular idea has shown that such a project is doable
and only enhances what we can offer to teachers by way of
resources, not to mention the follow up (new dialogues, exchanging
scripts etc) that ensues.
Due thanks go to all the teachers who wrote in and put up with my
pestering along the way. My wish is that you all feel you are getting
back much more than you put in. I particularly enjoyed a comment
from one teacher, who said being asked to write in with his notes on
productions, forced him to reflect on the choice of plays he did with
his students. Undoubtedly there have been all kinds of wonderful
spin offs as well.
Moving beyond purely content, you will see we have a new look for
Scene. I can only extend my sincere thanks to Ian Pike and David
Lightbody at this year’s Board meeting for their thoughts,
suggestions and guidance. This kind of collaborative process
ensures that we continually keep strengthening what lies at the heart
of ISTA; dialogue, keeping things alive and partaking in the
wonderful world that is theatre.
Finally, thanks to Jo Doidge for her creative brilliance in realising our
ideas.
What’s Happening in
Schools?
A new Publication
I know that some of you were
struggling for time, at the time of
commissioning. However I would
very much like to contact you again
– to ask if you can contribute to
‘phase 2’ of this project. It is our
aim, at the very least, to double the
current number of contributions, so
as to create a new publication for
the wider teaching community. I
have a model for you to use and
worked out in the early stages of
this project that a contribution
should take no more than 15-20
minutes – given the formula we are
using. It would be great to build on
what we have started here.
Other resources?
I am very much aware that we need
to monitor how much we ask you
to contribute during any one year.
Getting the balance wrong would
negatively affect good will and this
wouldn’t be good practice. But say
we tried to do a project of this kind,
every 2nd year – what other
resources would you find useful? If
we could collect other information
from member teachers, what would
this be? Please do write in with
your ideas, as the further ahead we
can plan the better. As part of our
Teacher Enrichment work, one of
our goals is to develop and extend
our current list of resources for
teachers. You, as members of ISTA,
have a voice in determining what
those resources should be.
I look forward to hearing from you.
Editor
[email protected]
Please respond directly to
[email protected]
Scene | 2006-7 March Issue 3 | 1
What’s Happeni
Charmaine Basel and Belinda
Shorland – British International
School, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam
sneakers scold and flirt with the
audience, and duels are fought with
giant salamis.
THE TEENAGE DILEMMAS OF
ANDY LEE: written by Charmaine
and Belinda
After looking through various plays and
feeling that they somehow didn’t feel
quite “international enough”, we
decided to write one. The play
focuses on its central character Andy’s
trials and tribulations - a type of Adrian
Mole with a cultural twist. It is set in
Vietnam (but this could easily be
interchanged) and explores the cultural
particularities of having a mixed
background and going to school in a
multicultural setting. The play has 30
written cast members of all ages and
has potential for more. It is in three
acts and running time without interval
is about 1hour and 10 minutes. It took
us around 4 weeks to write - including
a few late nights and weekends.
Highlights include: a whole cast
Bollywood dance / dream sequence; a
granny fight and a whole cast karaoke
/ dance finale to Blue Suede Shoes.
The piece was a success in the sense
that the audience connected with the
subject matter and really enjoyed the
humour. We also received
compliments on the writing. It was a
worthwhile experience writing and
directing the play and most importantly,
it was wonderful to have the students
perform a play that was specifically
tailored for an international setting.
My starting point was Scala’s scenario
“The Betrothed,” which I adapted to fit
the twenty 11 to 18 year olds who
auditioned. The first step was to
encourage them to play, to experiment
with movement, tempo and status.
They studied the Masters: Charlie,
Buster and Margaret Rutherford’s Lady
Bracknell, Bertie & Jeeves, Basil &
Sybill, Tom & Jerry. With no text to fall
back on, it was important they take
responsibility for their own characters
and create their own Lazzi. I found that
allowing a bit of anarchy into
rehearsals gave birth to accidental
discoveries, and many wonderful
comic moments.
Laurie Carroll Berube – Institut Le
Rosey, Switzerland
LOVE KNOTS based on a
Commedia dell’Arte Scenario by
Flaminia Scala
Tackling a scenario for students to
improvise around, rather than a
scripted play, felt like jumping into the
void - especially for the end-of-year
production. In the end, I had more fun
with this show than any other! Full of
gags, pratfalls, and mistaken identity,
improvised physical comedy relying on
whiplash timing, it is exhausting to
stage. But we had a great time
creating an anything-can-happen
cartoon world where lovers approach
in slow-motion, servants in high-top
2 | Scene | 2006-7 March Issue 3
N.B. John Wright’s Why is that so
Funny? was invaluable – especially
when creating a Keystone Cops
chase-cum-spaghetti-on-the-head
food fight!
Emily Blackburn – ACS
International School of Egham, UK
THE WISH PEDDLER by Tom
McCoy: The Dramatic Publishing
Company
Our fall middle school production last
year was part of a celebration of the
arts at our school. This event included:
a dance show, visual art displays,
performances by our school’s four
bands, a choir performance and a play.
THE WISH PEDDLAR is a very short
play, but it has an expandable cast.
We wanted to have a lot of students
involved, so this was ideal for our
purposes. The play is a bit thin to
stand on its own, but I can see that it
would be a good jumping off point for
other devised scenes. I think it would
be a good project for lower school or
for a middle and lower school
collaboration.
A DOLL’S HOUSE by Henrik Ibsen:
rights held by Samuel French
In February one of my IB 12 students
took on the challenge of directing A
Doll’s House. The results were
excellent. The small cast (3 M, 2F)
allowed for intense work from some
dedicated (mostly IB) actors. The
intimacy of our small black box studio
was ideal for this quiet and poignant
play. The technical aspects of this
production were very simple, but it did
give some of my IB students an
opportunity to further their design
skills. The true challenge came in the
development and handling of the
characters. It was exciting to watch the
students stretch themselves and
succeed.
ONCE UPON A MATTRESS by
Marshall Barer and Mary Rodgers:
rights held by Josef Weinberger
Ltd. in the UK and Rodgers and
Hammerstein in the United States
Our school has a tradition of a largescale spring musical and last year we
did ONCE UPON A MATTRESS. This
production was a true crowd pleaser,
and it was a joy to work on. The
characters are funny and the students
quickly related to the fractured Princess
and the Pea fairy tale. We were able to
include students from 6th -12th grade,
as the themes and content are universal
the whole school was able to enjoy the
production. We had a cast of 24, but
this number could easily be shrunk or
expanded as needed. There are a lot of
opportunities for large dance numbers
and the chorus has a personality all of
its own. Our small orchestra consisted
of piano, keyboards, a double bass and
percussion. It was large enough to
sound good, but small enough to
handle. This was by far our most
technically challenging show of the year,
but it wasn’t so beyond our means that
weren’t able to create a strong
production. We did end up having only
nine mattresses due to health and
safety hazards, but we made up for
what could have been a disappointing
effect by having Princess Winnifred use
a trampoline to vault into bed!
Mike Caemmerer – American
Embassy School New Delhi, India
MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM by
William Shakespeare
This was a standard production but
with my IB students in mind. The first
year IB students were told in February
of 2005 that the October production
would be the Dream. As the director I
gave them my rough sketch for design
ng in Schools?
and then set them about the task of
critiquing the idea. Their critiques had
to be based on research and theory as
well as the potential that the idea had
for bringing the play to life on stage.
They were very much the design team.
By the end of May, the idea had been
solidified enough so that one of the
students took on the task of bringing
the costumes to life. She was in
London in the summer and met with
ISTA’s David Lightbody to get some
design help. She came back in the fall
with full designs. She then turned
those over to another IB student who
was in charge of actual costume
construction, including fabric
purchasing and working with the tailor.
Nearly all IB Theatre Arts students
were involved in some aspect, either
on stage or off. The process for all the
students was invaluable. They saw the
birth of an idea and worked with it until
they saw it (or acted it) on stage. Their
ability to understand the intricacies of
design and production grew
significantly and the process clearly
impacted their own work. As a school
theatre director/teacher and given
whatever constraints (real or imagined),
I find myself avoiding the same steps
that I require of my students. This
process put into perspective exactly
what I ask them to do on a regular
basis with design and production. It
also gave them the kind of emersion in
a project they do not normally get.
ALL IN THE TIMING and TIME
FLIES: One Act play collections of
David Ives: Vintage Books and
Grove Press, respectively.
I have found this one night production
to be a great way to start a year. At
AES, with students moving in and out
yearly at a rate of about 20%, it is
difficult to know what kind of large
production the students are able to pull
off. An evening of one-acts gives me
as director the ability to choose pieces
of varying difficulty, while at the same
time giving around 20 students the
opportunity to have meaningful roles
on stage. I am a huge fan of David
Ives. His style lends itself to
challenging pieces for talented
performers (SURE THING for example),
but also lets students with less
experience learn the art of timing
(ARABIAN NIGHTS, CAPTIVE
AUDIENCE). The school community
audience can easily tolerate the short
acts and the sophisticated humor
behind Ives. The feedback for the
actors is always instant and gratifying.
COMPLEAT WRKS of WLLM
SHSKPR: abridged, Borgeson,
Long and Singer, Applause Books
This is the most recent production at
AES. Two graduating seniors dragged
their IB teacher on stage to perform
this well-known comedy. The
stipulation from this teacher was that
he have nothing to do with the
production except acting. Students
would be responsible for all elements
of production. They agreed. The play
is an intense production experience in
that while only three actors are on
stage, the supporting crew required 8
members not including the student
director. Most of these 9 were rather
prolific on stage, but had little or no off
stage experience. A baptism by fire!
Again, the play was fine, but the
process was the beneficial aspect.
They really ran all elements of
production-set design, costume
design, posters and tickets, props,
directing: they did it all. The play was
pulled off in four weeks requiring an
intense effort from all. And while the
acting was a great penultimate
experience for the seniors, it is the
students who worked backstage that
still talk about this play. This piece got
the “stage junkies” in the wings to fully
appreciate the enormity of work that
goes into a production.
MY FATHER’S DRAGON based on
the book by Ruth Stiles Gannett
The Thespian Society takes on as its
community service goal to bring
theatre to the drama starved
elementary students. Thespians put on
an annual theatre workshop for grades
3-5 with 50 to 70 students who show
up for the full day of theatre games
and mini-workshops. Two years ago
they extended that to create a full
theatre experience for the students.
The popular children’s story MY
FATHER’S DRAGON had been
adapted to music by the high school
music teacher. It provided a great
vehicle for an elementary show: flexible
casting allowing for between 40 and
70 students, outrageous costumes,
and individual stage time, even for the
smallest of parts. In addition, it meant
that the Thespians could (had to) all be
involved. They managed the entire
production, from audition to closing
curtain. They were in charge of makeup design and application, costume
design and application, blocking and
direction, choreography, everything.
Calderdale HS
Scene | 2006-7 March Issue 3 | 3
“Come as you are and leave with a different perspective on life.”
Hanna Lopes Coelho, St Nicholas School, Sao Paulo, Brazil
Adults were asked to help, but even
they played only a supporting role,
following the lead of the Thespians.
Because of the sheer number of
students, it was necessary for me to
do a lot of the time management, but I
did so only in consultation with the
student director. It was a fabulous
experience for both the elementary and
the high school students. The
Elementary School students loved
working with the high school students,
and I think the feeling was mutual. It
was a great community builder too, as
3rd graders now know seniors and
were greeting them in the school
hallways like they were best friends.
Kate Caster – International School
Hamburg, Germany
GOD’S FAVOURITE by Neil Simon:
published by Samuel French, Inc.,
New York
This is a comedy based on the biblical
story of Job. You know the one... God
and the Devil have an argument about
who has the most faith in God. God
tells the Devil his ‘servant on earth’ is
Jo Benjamin (Job) who will never
renounce God, no matter what the
Devil does to make his life miserable.
Simon has modernized the story with
some funny twists, including a
bumbling messenger from God sent to
tell Jo Benjamin the bad news. We
endeavored to do a double cast with
this show because it only has 8
characters. It did work nicely as it was
a great opportunity for our community
to see 2 quite different interpretations
of the same script. It was, however, a
bit difficult during the rehearsal
process. Fortunately, I had a
wonderful student director.
KISS ME KATE: book by Sam &
Bella Spewack, music & lyrics by
Cole Porter, published by
Tams-Witmark Music Library, Inc.,
New York
This musical is quite a good one for a
large group. We were able to use 7th12th graders with the variety this show
has to offer. This show provides an
excellent opportunity to costume
characters in the 1950’s as well as the
Elizabethan period. Not only does it
have wonderful Cole Porter music, it
has an interesting storyline... a little
different from the typical musical
4 | Scene | 2006-7 March Issue 3
comedies around. This is a play within
a play where the leading actor and
actress (who used to be married and
now can’t stand each other) are
putting up a production of “The Taming
of the Shrew.” The off stage antics
cross over to the on stage
performance. Besides this, a side
story involves 2 comic gangsters who
are trying to extort money from another
cast member for his gambling debts.
Some of the more well known songs
include: “Brush up Your Shakespeare,”
“Why Can’t You Behave?,”
“Wunderbar,” “Too Darn Hot” and
“Always True to You in my Fashion.”
STORY THEATRE by Paul Sills:
published by Samual French Inc.,
New York
This show was developed with my 9th
grade students for Elementary School
children. It is a compilation of some of
the best-known children’s stories plus
a few odd ones. The great thing about
his script is that you can do parts or
the entire show. We chose to use
most of the stories and cut the more
gruesome ones. There is also a lot of
opportunity to create each story with
unusual and interesting characters. It
works really well as an ensemble piece
with no real set and minimal
costuming. It’s a dream budget show.
Doug Dean – Marymount
International School Rome, Italy
ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO’S
NEST by Dale Wasserman
The rehearsal period for this high
school production lasted five months.
Each student developed their
character’s “back story” individually
and we spent a long time discussing
mental health and the wafer-thin line
that separates sanity from insanity. I
worked on the “less is more” principal;
I didn’t want a group of over-the-top
“nutbags”, as McMurphy refers to
them. I wanted real people that had
simply found life too complex to deal
with. That, for me, brought out the
tragedy of their situations and lended
extra weight to the coldly villainous
attitude of Nurse Ratched. This is NOT
an easy play to do well, I was fortunate
to be blessed with an extremely
talented and dedicated group of
students. Our set was stark white and I
went with a soundrack of Joni Mitchell
and Bob Dylan, reflecting the play’s
anti-establishment themes.
REVOLTING RHYMES by Roald
Dahl
This was an 8th grade production. We
had spent part of the year working on
clowning, physical comedy and status
and this piece gave us an excellent
chance to put what we had learned
into practice. The narrator of the six
stories was a clearly identifiable
authority figure, albeit one who had his
status lowered as the plays collapsed
around him. We introduced ideas
taken from Michael Green’s Coarse
Acting Shows, with actors “forgetting”
lines, outsized props, misplaced sound
effects, wobbly scenery etc. We made
many of the props and costumes
ourselves, including two life-size ugly
sisters, complete with detachable
heads. The bottom line was though,
that through all of this, the actors still
had to tell the story and tell it clearly. I
cast 30 actors but it could be done
with far fewer. The stage started in
pristine condition but, by the end, was
full of props, chopped-off heads, used
dynamite sticks and discarded
costumes, leaving the poor narrator
utterly beaten as the curtain drew. It
was SO much fun; I can’t wait to do it
again with another group!
THE TROJAN WOMEN by Euripides
This was the high school production
that we ended the 2005/06 academic
year with. I had a group that was
almost entirely female and, in particular,
four gifted girls to play the challenging
roles of Hecuba, Cassandra,
Andromache and Helen. I wanted to
strike a balance between the traditional
Greek style of performing and a more
modern, naturalistic approach. So,
rather than having the chorus speaking
in unison I asked each of the girls to
develop an individual character and
shared the chorus lines between them.
The middle school art teacher, a
talented artist in his own right,
designed a post-apocalyptic set for
me, with rough, patched tents,
washing lines, broken machinery, fallen
buildings; a world deprived of the
luxuries we now take for granted but
somehow still recognizable as our
own. This is a moving, powerful and
challenging play.
Alenka Dorrell - American
International School Budapest,
Hungary
Kabuki MACBETH: three Scenes
from Shakespeare
As part of a final directing unit, three IB
student directors tackled the Prophecy,
the Letter and the Final Battle in
Kabuki style. Each student actor also
took on a production role. The results
were spectacular and the learning
curve immense for everyone. The play
lent itself well to the style. Our witches
created some very Kabuki special
effects (fishing lights in their teeth,
cobwebs sprayed from their sleeves),
the kata for the warriors and the
extremely bloody fights with convenient
mie to underscore the action (and
allow everyone to breathe!) gave the
choreographers a job while the
designers worked with Kabuki colour
symbolism for the Hanamichi floor
cloths and the wall hangings. There
was space for the musicians to
compose a drumming and flute score
and our narrator spoke the text in
Japanese and English!
THE GRADUATING CLASS by the
High School Theatre Ensemble of
AISB
This was a devised production. We set
it in an International School,
improvising with characters from
different walks of life/circumstances.
The basic premise was a student
thinking on the questions posed by her
headmaster at Graduation, ‘Where
have you come from? Where are you
going?’ After every rehearsal, I took
away the notes I had written from the
students’ improvs and wrote the script
that way. This is obviously going to be
a touch frustrating in terms of writing
because often you would rather the
story was different (!) but it is a great
way to teach devising and character;
and to give the kids ensemble
ownership of their piece. It was also
hugely popular with the audience
because they recognized so much
from it – though we tried hard not to
tell any personal stories.
THREE SISTERS: an adaptation
based on the play by Anton
Chekhov
My IB Seniors are exploring Naturalism
through site-specific and Promenade
theatre, by rehearsing and performing
in my house. The first two acts take
place in the living room, the third act is
in the basement and fourth act takes
Calderdale HS
place in the garden! I can report that
we are having a ball doing this piece.
Working within a domestic environment
has been fantastic. So many moments
happen differently. A stage rehearsal
for instance, had Vershinin walking
around when talking. In the living room,
this was clearly ‘unnatural’ so we
made it much more static but used
hands and faces more. In terms of
production too it has been fascinating.
Mood music doesn’t work at home,
but you can do all sorts of things with
stage lighting. Our performance is, for
instance at 6pm but the first act is
daytime, spring. We are placing large
lights outside windows to shine in and
give the conceit. Because it is cold
here, torches and fire heaters are part
of the 4th act (now set at night...)
Interestingly, the 3rd act, in the
smallest space, works the best of all.
Anne Marie Drodz – Bilkent
University Preparatory School,
Turkey
ANTIGONE by Jean Anouillh
adapted by Anne Marie
Grade 12 IB Theatre Arts students
gained an experience of performing
this play in a professional small studio
theatre in February 2006. The play was
adapted to suit the individual needs of
7 students. They were given enough
individual exposure but were not
overburdened with large chunks of text
to memorize. The essence of the play
was kept intact – maintaining themes
of oppression, teenage rebellion and
search for identity. Drawing on Greek
myths and the theatrical conventions of
Greek Theatre, (masks, ritual dance
and choral movement), we also used
rehearsal techniques drawn from
Boal’s “Theatre of the Oppressed”
which was later incorporated into the
fabric of the play, eg, Colombian
Hypnosis, Mirroring, Image Sculpturing
etc. This was interlaced with modern
music and modern references in terms
of props and costuming. The set
design owed much to the influence of
Peter Brook with a minimalist approach
and an “empty space” feel to the
piece. The 7 actors gained a
worthwhile experience of performing in
a professional theatre space and
gained a synthesis of the two year
journey they had taken from Greek
Theatre in Year 1 through to Theatre of
the Oppressed in Year 2.
THE DINING ROOM by A.R. Gurney
The Grade 11 IB Theatre Arts class
performed this American classic in May
of 2006. Each of the six actors played
six to eight characters in the course of
the two-act play. As the director, I was
thrilled to finally have the numbers and
talent to put this piece on the stage.
This was also the first time at
BUPS/BIS that students performed a
full length dramatic piece, another sign
of how our theatre department is
expanding. The structure of the script
made every student stretch themselves
to reach the ultimate challenge faced
by every actor: How does one create a
believable character onstage? They
had to exit, unbutton a shirt or pin up
their hair and come back on stage as
another character entirely. Due to
scheduling restrictions, the IB students
worked on the piece for over three
months before it went up, requiring
them to sustain focus and commitment
on a much higher scale. The main
challenge of the piece, technically, was
the set and props. The dining room in
question had to be stereotypically
American WASP, yet versatile enough
that it could withstand the 11 scenes
played around it. Students learned the
incredible frustrations every prop
master goes through: how to find not
just a spoon, but a whole set that not
only matches each other but the
Scene | 2006-7 March Issue 3 | 5
massive and ever-growing metropolis
which offers the best and the worst of
the urban experience. Transitions
between scenes were achieved with
the use of projected photographs and
video and a rock band playing
selections from The Clash.
THE CHRYSALIDS: adapted by
David Harrower from the novel by
S
John Windham
H
Calderdale
The text is specifically written for
Calderdale H
S
teenage actors and our cast of Grade
7 to 10 students handled the roles very
well. A design motif for the production
was a reworking of Da Vinci’s famous
image of the man with his limbs
stretched out set inside a pentagon.
This became the symbol of “purity” for
the xenophobic citizens of Waknuk.
The production was set in the round
with five risers creating a pentagonal
stage with 5 entrances. As a part of
the project, Grade 10 music students
overall design concept. The
studied minimalist music and
experience certainly allowed the actors
composed in that genre. Selections
to grow; the time commitment enabled
from their compositions were used as
them to reflect and focus on their
scene transition music and to
process; and finally they gained an
underscore the recorded passages of
understanding of just how many items
“telepathy” from the mutant children.
and roles are required to get a full
length play on it’s feet.
Gillian Eugene - Lincoln
Community School, Ghana
Geoffrey Duffield - Western
Academy of Beijing, China
THE VISIT by Freidrich Durrenmatt:
translated from the German by
Patrick Bowles
Durrenmatt’s THE VISIT is a great text
to stage provided you can cast the two
lead roles that require a fair amount of
sophistication. Beyond those roles, it is
potentially a great ensemble piece with
scope for lots of interesting
characterization for a cast of about 35.
We staged it on a fairly empty stage
with design emphasis on costumes. I
think this suits the Brechtian flavor of
the script. This is an excellent piece of
theatre to provoke discussion on
ethical issues.
METROPOLIS
This was a devised project for a group
of about 30 Grade 7 to 9 students,
loosely based on an Australian play by
Tony Nicholls and Felicity Lyons, URBS
URBIS. Heinemann published the play
in 1982 in the One Act Play series, but
I think it is now out of print. URBS
URBIS is a pastiche of scenes in a
variety of theatrical styles on issues of
urban life. Using the original text as an
exemplar, the company devised
original scenes about life in Beijing, a
6 | Scene | 2006-7 March Issue 3
THE MARRIAGE OF ANANSEWA by
Efua T. Sutherland
This tale is based on the oral traditions
of Ananse, a trickster spider in the
Ghanaian culture. As with many West
African plays, it relies heavily on music,
song, and has opportunities for quite a
bit of dance. It also makes use of a
storyteller, which is a well-known figure
in Ghanaian culture. The play is most
suitable for High School students,
though we had a mix of High School
and Middle School (in fact, the role of
Ananse was played by a 6th grader).
The cast can range from ten members
upwards as, apart from the main
characters, all the cast can act as the
players (similar to a chorus), and a
combination of other roles. I think we
had fifteen to twenty students in our
performance. The play is quite long so
you will want to edit it. We had an
outside artist who knew the play, and
knew African drumming, singing and
dancing, to come and work with the
students. We were able to do a bunch
of the songs in Twi (one of the local
Ghanaian languages), which was very
cool for the actors and the audience.
He also taught us some West African
dance, and worked on drumming with
our student and teacher musicians.
The cunningness of Ananse and the
wild turn of events that take place
makes this play very unique and really
quite funny! The kids and the audience
alike loved the play, and thought it very
refreshing to see an African, specifically
Ghanaian, play on the stage.
RELIA: A NOH RETELLING OF THE
TALE by Gillian Eugene
In this play I adapted the familiar tale of
Cinderella using the theatrical tradition
of Japanese Noh Theatre. Aiding me in
the writing process was a book, The
Noh Plays of Japan: An Anthology,
written by Arthur Waley that contained
a variety of Noh plays. The result was
something quite dark, spiritual and
“ghost-like,” yet also quite funny! We
set the play outside in the grass, trying
to closely imitate the stage and set-up
of an actual Noh performance. Around
the stage we built a bamboo frame
with lanterns hanging down. We had
Japanese drumming playing as the
audience entered and at various points
throughout the performance. I had a
local artist make these fabulous
wooden masks for the main
characters, and all the characters had
on thick wooden clogs that made this
amazing sound on the floor. Everyone
had on a different style of kimono, and
the hair and make-up became very
wild and over-the-top! There were two
musicians that played the flute
throughout the performance. We
incorporated much movement into the
play and, I must say, the whole thing
was just beautiful. We had mostly
Middle School students in this
production, and it was perfect for
them. The number of cast can vary as
the chorus can have any number of
people take part. This was an excellent
way to get the students and adults
alike familiar with some of the elements
of Noh Theatre.
CONFERENCE OF THE BIRDS by
Peter Brooke and Jean-Claude
Carriere
This play is for High School students
and has a cast of 12 – 16 (this allows
each actor to play a bird and at least
one other character). It is a challenging
script, as one has to really work to
discern the meaning of the various
stories and to clearly grasp the overall
narrative. The play is adapted from a
Middle Eastern poem, and tells the
story of a group of birds, led by the
Hoopoe, on a grueling journey to find
their king. There are various mini-
narratives throughout the play, told by
the Hoopoe, each to teach a lesson to
the other birds. The play is quite
visually stimulating. We had one of the
classes at school design a bird mask
and wings for each bird character;
underneath this all the actors wore
white Middle Eastern dress (baggy
pants, knee-length shirt). The creativity
and colours that came from the
student’s bird creations were
awesome! We performed the play in
the round, with the main action taking
place on a circular carpet surrounded
by bamboo poles. When the birds
were not in the circle they were
perched on various sized ramps and
levels in the corners of the room. The
play is physically demanding in that the
actors must work hard to develop their
“bird bodies,” as well as give the
illusion of flight throughout the play.
Tim Evans – Yokohama
International School, Japan
THE BURIAL AT THEBES: Heaney
after Sophocles
This is Sophocles’ Antigone, but a
fairly new version by Seamus Heaney.
The language is very accessible. The
students did not feel threatened by it.
The cast was from 7th to 12th grade.
I used all my IB class too. The latter
took on both performance and
production roles. I used some
eighteen students on stage. I chose six
students to be the Chorus; you could
have two or twenty. It was my first time
working with a CHORUS and was a
desired challenge. They hold the play
together. But what would I do with
them on stage all the time!? They
explored: jazz dance, Tango, physical
theatre and acrobatics. The stage was
open and minimal. We reset it in a
mythical South American country.
Creon looked highly dubious as the
Chorus swept in to the sampled Tango
sounds of Gotan Project. He did not
have a Cuban cigar.
ARMS AND THE MAN by G.B.Shaw
This is a perfect low-key, small cast
project for IB students wishing to
explore Victorian Theatre. 3 female, 4
male. 3 ACTS. 3 settings. A set
design challenge. We did it on an
open stage with 3 distinct areas for
each Act. Colour coded, semi-real and
contemporary. The play has many
themes: love, honour, deceit, war,
male/female. It concerns a soldier
trapped in the bedroom of a young
lady whose fiancé is on the other side
of the conflict. The fugitive appears
eccentric in his views of war and
honour. She becomes intrigued. Will
she protect him?
THE NAVIGATOR
This was an adaptation of the little
known musical from 1976: Stephen
Sondheim’s PACIFIC OVERTURES.
With at least a dozen songs it was far
too ambitious for MS/HS. But being
here in Japan it seemed impossible to
ignore. So we rewrote the start and
the end. We only included 4 songs. It
had a rather dated view of the
Japanese: walkmans and sushi rolls.
We added AWA ODORI dance,
BUTOH movement and Complicite
lighting effects recently seen in THE
ELEPHANT VANISHES. The Cast was
large. I used over thirty but you could
add more in the crowd scenes. This is
in many ways Sondheim’s attempt at
an Asian play. So for IB students there
are opportunities for exploring: Kabuki,
Noh, Butoh, Kyogen and Bunraku. We
selected two out of those; Butoh and
Kyogen conventions. It is the story of
Manjiro, a young boy who is
shipwrecked. He is rescued by an
American Whaler and is taken to New
England. He learns English, one of the
first Japanese to do so, and returns
dangerously to the closed kingdom. It
is all based on fact so there is plenty
of opportunity for research and
historical cross-over. Again we used
our open stage and created settings
with slide projections. We also had live
music: taiko drums, koto and piano.
This was a very special play to do and
if you are going for your BIG one; the
one you wish to be remembered by,
the one you will watch again and
again on your dvd, then... dozo.
Jerry Flynn – International School
of Tanganyika, Tanzania
lighting and sound for the IB Theatre
Arts students. It was a three- month
project, rehearsing twice a week as an
extra-curricular activity. The outcome
was kitsch and humorous. The
students and staff had a great time
working with this one and it was
received well as an enjoyable evening
of family entertainment.
PINNOCHIO written by John
Morley, published by Samuel
French
At the time of writing this is our current
project. We are working with a cast of
35 students from grades 6-12. There
are 12 principal roles with supporting
cast as puppets, circus performers
and villagers. The play is directorially
challenging with the script demanding
a variety of illusions and complex
settings. The original script is a musical
although we have decided instead we
have the MYP grade 10 students
composing and recording an original
score. The production is being used as
a vehicle for the IB students as well,
one who is working on Costume
Design for her Individual Project and
one who has taken on the role of
Stage Manager. The production is
working along the lines of
Physical/Total Theatre. Its greatest
challenge and benefit is the
opportunity it gives for an exploration
of movement and ensemble theatre.
Beijing MS
S
Calderdale H
DRACULA SPECTACULAR: book
& lyrics by John Gardiner, music
by Andrew Parr, published by
Samuel French
This was a secondary school (grades
6-12) musical play with a cast of 25
(this is flexible). It has great music,
both big chorus numbers and
challenging solos and duets. The
characters are melodramatic and
stereotypical creating some great
humor. It has good scope for design
and construction and so we had a
large crew working on those elements
throughout the rehearsal process. It
was also used as a project in stage
Scene | 2006-7 March Issue 3 | 7
Calderdale HS
ANIMAL FARM adapted by Peter
Hall, lyrics by Adrian Mitchell,
published by Heinemann
Educational
This was the 2006 Secondary School
production that was done with a large
cast of 44 students plus 5 musicians.
As the adaptation says, the play is
called a ‘fairy tale...’ so the set design,
created in part by the students, went for
a two-dimensional story book feel. All
the performers/characters wore masks.
These were beautifully made by the Art
department [visit www.istafrica.com]. To
everyone’s credit the masks were
brought to vivid life through three
months of focused ensemble work. We
saw subtle characterizations from
everyone, and a sense of stage
awareness and movement skills that
belied any theatrical inexperience.
There is a saying in the theatre...
‘never work with kids or animals’.
‘Animal Farm’ was a successful
exception to this rule for sure.
Leanne Fulcher – International
School of Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
PETER PAN: full length musical
Age appropriate: Elementary and
Middle School, separate scripts
Original script written by Leanne
Fulcher and Sarah Charley
Lyrics by Sarah Charley
Length: one hour and 45 minutes
Cast size: 45-50
Music: 10 songs with extra musical
interludes between scenes.
I have actually produced or coproduced this version of Peter Pan
twice. The first time was in Monterrey,
Mexico where I co-wrote the script to
be a bilingual script. The natives
(Mayans) were only Spanish speaking,
the family and mermaids only spoke
English, but Peter and his lost boys
spoke both languages. We had the
benefit of having a mostly bilingual
8 | Scene | 2006-7 March Issue 3
audience, so we were able to have fun
with the languages. The music is all
recognizable tunes with original lyrics
written by the very talented Sarah
Charley. (10 songs in total including
Fame which was re-written to be “Pan!”
and the Cheers theme song that
became “Never-Never Land.”) The
music definitely makes this show, as the
students still sing the songs 3 years
later. The second time I produced Peter
Pan was in Kuala Lumpur, where I now
teach middle school. I re-wrote the
script to make it more middle school
humor, changed it to be a full English
script, added historical details about the
mermaids and changed the location to
Kuala Lumpur. (Peter Pan is available in
the public domain, so there was no
need to pay for the rights.) We had a
talented high school student who used
blue screen technology to superimpose
Peter Pan and the family as they flew by
the Petronas Twin Towers. Floating
clouds covered the stools to create an
awe-inspiring scene. Sound and light
and backstage was crewed entirely by
middle school students. Our orchestra
was hand picked from our middle
school talent pool.
THE UGLY DUCKLING: one act
written by A.A. Milne
Published by Cerf, Bennett and Van H
Cartmell, 24 One Act Plays, First
Broadway Books 2000,
www.broadwaybooks.com
Age appropriate: Upper Middle and
High School
Length: 40-45 minutes, although it is
possible to cut this down to 20-25
minutes
Cast size: 3 male, 3 female
The story is based on the children’s
story, but is actually the story of an
ugly princess, whose parents are
frustrated in their attempts to find her a
suitable husband. They end up
scheming to present a beautiful maid
as the bride-to-be. Luckily the princess
ends up meeting the prince who is
also scheming and they fall in love
without the benefit of any tricks. The
audience loves this story, because of
the fabulous humor. The language is a
bit difficult, but can be simplified. I
used this script for an art’s festival. The
set is very simple as it only requires
two thrones and one bench. Costumes
can be colorful and add to the story
very much.
THE PINK PANTHER STRIKES
AGAIN: full-length play
Written by William Gleason based on
the film by Blake Edwards & frank
Waldman, published by The dramatic
Publishing Company,
www.dramaticpublishing.com
Age appropriate: Middle and High
School
Length: 2 hours
Cast size: 25-24 with flexible number
of speaking parts and 6-12 pink
panthers
This is our production for 2006/2007.
We are really excited by the script. It is
very slap-stick, which is fun for the
students and the audience. The
audition was equally based on balance
and athleticism as on acting ability,
which allowed for students to get
involved that do not normally take part
in the fine arts. We’ve done some
great workshops on stage combat to
prepare for this production. On the
difficult side, there are an incredible
amount of scene changes. The script
compensates for this by
recommending a simple suggestive
set, but you can also make it more
complex depending on your resources.
Although this is not strictly a musical,
our middle school orchestra will be
supporting our music needs. We’ve
also had a lot of fun with sound effects
for this show, although you can buy a
sound effects tape from the publisher.
The part we are most excited about is
our Pink Panthers (PP’s). We have 7
female and 5 male PP’s who function
as entertainers between scenes but
also move set and props on stage.
This allows the show to run smoothly
without the need to shut the curtain for
set changes. Our dance
choreographer also has them walking
over chairs in the audience, belaying
off the balcony and clowning for the
audience during intermission. They
have become as important to the story
as the story itself. The students chosen
as PPs were chosen based on their
dance skills, gymnastics, athletic ability
and/or circus skills. The PP’s are also
developing their own specific
personalities, such as the shy one, the
rebel, the clown character, etc.
Neil Harris and Flicky Lappish –
Shatin College, Hong Kong
OUR COUNTRY’S GOOD by
Timberlake Wertenbaker
The play is set in Australia 1789. A
young lieutenant is directing rehearsals
of the first play ever to be staged in that
country. With only two copies of the
text, a cast of convicts, and one leading
lady who may be about to be hanged,
they struggle on and eventually become
transformed by the redemptive,
transcendental power of theatre.
In order to explore the play practically,
we began by looking at Brechtian
devices that might be used in order to
tell the story more effectively: narration,
cross cutting, addressing the
audience, stylized acting, titles and
slogans were all part of this process. It
is a good IB project as the demands of
the script (overlapping dialogue, for
example) and the doubling-up of
characters presents itself as a
challenge for the actors. There is a fair
amount of research the cast can do
into the characters they are playing as
well as the context in which the play is
set. The “play-within-a-play” element
allowed the students to research
Restoration comedy in THE
RECRUITING OFFICER that the
convicts perform.
OUR COUNTRY’S GOOD also
presents a group with some strong
ensemble moments that encourages
the group of students to work on
performance skills, another element of
the IB Theatre Arts course. To this end,
we started by looking at many of Boal’s
rhythm games and ‘shoals of fish’
exercises as well as Liz’s monologue at
the beginning of Act II to get the group
thinking about using choral speech. We
also found good use for Max Stafford
Clarke’s technique of using playing
cards to determine character status in
scenes. These rehearsal techniques
are always good for the students to
record in their portfolios and can be reused when working on their Practical
Play Analysis (IB Theatre Arts
component). At the end of the scheme
of work all of the lines and characters
were divided up, a good opportunity
for students to help determine the
shape of the piece. The project, which
is still ongoing, placed the students in
charge of one responsibility each such
as set design, costume, lighting and
direction. We wish them well in their
new theatrical landscape!
ANTIGONE: two theatrical
approaches
The group began by improvising on the
theme of moral dilemma. The scenario
is: there has been some professional
espionage in the company, the MD has
to decide who is deserving of
promotion, who dismissal. Pursuing
the same theme but in a different
context, the group looked at
ANTIGONE by Jean Anouilh. After
working on presenting the Prologue as
an ensemble, further extracts were
chosen for performance.
Simultaneously the group researched
the techniques of Brecht and
Stanislavski and used their practice to
interpret the text. The group was then
directed to compare and contrast the
extract with a similar moment in the
text of Sophocles and at some time in
the performance move between the
two texts. These moments of switching
between the two texts proved to be
quite theatrical. The costumes used
were simple, with the title character in
white and with changes between
actors realized on stage as a
distancing device. Finally, the reasons
for the different attitudes to the key
protagonists were discussed and
decisions reached about the
playwrights’ intentions and the
historical/political context. The group
then returned to working as an
ensemble for the final moments of the
performance that was staged infront of
parents in a studio laid out in a variety
of stage configurations including
traverse. Working on ancient and
modern versions of this text offered
both exciting and varied performance
possibilities for the actors and a depth
to their studies in World Theatre.
THE RAMAYANA
We performed the ancient Indian story
of the Ramayana as a whole school
production with about 120 students
aged from Yr 8 to Yr 13. Our version
borrowed heavily from the Balinese
theatre traditions I had learnt about on
an IB TAPS there. The script was
compiled by borrowing from various
sources, trying to “beef up” key
sections between pairs of characters in
a psychological modern realist sense
e.g. “Why did Rama reject his wife?”
and dividing the whole epic into three
sections for three separate casts. The
whole ensemble came together at the
beginning and the end.
The Music Department wrote an
excellent atmospheric score for a
Gamelan orchestra of about 15 players
who dressed up in sarongs on
performance nights. Rama’s ‘hunting
of the deer’ sequence was particularly
magical with Gamelan accompaniment
to the deer’s balletic movements. The
monstrous characters such as Ravana,
so important to the drama, were
created through masks we made with
gummed tape and we bought yellow
and orange silk for the ‘good’
characters while purple or black cloth
was used for the ‘baddies.’ The three
Ramas wore all over blue body paint
and there were three Sitas in identical
saris. We went through a lot of
makeup from Snazaroo! (an online
face-paint supplier). As you would
imagine with such a large cast, there
was a great deal of ensemble work
needed for the forest scenes and the
great battle at the end but this didn’t
prevent the sections being rehearsed
independently. The production ended
with the trial of Sita and a fire dance to
test her virtue. (Not very PC I know but
reflecting the tone of the original epic.)
The opening at Ayodhya was
performed outside on the playground
with the parents looking down from
landings. The actors and audience,
behind a chanting chorus, processed
together as if on Rama’s journey, to the
school hall where others in the
ensemble were already in situ as the
magical forest. Difficult battles and
seduction scenes were performed
behind a shadow screen about 15 by
15 feet in height. All in all I thought it
was great fun but I think some of the
students would have rather done
Grease again!
Scene | 2006-7 March Issue 3 | 9
“Loads of fun and a real revelation about what general classroom teachers are able to achieve by
Deborah Morehouse, Jakarta International School, Indonesia
integrating drama into their classroom.”
Ash Huxtable – International
School of Penang, Malaysia
WOLF LULLABY by Hillary Bell: an
IB Theatre Arts production
Second year students were keen to
choose and collaboratively direct their
own production. After reading a series
of scripts they were immediately drawn
to Bell’s tale of a nine year old Angie
who is accused of murdering a twoyear old boy. The story draws
inspiration from the nature vs. nurture
debate that surrounded chilling real-life
child murders (e.g. Mary Bell and
James Bolger), resultant media
attention and the effects this has on
the accused, their parents and law
enforcers. The students took up a
challenging piece with enthusiasm and
a great deal of consideration. They
enjoyed the way that the story
unfolded in a series of psychologically
realistic scenes but gave them the
opportunity to use anti-realistic
techniques, staging and technical
effects. A great play for original music
and sound composition that is
guaranteed to have your audience
squirming in their seats. The real
success comes when the audience are
unsure whether they are meant to hate
Angie or feel sorry for her.
THE INSANE ASSYLUM: a
Commedia dell’ Arte scenario
Another IB project that challenged
students to recreate the traditional
atmosphere of a commedia
performance. The project began with
an introduction to mask using the
excellent resources of the Trestle
Theatre Company and their Basic
Mask Set (the set comes with a
detailed teacher’s resource pack with
lesson by lesson workshops).
Students took the skills learnt in this
unit out into ‘streets’ performing
original, short, spontaneous scenarios
during primary school break-times.
Here they learnt the hard way about
the unpredictable nature of audiences
as well as the limitations and
boundless magic of masks. They used
these experiences and new-found
skills in approaching the demands of
commedia, to improvising and
rehearsing the ‘canavaccios’ of THE
INSANE ASSYLUM. They had by now
made the transference to commedia
10 | Scene | 2006-7 March Issue 3
masks, bought over the internet from
Darkside Masks in New Zealand. The
students also designed and realised
their stock character costumes as well
as undertaking workshops in Lazzi
acrobatics and circus skills (mostly
juggling). The final performance was
done in a small 100- seat theatre that
the students transformed into a surreal
lantern festooned wonderland. Preshow sought to energise the audience
through displays of circus tricks and
live musicians in an attempt to recreate
a noisy market place. Traditional fourth
wall barriers were broken in order to
bring the audience closer to
experiencing the production rather
than just watching it – techniques
learnt in the initial ‘street theatre’ mask
work were invaluable. World theatre
tradition transformed into a living,
breathing event.
PUTERI GUNANG LEDANG: The
Fairy Princess of Gunang Mountain
This devised performance took the
very popular and well-known Malay
folktale and re-told it using the
traditional practices of puppetry, dance
and music with a creative twist. The
story revolves around the Sultan of
Malacca and his arrogant assertion
that he will marry the Fairy Princess of
Gunang Ledang. A quest ensues,
marked by terrible trials and results in a
set of impossible demands laid down
by the Princess. A cast of 40 were
divided into Sultan’s subjects, a group
of savage tigers, wild men of the forest
and guardians of the Princess. The
main three characters of the Sultan, his
trusted warrior and the Princess herself
were giant six-meter tall wayang golek
puppets operated by students. The
groups learnt traditional Balinese
dance movements in a series of
workshops. These movements were
then used as a basis for more
contemporary choreography (designed
collaboratively by students and staff) as
the students learnt to tell the story of
“Puteri” through dance/drama.
Transition narration was provided by
wayang kulit puppets and voice-overs.
An original score was devised by
music students who used their work
as part their IB and GCSE
composition/performance
requirements. This score also mixed
traditional and contemporary styles.
The whole piece lasted about 40
minutes and was performed on the
school field as the centre-piece of a
performance evening called ‘Ria’
(Malay for ‘celebration’) that focused
on the living culture of Malaysia –
‘bringing the outside in’ – where invited
performance practitioners were
brought together to demonstrate their
art for the school and local community.
An exhausting exercise for a small
department – but unbelievably
worthwhile and inspiring.
Greg Jemison - American
International School of Bucharest,
Romania
SIAMESE FIGHTERS was a short
play I wrote when I was teaching in a
large comprehensive school in the UK.
It was written at the request of a local
primary school that was undertaking
projects to highlight the problems of
bullying in school. I worked with a
small group of middle school students
on re-working the play to make it
relevant to an international school in
Romania. This was a small scale
production - bare stage, no tech and
minimal props - aimed at
performances for Grades 4, 5 and 6
plus a performance for parents, faculty
and friends. The play looks at bullying
at different levels and at how victims
can also be bullies. The script provides
a framework for considerable
improvisation and the performance
finishes with the cast coming back on
stage in character to face the
questions of the audience. In fact this
aspect of the project was the most
grueling for the performers as some
questions were very searching and
really put the characters on the spot.
Our major production was a musical
melodrama called CAMILLA or
CAPTIVE AT KENTIGERN COURT
with a cast of 45 with almost the same
number involved in support roles. It’s
set in the early 1800’s with
highwaymen, tavern wenches and
aristocracy (mainly High Schoolers)
and downtrodden servants (Middle
School) oppressed by the wicked onearmed Sir Pegram and his sinister
sidekick - Flitch. Comedy and tragedy
are juxtaposed and the moment when
the smallest servant stands up to his
wicked master and has his neck
Beijing MS
broken on stage guaranteed gasps of
horror from the audience. Fun too for
the tech guys who experimented with
snapping celery and carrots in front of
a mic to reinforce the effect. The music
is scored for string quartet plus flute,
piano and percussion and not having
any string players we pulled in music
students from the local University who
were fantastic. We have good links
with a local theatre and also a film
studio who were invaluable in helping
us with set, props and costume and
this involvement with the wider
community really helped to energize
the students involved. I wrote the play
some years ago with one of my
students who wrote all the music.
Our most recent purely High School
production was Moliere’s THE MISER.
There was some cutting and a fair
amount of translation to make the play
more accessible and contemporary.
The production was not period specific
and costuming was eclectic with
Harpagon in tail coat and battered top
hat and the sly servant La Fleche in
baggy jeans and entering on a kid’s
scooter. We used Commedia as a way
into much of the physical comedy and
this gave the cast the opportunity to
create their own Lazzi and visual comic
details. For the scene where Harpagon
searches inside La Fleche’s baggy
pants for stolen goods the two boys
created an amazing and hilarious
routine. Initially many of the cast were
doubtful as to whether the play would
be funny for a contemporary audience
and felt such achievement when the
audience responded as they hoped.
We used a soundtrack based entirely
on the Hooked on Classics series of
well known classical pieces with ‘naff’
disco beat.
Nancy Jenkins – Anglican
International School, Jerusalem
(formerly at International School
Yangon, Myanmar)
THE VENETIAN TWINS by Goldoni
in a translation by Ranjit Bolt
This is the second time I have directed
this play, which I saw performed by the
RSC twice! This is a brilliant,
entertaining and irreverent translation,
yet still suitable for schools. I worked
with a cast of 14 for over 12 weeks, all
of whom were aged between 13 and
18. I cast two different students as the
twins on both occasions. In Rangoon,
one was a boy and one a girl. The use
of half masks made this possible. Girls
also played the father, several of the
servants and the villain of the piece.
This play can be performed with
minimal set and lighting and it is
possible to localize a lot of it, so the
inn became the American Colony
Hotel, Jerusalem etc. The audience
loved it and so did the students.
MY FAIR LADY
I worked with about 25 students,
aged 11 to 18, a Musical Director
playing a piano and two
Choreographers. I had to re-cast the
musical in a morning because the
school board banned my first choice,
BLOOD BROTHERS, that I had
chosen partly because I had promised
the students we would do a musical,
only thought I had one student who
could sing and believed I could handle
the choreography myself. Three hours
later I assembled the cast of BB and
announced a change of plan. We had
a minimalist set and lighting, but we
went to town on the costumes and
props. I also had choreographers who
made the dancing really innovative and
exciting and the costumes were
spectacular. It was extremely
ambitious, but the students pulled it
off. If we can mount a production like
this, from within a Middle School/High
School of 70 students with no music
department, no drama department
apart from extra-curricular and no
dance training, anyone can...
THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING
EARNEST
The challenge of what to do after MY
FAIR LADY... We decided on
something more intellectual with a
small cast, which would allow the two
students who played Professor Higgins
and Colonel Pickering to play opposite
each other again. I worked with 9
students aged 15-17. We went for a
sumptuous set and less elaborate and
authentic costumes. Students and
audience loved the play, but the cast
did comment that the first night
audience was much better because
they got more of the jokes. This
production also featured an AfricanAmerican Lady Bracknell!
And this year...? GUYS AND DOLLS.
We now have a music teacher, so she
will start a choir in October and teach
all the musical numbers, I will cast the
musical in January, for performance in
June.
Beijing MS
Fenella Kelly - Cairo American
College, Egypt
SPARKLESHARK by Philip Ridley
from the National Theatre anthology
of plays for young people
CAC had been experiencing some
bullying and discrimination problems
before I arrived at the school, so I
thought this Middle School play would
help highlight and address some of
those issues. I auditioned as soon as I
arrived and had an overwhelming
number of students audition. I
therefore decided to double cast the
show and also avoid stereotyping by
doing so. For example, the bully was
tall and blonde in one show and very
small and dark in the other; the object
of bullying (the character of Finn, an
older sibling with speech and
communication problems) was a
stocky boy in the first show and a tall
girl in the second. The ‘popular’ girls
gang was also different each night,
with one group being predominantly
American and the other group being
more international. We worked on the
play for 8 weeks and simultaneously
the Middle School Stagecraft classes
(one of which I was teaching) designed
and built the set and designed the
lights. Students felt true ownership of
the production and the large student
involvement meant that audiences
were large, and hopefully our message
reached many.
Scene | 2006-7 March Issue 3 | 11
ALICE IN WONDERLAND: an
adaptation of the version in Plays
for Children by Blanche Mervin
AND
THE EIFFEL TOWE WEDDING
PARTY taken from The Infernal
Machine and other Plays by Jean
Cocteau
My High School Acting class wanted
to do plays that really enabled them to
develop character, voice and
movement. We therefore chose to do
2 plays that could really allow them to
work on contrast in rhythm, style,
staging etc, but also have an
overarching theme that they could
apply to both. We chose these two
plays and decided to do both of them
in a Surrealistic style. The set and
costumes were researched, designed
and made by the Middle School and
High School Stagecraft classes. These
classes worked in collaboration with
the director, who communicated the
ideas and needs of the cast to the
Stagecraft students. ALICE IN
WONDERLAND was the most fluid
script with students reading the A.A.
Milne novel and taking other
characters and scenes that they felt
HAD to be included. Other lines were
adapted and added to other scenes to
allow for more characters and action.
THE EIFFEL TOWER WEDDING PARTY
was taken as written, but for both plays
we had to add the Surrealist slant, so
we experimented with unusual staging,
use of trap doors for objects and
people to appear and disappear ‘as if
in a dream’ and we also worked with
music and movement to add variety,
juxtaposition and the elements of the
unexpected. Students in the class
worked on this play for 10 weeks. The
Stagecraft classes worked on the set,
lights and costumes for 5 weeks. In
total there were about 90 students
involved in the production process.
Susan King-Lachance – Jakarta
International School, Indonesia
THE CHALK CIRCLE by Bertolt
Brecht
Jakarta International School’s high
school theatre program recently staged
this play set in Indonesia during an
undetermined time period- yesterday?
today? tomorrow? There is a reason it
is called Epic Theatre! Although it was
a big show involving 45 cast members
from grades 9-12 and almost as many
crew members, it was great fun to
work with and fairly accessible for high
school actors. Since we set the
12 | Scene | 2006-7 March Issue 3
production in Indonesia, we used
kecak to stage the opening Parable of
the Chalk Circle, wayang golek
puppets for the lawyers, popular
dangdut music, and comic clowns
from wayang orang. It was a lovely
experience for our students to actively
study the performing arts of our host
country, and our production hopefully
opened the eyes of the audience to
the social problems in their world. It’s
amazing how contemporary Brecht still
is; this play could be staged anywhere
in the world and still be poignant. All
we did was change the names of the
characters to Indonesian names and
references to places in Indonesia. Our
prep time was seven weeks. Without
two directors (myself and Tom Schulz)
this would have been a bit too short of
a rehearsal period for a production of
this scale. Luckily at Jakarta
International School we have stipends
available for a set designer, tech
director, producer, costumer, and
director.
THE TAMING OF THE SHREW by
William Shakespeare
Last March students prepared a
Commedia dell’Arte version of this play
as a 45-minute festival piece that
traveled to Bangkok, Thailand.
Auditions and casting were done in
conjunction with a one-week CDA
workshop given by Marco Luly (whom
many ISTA members will know through
attending various Asian festivals and
TAPS). This piece was a double
challenge for the cast of sixteen 1012th grade actors since they were
dealing with two distinct styles.
Masked zanni sat on the stage the
entire show and stepped forward to
play various roles as well as
contributing sound effects to the very
physical comedy found in the play.
Masks were designed and constructed
by an IB theatre student who used the
work as her individual project. Over
the six week preparation period, actors
fully explored the traditional Commedia
style; masks made of plaster with foam
rubber features were less traditional,
but equally fun. Costumes were also
student designed. Since the show
traveled, the set consisted of long
lengths of fabric draped over battens
and hung rope ladders.
WHAT I DID LAST SUMMER by A.R
Gurney
In late April of 2006, three one-acts
were staged with the audience seated
on our main stage in modified arena
configuration. My favorite text was
WHAT I DID LAST SUMMER, cut to a
40 minute play. Rights can be
arranged through Dramatists Play
Service, Inc. We performed only the
first act since we had a short fourweek rehearsal period. The characters
are age-appropriate and the realistic
acting style required was a nice relief
from the more stylized and
exaggerated traditional styles we had
worked with last year. It has a small
cast (two men and four women) and is
an absolute jewel.
Sandy Landis – International
School of Stavanger, Norway
Musicals: PIPPIN, FAME AND
GREASE
Pippin and Fame are available in
Europe from Josef Weinberger Ltd,
http://www.josefweinberger.com/weinberger/index.html
Grease is available in Scandinavia from
Nordiska, www.nordiska.dk
High School
I put these three together because
they are quite well known texts. For
our featured production of the year, we
have, recently, tended to select crowdpleasing musicals such as these. Each
has its own style and places its own
unique demands on the actors. For our
presentations of PIPPIN, we rehearsed
for approximately six weeks three
times a week. We split the lead
player’s part among approximately
fifteen students and attempted to
provide each participant with a
featured moment. Students were
allowed to select the scenes in which
they participated and responsibilities
were shared. Much of the blocking and
choreography was student-initiated.
This is a very “sweet” text, with catchy
music and a nice message. For FAME,
we divided a cast of 35 into three
ensembles: a music ensemble, a
dance ensemble and an acting
ensemble. These groups were able to
have separate rehearsals and this
allowed us to use an abbreviated
rehearsal period (six weeks, three
meetings a week). Our music
ensemble made up the “music
students” in the FAME school but also
provided all the music for the show
itself. The dance ensemble worked
with our choreographer to develop
their own dances that provided
transitions between scenes and
‘scenery’ for songs and scenes. We
had minimal technical demands,
restricting our set to black boxes and
platforms. The stage was a fluid area
through which students moved freely,
as if in a school, including moving from
the performance space into the
instrumental area. This text was
extremely flexible and we felt that we
could adjust it to match our group’s
strengths effectively. GREASE, of
course, is an old stand-by. While there
aren’t many ‘moments’ in the text that
challenge actors emotionally, it is such
good fun that students challenge
themselves. We really focused on
character acting and comedic timing
for this one. We spent eight weeks in
rehearsals (three meetings a week),
splitting time among choreographic,
dramatic, and music rehearsals. We
had a stationary set consisting of a
scaffolding platform with a stage-right
staircase and backstage access, a set
of lockers and several benches that
served multiple purposes.
INTERVIEW: a one act play from
AMERICAN HURRAH published by
Dramatists Play Service, available
alone or with AMERICAN HURRAH,
www.dramatists.com
High School
This is a fantastic text to challenge
drama students. It is approximately 20
minutes long but those twenty minutes
are extremely intense and demanding.
The first half of the play consists of
four anonymous interviewers
bombarding four ‘average’ people with
questions regarding their lives and
work experiences. The audience
understands that this questioning
process in meant to approximate the
situation of a job interview. However, in
the absurd world of the play, the
questions drift away from reality,
becoming more and more absurd and
seemingly more and more probing,
even diabolical. The second half of the
play follows the same characters
through a series of monologues that
move the action from the impersonal,
surface realm of the first half to a more
internal realm. Overall, the play is a
fairly cynical statement on life,
suggesting that the world is a cold,
impersonal place where only the fittest,
or cleverest, survive. In terms of style,
the play verges on the absurd. It is
very fast-paced and requires a strong
sense of timing. While individual actors
will be challenged and showcased, the
play provides tremendous
opportunities for creative ensemble
work. It has a minimal set (eight chairs
or boxes) and technical demands and
is very flexible in terms of performance
space. We developed it over the
course of about five rehearsals for a
one-off performance, but I have also
used it as a contest piece and as part
of an evening of one-acts.
Keith LeFever – Schule Schloss
Salem, Germany
UBU REX by Alfred Jarry
We read this play in our middle school
theater workshop session looking at
possible sections for scene work. The
students were so fascinated by the
intensity of the play that we decided to
produce it for Parents Day, which was
five months away. At first we would
read a scene, then use the basic
structure to improvise. In this way we
could experiment with the play and
find our own levels of expression. We
also cast the play using the
improvisations as the basis for
character selection. We ended up
having most of the main roles played
by girls; only Tatzensaum and Bubelas
were played by boys. Then we brought
in a professional acting coach from the
National Theater in Mannheim, to do
an intensive two-day workshop on
body language and extreme forms of
expression, using masks and group
exercises. We developed ideas such
as slow-motion racing, the ‘great
escape’ of the Queen and Bubelas
over 12 meters long being supported
only by bodies and not touching the
floor, finger puppets to represent
thousands of angry citizens, and using
shadows as a method of execution.
Our four musicians used tools that
they found in the janitor’s room as their
instruments. We used the floor of our
Gym as the stage and it was 6 meters
wide and 16 meters long. We had the
audience raised on two sides with the
stage being in the middle. At each end
we had a two level scaffold and two
wooden slides which lead down to the
main stage. This provided plenty of
space for the 28 actors and gave us
endless possibilities for movement and
the ‘crowd’ scenes. The entire tech
was done by the middle school
students. The lighting was particularly
complicated and detailed and
demanded long hours to hang and
focus. The make up crew had a blast
as we let them free to come up with
outlandish designs, which produced a
green Ubu with bones, bugs, and body
parts in his hair. We had a wave of
illness that reached the cast; therefore
our rehearsal time was cut short. We
asked the school if we couldn’t use
some class time to finish the play, our
request was rejected. Therefore we
showed the rise of Ubu, but not the fall.
THE LEARNED LADIES by Moliére
This play we performed with the high
school group as a main stage
production. As usual we were
searching for a play with strong female
roles as the balance of power in our
theater group hardly ever swings the
other way. Most of the group had
exceptional speech skills and had been
with me for almost four years. The play
has wonderful themes such as family
dynamic, intellectual snobbery and, of
course, the role of women in society.
We used a great German translation
that was modern and phonetically
ingenious. Because of the language
we decided to set the play in the fifties
which had some of the same attitudes
toward women, daughters, and
intellectuals as in Moliére’s time... more
or less. The choice helped our prop
and costume department and cut
down on our overall production costs.
We had the stage set up in a sort of
thrust mode, which was shaped more
like a “T”, with the living room jutting
out with the bar and entrances at the
back. Having the audience on three
sides increased the intimacy of the
Beijing MS
Scene | 2006-7 March Issue 3 | 13
a house. I resolved the problem of the
‘basement’ by creating an attic
instead, this meant that actors were on
stage and visible while they were
making their inventions but it worked
nicely. Character work fantastic and
includes accents and physical stage
combat /age work for students to
explore. It’s a great ensemble piece for
12-15 actors (I added in a few
characters). Light comedy/love story...
Students loved working on this.
Beijing MS
space and when watching, one felt like
almost part of the family. The
production was a huge success in the
community, which always pleases the
PR department.
AFTER JULIET by Sharman
Macdonald, published by Samuel
French
A play written by the mother of Keira
Knightley, about what happens to the
teenage Capulets and Montagues after
the death of Romeo and Juliet. We
chose this play again out of the need
to find a play with plenty of female
roles. In order to increase the number
of the performers we coupled the play
with scenes from Shakespeare’s
ROMEO AND JULIET also to refresh
the audience about who is/was who.
Again, in order to cut production costs,
we kept the stage almost completely
bare using only platforms, scaffolding,
a bed and a couch for both plays. The
main production elements we used
were lighting, fog, and music. We were
fortunate to have two excellent student
musicians, one on the grand piano
with the other playing cello, they
played original music combining it with
fantastic improvisations. We also made
“R+J” timeless using modern
costumes and props and a rather
modern translation (German).
One more play that I’m doing with the
8th and 9th graders is THE POET AND
THE RENT by David Mamet (Samuel
French)... a fun play with a very flexible
cast and simple production elements.
Gillian Lynch – American School of
Paris, France
High School Productions
YOU CAN’T TAKE IT WITH YOU by
Kaufmann and Hart
Social /Political Context: America
1930’s - great for getting students to
do research. A very simple set inside of
14 | Scene | 2006-7 March Issue 3
BLOOD WEDDING by Lorca
Small cast, simple stage set.
Melodrama. In this production I had
the MS design a forest. We had a live
cello player and baroque lyric singer
and Bunraku type puppets woven
throughout the production. Actors also
had the chance to work with a tango
dancer in workshop sessions for the
wedding scene.
CHANGES OF HEART by Marivaux
Small cast. Simple set. Parallel work
on Commedia dell’arte as Marivaux
wrote for the Italian players. Great for
IB dramaturgy. Heightened language
but accessible to young acting
students. Working on rhythm and
timing important.
THE GOVERNMENT INSPECTOR
by Gogol
I am working with a cast of 30.
Grotesque and physical comedy as
well as having a very dark underlining.
Very simple to stage, we are working
on a 3m x 3m. Minimal set and
lighting requirements.
ANTIGONE by Anouilh
An IB class project . Performed outside
in “found” space for younger audience
(MS).
STEEL MAGNOLIAS by
IB Class Project. Performed beginning
scenes as worked on stage, reading
for the rest. Excellent for set design,
accents and older character work.
Middle School Productions
THE TREE THAT HOLDS UP THE
SKY, part of the Cambridge play
series
Great ensemble piece (25students).
Also looking into other theatre/
performance traditions. Story takes
place in the Amazon jungle. A road is
being build through the forest causing
devastation until it comes to a halt as a
result of a tree needing to be knocked
down. A meeting of two cultures and
two belief systems. Environmental play
with a strong message. Also chorus
work. Some of the script needed to be
touched up but also has some
moments of humour. Students loved
working on it and great for all
audiences (Lower School included).
Adaptation of ALICE IN
WONDERLAND and a few scenes
from THROUGH THE LOOKING
GLASS
Mixed and massed a few scripts and
adapted some scenes. Great improv
work possible around the story in order
to build script. Strong ensemble piece.
Had the IB students design a modular
set. (40 students)
A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM
A massive undertaking with 6th-8th
graders. They came out loving the Bard.
A THOUSAND CRANES, OUR DAY
OUT and I NEVER SAW ANOTHER
BUTTERFLY have all been in class
8th grade projects.
Chuck and Becci McDaniel – John
F Kennedy School, Berlin, Germany
DIE DREIGROSCHENOPER by
Bertolt Brecht: The Threepenny
Opera, English version from TamsWimark, Blitzstein translation
We produced Brecht’s Three Penny
Opera in the original German. The
music is sometimes lush, sometimes
stark, and the small orchestra is ideal
for schools with small music programs.
The cast is flexible. (We used 27, but
could have made do with19.) There are
4 good roles for women (if you include
the Street Singer). The piece also
allows you to experiment with Brecht’s
concept of Verfremdung (making
things strange). We stripped away all
the masking curtains, revealing the
bare walls. The stage itself was, for the
most part, bare. Individual scenes were
introduced by Titeln (signs, in our case,
projected PowerPoint slides). Each
scene itself was represented by a
single, free standing, painted flat that
represented the location of the scene
(bales of hay for the stable, lush velvet
drapes for the whorehouse). The jail
cell we created with a single gobo. In
all, the spare setting allowed us both
to cut costs and let the students
experience a special kind of
theatricality and intimacy with the
audience. The play itself, with its cast
of devious characters and its focus on
social issues (greed, injustice,
corruption, and more), was great fun
for our students as well.
“It was wonderful to see young people from all over the globe coming together to further their
learning about theatre in a mutually supportive and excitingly enriching environment.”
Paula Mor, Island School, Hong Kong
THE LADY IS NOT FOR BURNING
by Christopher Fry, published by
Dramatists Play Service
Fry’s play is a beautiful lyrical
exploration of life, love, and morality.
This piece can be done in very
Shakespearean style, with a simple set
consisting of only a couple of raised
platforms and a few benches and
chairs. The small cast has several
women’s roles with some meat to
them, and the roles of the chaplain and
town drunk can be converted, giving a
balance of 6 M to 5 F. The play itself
(written in blank verse) is both a verbal
delight and an effective challenge to
students. Our students revelled in the
unusual word formations and, through
working with the play’s intricate
language, gained greater control of
their own vocal mechanisms. Definitely
a worthwhile challenge.
ORIGINAL VIDEOS
Our Advanced Drama class created
original videos for public presentation.
During class, we concentrated on
three basic elements of filmmaking:
directing, writing, and acting. We
looked at both classic films, such as
Citizen Kane and Casablanca, and
more recent gems, such as American
Beauty. The students, in groups of
about five, pitched a script idea, wrote
a draft screenplay that was critiqued
by the teacher, then revised the
screenplay into a shooting script.
Students then created a locations
chart, shot individual scenes, then
edited them together using iMovie.
Students were both their own actors
and directors, and all students
participated in the editing process. We
had a gala presentation evening. All the
students’ videos were shown, and the
audience voted on Best Supporting
Player, Best Actor, Best Actress, Best
Screenplay, and Best Picture. Winners
received little Smurf statuettes. It was
a great way to cap the project, which
we would recommend as a means to
helping drama students connect the
dots between the two media of theatre
and film.
Annie Mcmanners – Frankfurt
International School, Germany
HOMER’S ODYSSEY by David
Calcutt published by Nelson as a
Dramascript
We worked for 2 months on this with
9-12 grade students. 15 girls and 15
boys. The first scene in the play is
slightly dodgy and could take a few
cuts, but it soon perks up. The girls
played the suitors of Penelope in the
first and last scene wearing masks and
robes and then the boys burst in with
a sort of Haka that was virile and
visceral to lead into the rest of the play.
Masses of music and movement
opportunities, dance, mime and choral
speaking. We performed on the floor of
the room with audience on 3 sides and
a series of platforms and steps leading
up to the stage at one end. The
Cyclops was rear projection with a
voice over, but there are other great
production challenges for IB students
to work on.
GRIMM TALES AND MORE GRIMM
TALES by Carol Ann Duffy and Tim
Supple, published by Faber and
Faber
Each of these contains 7 or 8 different
stories with dramatizations. We
selected 8 scenes from the two plays
and put them together as one
performance. We performed on the
floor with audience on three sides with
large painted screens on either side to
provide exits etc. There was a cast of
50, divided into two groups, but it
could be done with 10 actors. In Act 1,
one group performed as the sound
factory for the stories, sitting apart
from the actors, making sound/music
using a variety of traditional and
improvised instruments as well as their
voices. For Act 2 they swapped with
the other group. Each story has a
different set of challenges and we used
Folkmanis puppets in many instances
as well as creating all of the settings
and props using students. The screens
were painted with a scary forest taken
from a book of Walt Disney stills from
Snow White and the 7 Dwarfs. We
worked for 2 months with students from
grades 9-12.
ARABIAN NIGHTS by Dominic
Cooke, published by Nick Hearn
Books
Rich colour, fabric, carpets, gold and
silver, food platters with real food, belly
dancing, incense burners. This is all
you need to do this show. We had a
large cast of 55 and there are about 40
roles but you could do it with 10, with
doubling. There is a lot of room to
make each story individual and I asked
pairs of IB students to take charge of a
scene, encouraging them to negotiate
with each other to produce an
umbrella design, as well as individual
ideas. The Music department
purchased a number of authentic
Beijing MS
Scene | 2006-7 March Issue 3 | 15
instruments including a Duduk on eBay
and learned how to play them for the
show. Other music was provided by
CD’s (there is a lot of Music of the
Middle East available on World Music
CD’s.) Plenty of opportunities for group
dances at weddings and celebrations
and at the end.
then throws their arms up in confusion.
Then fingers are pointed at someone,
usually early in the line, for losing the
story. They want to turn the
destruction of the story into a story,
too, the plot of which is the loss of the
plot. Even in the little games we play,
we need to make up stories.
Mark Mouck – American School of
Warsaw, Poland
When devising longer stories with my
students, I emphasize making the story
meaningful to their audience. To explore
the creation of meaning, we explore
dramatic structure. In their sophomore
year, we spend a day looking at the
various incarnations of the hero myth.
The discussion springs from Joseph
Campbell’s The Power of Myth and The
Hero with a Thousand Faces. I warn
them that this discussion may ruin their
movie-going experience as we apply the
structure presented in these books to
Hollywood films. The analysis of
structure generally helps their stories,
but I wanted to go deeper into dramatic
structure with my IB students. After
reading that IB wants students to
engage directly with the writings of
theater practitioners, I bought a number
of ‘primary texts’. David Mamet’s
collection of essays, Three Uses of the
Knife, was among them.
Using David Mamet’s THREE USES
OF THE KNIFE to explore dramatic
structure
After playing theater games for the first
few days of a school year, I have each
of my IB I students lead the ensemble
through a game. Afterwards, they
write about it in their journals in terms
of taking leadership versus playing a
supporting role in the ensemble. This
year one of my students introduced
me to a physical variation of the
telephone game, which I have since
used as a warm up. The idea is that
one student performs an action for the
next student in line, who then repeats
it on down the line with oftenhumorous results at the end. I have
found that the initiator of the
movement generally wants to tell a
story in mime: a freshmen being
stuffed into a locker; burying a
treasure-box; a frog trying to jump over
a log. By the time the movement gets
to the last person, the story has been
lost. The last person usually flails
about for five seconds and
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The first line of the first essay is, “It’s in
our nature to dramatize.” That is, we
want to find meaning in everything that
happens to us (and it happens to us.)
Mamet provides a couple of examples
of finding meaning in everyday
experiences. “Great. It’s raining. Just
when I’m blue. Isn’t that just like
life?” In another example Mamet goes
on for two pages describing the
perfect ball game. “Do we wish for
our team to take the field and thrash
the opposition from the First
Moment?... No. We wish for a closely
fought match that contains many
satisfying reversals.” Ultimately it is just
a sphere (of sorts) moving back and
forth across a field. Ultimately it is just
water condensing in the atmosphere
above us. Ultimately it is just a
movement we are asked to pass down
the line. Just as we find meaning in
phenomena, we find satisfaction in
creating highs and lows in life, what
Mamet summarizes as the “Yes! No!
but Wait!” structure of drama. He
explains, “It is difficult, finally, not to
see our lives as a play with ourselves
the hero.”
When I first gave the third essay in
Mamet’s book to my IB 1 students last
16 | Scene | 2006-7 March Issue 3
year in preparation for a Shakespeareinspired devised theater competition, I
thought I was asking them to explore
tragedy. A naturally comedic group, I
wanted to challenge them to
understand the nature and purpose (to
steal Mamet’s phrase) of tragedy. But
as they worked the piece over three
weeks, they realized that comic relief
was necessary for the rhythm and
tempo of the play. As they fitted the
play with the ups and downs they
thought necessary, they realized, and I,
that they weren’t studying just tragedy,
only one of the masks, they were
studying the nature of drama.
The story they created was fun... for a
tragedy. In the end, they decided it
was about what would happen
if Hamlet and Lady Macbeth, unmarried
in their story, were to meet and fall in
love. Somebody is going to cry “Out,
damned spot!” (Hamlet) and somebody
is going to get murdered (Lady
Macbeth.) Story spoiler: Hamlet kills
himself, too. But the beginning of the
process to create the story came from
the title of Mamet’s collection of essays.
In the final essay he quotes the blues
singer Leadbelly, “You take a knife, you
use it to cut the bread, so you’ll have
strength to work; you use it to shave,
so you’ll look nice for you lover; on
discovering her with another, you use it
to cut out her lying heart.” At the
beginning of the process, before they
looked to Shakespeare for inspiration,
before they considered the rhythm of
highs and lows in the play, I asked
them to use an object as a symbol or
image that would, as Mamet suggests,
“subtly change its purpose through the
course of the play.” Like the knife, the
symbol or image should not physically
change, but our perception of it should.
Mamet says, “The tragedy of murder is
affecting as the irony of the recurrent
knife is affecting. The appearance of
the knife is the attempt of the orderly
affronted mind to confront the
awesome.” Like the rain or ball
described above, the knife is neither
good nor evil. Thinking has made it
both. He summarizes the effect of
purposeful dramatic structure here:
In great drama we see this
lesson [the worthlessness of
reason] learned by the hero.
More important, we undergo the
lesson ourselves, as we have
our expectations raised only to
be dashed, as we find that we
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have suggested to ourselves the
wrong conclusion and that,
stripped of our intellectual
arrogance, we must
acknowledge our sinful, weak,
impotent state -and that, having
acknowledged it, we may find
peace.
The object my students used and its
symbolic nature got them third place at
the competition. The first two places
went to comedies. Their “knife” was a
pen used to write a book on the
virtues of the solitary life. After the
book propels the author to fame, we
encounter the first act problem: he falls
in love. The audience is rooting for
their hero though. Then the second act
problem: the new couple has an
argument over the virtues of solitude.
Here I interrupted the student’s
process for a discussion about
character/relationship foils. They
decided to insert a few scenes about
“the ideal couple”, who in one scene
have an argument, but who come to
terms with their disagreement in
another scene of emasculating comic
relief. If only our hero could learn this
lesson. After a few more plot twists
where the author picks himself back
up only to fall down again, our hero,
tragically proud and unable to heed the
rules of relationships, kills the woman
with the pen for making him contradict
everything he wrote. The murder
sequesters him to a loneliness he can’t
handle, and he writes a suicide note
with the still bloody pen.
The knife remains the same, but the
play allows the audience to give it
significance. The various incarnations
of the knife, as it changes in the minds
of the audience, charts the highs and
lows of the story. The three uses of the
knife are the three parts of dramatic
structure.
In the telephone game, while my
students are passing the movement
down the line, I have had some fun with
keeping the rest of them entertained.
Most recently, I asked the rest of the
line to name an animal for me to mimic.
One called out a monkey. I lowered
myself like an American football player
at the line of scrimmage, stuck my
fingers on my head like a pair of horns
and jumped around. “That’s not a
monkey!” “Try a giraffe.” Again, I
squatted down, put my fingers on my
head and jumped about. “That’s not a
giraffe!” After repeating a few more
times, I squatted down with my
fingers on my head and, while
jumping around, asked them what I
am now. They got the joke and
started calling out all sorts of things.
The action was the same every time;
the joke was in their perception of the
action.
Mark Palfrey – Munich
International School, Germany
THE VENETIAN TWINS by Nick
Enright
A musical. The play text was written by
Nick Enright and the music by
Terence Clarke. The piece is a
pastiche of styles and genres loosely
based on Goldoni‘s A SERVANT OF
TWO MASTERS. The MIS
production was rehearsed as an
after school activity. The cast
worked 6 hours per week for about
12 weeks to learn the dialogue,
song and movement required. We
had a live band and the
actors/singers were mic’d. I
employed two vocal coaches,
musical director, set designer,
choreographer and make up
artists to assist. This show is a lot
of work but is highly entertaining.
CHRONICLE OF DEATH foretold by
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
I adapted the novel into a play script. A
long task. The novel takes the
structure of a Greek Tragedy so that
was the starting point. The community,
who do not stop the murder were the
chorus, who never left the stage. They
were set up as a jury watching and
commenting on the action; they also
delivered a lot of the text taking the
role of the narrator. Most actors played
multiple roles. We used live music
(Indian) as we transported the story to
Goa. We used rear screen projections,
40 still images, as the backdrops for
each scene. Chapters were introduced
with Brechtian style titles, also
projected. The death scene was done
behind the screen with coloured
images. The piece was rehearsed, as
an after school activity, for about 12
weeks. I worked closely with a musical
director/musician, set designer and
later a lighting designer.
RANDOM
This year I am working on Random. As
the name suggests, it is a pot pourri of
pieces. The aim is to contrast and
juxtapose. Taking the audience from
comfort to discomfort, humour to
horror. The extracts will not be
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delivered in one piece but cut up.
The set is minimalist, lighting and
sound will be very important. I am
working closely with the same team as
last year. The genesis of this ides came
from the demands of the previous year.
It was physically and emotionally
draining to undertake such a large
project as CHRONICLE given the
demands that IB and Grade 10
students have on their time. Trying to
get twenty cast members together for
two hours was impossible. RANDOM
allows groups to meet when they can
and work on their own pieces.
Elcin Peker – Eyuboglu High
School, Turkey
BLOOD BROTHERS by William
Russell
This ninety-minute play was performed
by our Middle School students. We
spent 2 hours per week- in a sevenmonth period, and we worked with
two separate groups. Since the play
requires two different casts to perform
childhood and adolescent periods, we
had the opportunity to work with 30
students. We performed the original
play. Although it is a musical, we only
focused on 3 significant pieces of
music and designed dance
Scene | 2006-7 March Issue 3 | 17
“What other event makes professional development feel like such a vacation for the mind and soul?”
Doug Bishop, Taipei American School, Taiwan
choreography for them. After practising
some basic drama skills and going
over the importance of body language,
gestures/mimics and posture we were
ready to start. Before the audition part
students did research on the play and
read the critics. After reading the
scripts, they started practising for
audition. The play was performed at
our school’s OPEN HOUSE DAY.
John Pitonzo – International
School of Florence, Italy
PIRATES OF THE
MEDITERRANEAN: Middle School
Middle School students ideated and
participated in the creation of the
script. They spent 3 months putting
the play together, creating their own
costumes, writing the dialogue, and
designing the set. The play involved a
ghost pirate recruiting a group of
neighborhood kids to locate a long lost
treasure in order to end the curse
placed on him by a lady Bucaneer for
the “haircut” he had given her. They
performed the play in front of the
elementary school and at Teatro Le
Laudi in Florence as part of a doubleheader with Romeo and Juliet.
THE TERRIBLE TRAGEDY OF
FAUSTINA FAUX: High School
This was a take-off on Marlowe’s Dr.
Faustus. Faustina, an average student
with self-perceived average looks, one
true friend and an acceptance into a
non-competitive university, makes a
deal with the devil for the highest
grades, beauty and popularity.
Twenty-four years later, highly
successful, men at her feet, the devil
comes collecting and she has a
change of heart. In this version things
turn out in her favor as The All.
Powerful shows up and plays a dirty
trick on the devil. The play had a cast
of 8 consisting of Faustina, her friend,
Mephistofeles, a good angel, bad angel,
a shady teen selling drugs, watches and
black magic, God, the Devil, and the
most popular boy in the school. This
play was 50 minutes long and
performed for grades 7 through 11.
ROMEO AND JULIET: High School
The Upper School Drama class,
combined of 21 grade 9 and 10
students, performed a contemporary,
slightly edited version of Shakespeare’s
18 | Scene | 2006-7 March Issue 3
love play. They performed this play at
Teatro Le Laudi in Florence. The play
included contemporary music selected
by the students.
Catherine Rankin - BISS Beijing
International School, China
RITES OF PASSAGE: student
devised
A group of 7 students aging from 11 to
16 worked with me on a student
devised piece call “Rites of Passage”
for our One Act Play Festival. The
main theme was based on what
adolescents do to be accepted by
their peers. Some of the ideas I had
came from other small group
workshops but the overall performance
was a truly collaborative effort. The
focus of the performance was
ensemble work so there was no lead
character. It started with the idea of a
new person arriving into a tribe – “
Deep in the Jungle there is a tribe. The
tribe is adolescence and the jungle is
here!” The play then progressed
through a variety of events such as –
smoking (using Madonna’s vogue as a
base) drugs; alcohol (poem about the
hangover fairy); fashion sense (wigs)
and sex. Through out sections the
students performed monologues
lasting one minute, that focused on an
individual’s reaction to the “tests”. The
play concluded with an initiation
sequence. We performed the piece for
the school and audiences at the
Festival. The audiences found it to be a
powerful performance.
AIDS – Student devised
The AIDS presentation was for World
Aids Day. The performance started
with a PowerPoint display with Avril
Lavigne’s version of “Knocking on
Heaven’s Door”. A group of five
students were frozen in still images.
After the PowerPoint, the lights came
up and each person said a series of
statistics. On the second series of
statistics, the students moved into a
circle. A chant of “Ring a Ring a Rosy”
was used as the students moved
around in a circle. At the end of each
line, students would freeze and one of
the students would come to the front,
in role to present a monologue. The
monologues included: a doctor; a
friend of someone in hospital; a drug
addict; and two monologues about
getting AIDS through unprotected sex.
The final sequence had the group
saying the whole poem again ending
with “All fall down” and the lights went
out. It was a powerful piece and gave
teachers an opportunity to discuss the
issues of AIDS within pastoral care and
the sciences.
Stan Ratoff – American School in
London, UK
ANNIE JR from the Broadway Jr
series
Choosing a musical for MS students –
in which the range of the songs are
appropriate – can be difficult – at least
it was for me. In the end, on the
recommendation from my musical
director, I looked at the Broadway Jr.
series and found Annie Jr. It was
perfect for 7th and 8th graders - even
though it was originally geared for
younger singers. The length of the
musical was very manageable (onehour long) and it provided the students
with a very positive musical theatre
experience.
We had a 10-week rehearsal schedule,
meeting 2-4 times a week after school
for the first two months and everyday
for the final two weeks. We had a cast
of over 30 students. The first two
weeks focused on ensemble building
and reviewing the themes of the
musical. We read the original Little
Orphan Annie comic strips to get a
sense of the character and time it was
published. The set was created to look
like the original newspaper comic strip.
Only after the second week did we
begin to read the script and begin
rehearsing the musical. Everyone in
the cast felt that there should be a real
Sandy (the dog), so we held dog
auditions, with the cast members
making the final decision. It was quite
an experience working with a live
animal – it reminds me of W.C.Fields’s
comment that one should never work
with animals and children – and here I
was working with both! In the end,
both children and dog were hits and
everyone enjoyed the musical. As for
Tech, we hired a lighting designer who
worked with me on designing the
lighting. He then trained a couple of
8th grade students who ran the lights
and sound for the performances.
Musicals are big hits within a school
community – sometimes they
overshadow a dramatic performance
but within an international community,
it will be a musical that will bring the
community together.
THE COMEDY OF ERRORS by
William Shakespeare
Shakespeare can be difficult for MS
students, and sometimes for teachers,
but I decided to try my first
Shakespeare play. Which one to
choose? It just so happened that I
had tickets to see THE COMEDY OF
ERRORS in the West End, London –
and I was struck by both the simplistic
and humorous way it was produced. I
had found my Shakespeare play. Two
week before auditions, students were
able to drop by my room to read
through the script and become familiar
with the play. I spent many lunch
periods and recess time talking with
students about Shakespeare and THE
COMEDY OF ERRORS. When I
choose a play for MS students, I
always try and find a theme that would
be relevant to their life experiences.
This Shakespeare play was a perfect
choice to explore identity – which is a
major issue for adolescent-aged
students.
With a 10-week rehearsal schedule,
we spent the beginning weeks
exploring the language and how to
create ‘normal’ dialogue with the
verse. During this time, we had the
good fortune to participate in a
Shakespeare workshop at the Globe
Theatre, exploring themes of the play.
We even had a chance to act out
some scenes on the stage. This was
an invaluable experience for the cast.
Our set was all white with revolving
doors, which were metaphors for the
changing identities. Both set of twins
were dressed the same and the action
was more Commedia dell’ Arte than
Shakespeare. The cast had a ball
doing this play and their interest in
Shakespeare grew. For me THE
COMEDY OF ERRORS was an easy
and funny play to do with MS
students. It was very accessible as an
introduction to Shakespeare. Again, I
used MS students as crew, lighting
and sound people for the production.
THE ODYSSEY adapted by David
Calcutt
The ODYSSEY is a wonderful play to
do because it touches on many
adolescent issues such as identity,
transition, friendship, risk-taking, love,
etc. Another reason for choosing THE
ODYSSEY was my policy of allowing
anyone who auditions to be involved in
the play as either cast or crew. Usually
I get around 30-40 students
auditioning for the MS play so I always
try to choose a play with a large and
flexible cast.
THE ODYSSEY proved to be an
amazing experience for both cast and
myself. During the early stages of the
rehearsal process, we explored the
story and improvised each adventure
Odysseus experienced. I also began
to explore with the cast the concepts
of ritual and storytelling. The
adaptation focused on the concept of
a story within a story – which made it
easier for both the cast and audience
to understand the story and to allow
monsters and Cyclops to appear on
stage by using effigies for these
creatures. The staging was simple –
chairs for listeners of the story in the
play and the floor for the actors telling
the story. 9th grade students who
were studying THE ODYSSEY in class
talked to the cast about the story. The
characters created their own dance
and rituals needed in the play.
Through the exploration and
development of rituals, the cast
became closer to each other and a
real ensemble experience was created
for all involved. I also had a high
school assistant director who worked
with the students. My designer
designed every costume and we had
parents make them. It was quite an
adventure – just like the journey in the
story. It was a fascinating experience
bringing together parents, cast and
crew to work on one adventure –
which was an odyssey in itself.
Steve Reynolds – United World
College of Li Po Chun, Hong Kong
WOZA ALBERT by Percy Mtwa,
Mbongeni Ngema and Barney
Simon
The play was presented by IB Theatre
Arts students as their year two/end of
course production. It was the
culmination of their African theatre unit
as well as a celebration (and closure)
of the course as a whole. The play
features two actors playing a variety of
characters with a basic (easy to
prepare) staging. It is fast moving,
funny and very physical, but also
focuses on the serious issue of racism
through its Apartheid South African
setting. We split the play into four
sections and two different students
played the characters in each section
(because there are so many characters
there is little need for character
development). A student director was
then appointed for each unit. So, the
students owned the material and I as
teacher just oversaw the production
values and transitions between each
unit. We rehearsed over an 8-week
period (the separately run units made
simultaneous rehearsals easy), in
lessons and after school. We explored
the history of South Africa and physical
theatre skills before focusing on the
text and delivered a studio
performance over three nights to the Li
Po Chun college community.
THE LIST by Steve Reynolds
This play was presented by the Dar es
Salaam Young Peoples Theatre, a
youth group that was based in the
International School of Tanganyika and
open to all local young people (no
auditions – inclusive entry). The group
was dedicated to producing plays
Calderdale HS
Scene | 2006-7 March Issue 3 | 19
about African issues affecting African
people in African places. The group
decided to produce a play focusing on
HIV Aids and I came up with an idea
that (rather than the deluge of heavy
moralizing material around) we should
try to devise a comedy! I had an initial
idea of a naive village girl who dies of
Aids. She has been taken advantage
of by a number of male characters.
Just before her funeral, the village
discovers that she wrote a letter to be
read at her funeral and rumour quickly
spreads that it is a list of the men that
may have infected her. The comic
element arises in the farcical attempts
of the men to find and destroy the
‘list’! Characters are lightly drawn as
the message focuses on educating the
audience about HIV Aids. The group
devised scenarios in a number of
workshops and I would note any
characters, lines or actions that held
potential for a script. I would then draft
a scene, return to the group and
rehearse it, making changes as we
went along. We also invited medical
and government experts to talk to the
group and inform our work. The play
was rehearsed over a 12-week period
and features 19 characters (the
protagonists are women) in a 2 hour
show. The play was presented ‘in the
round’ to the wider Dar es Salaam
community including honorary
government guests at the international
school. The play is due for publication
by Macmillan Aiden in November 2006
in Swahili translation.
THE COMEDY OF ERRORS by
William Shakespeare
This is a good choice for a
Shakespeare production because it is
funny... and one of Shakespeare’s
shortest plays! The play was produced
at Li Po Chun United World College as
part of the IB CAS (after school
activities) programme. Students
auditioned for a role. The play focuses
on a series of mistaken identities and is
a good choice for ‘mirror’ work or an
exploration of identity itself. A big
emphasis was made on demystifying
the language and focusing on
meaning. In rehearsal, modern English
translations were made by the cast of
every scene. Then the scene would be
improvised in modern English, before
returning to the original text to be sure
that the students understood the
material/language (and owned it rather
than it owning them). Of the 15 or so
characters, some gender switching
20 | Scene | 2006-7 March Issue 3
was done to reflect the high proportion
of talented females that auditioned (so
some girls played men or male
characters were changed to female). I
was also lucky enough to have
identical twins in the cast! The
performance was staged in the open
air with a bare brilliant white set
comprising of a row of doors on an
upstage wall. In contrast, the actors
wore vivid and exaggerated costumes.
The doors encouraged the fast paced
on – off stage action of the play. Other
activity groups were encouraged to join
the production with the college circus
group providing jugglers and acrobats
for the setting of Ephesus and the
college orchestral group providing
music. The play runs for around two
hours and was presented to the
college community with a night (free of
charge) devoted to the surrounding
local community.
Daniel Sartdet and Elaine Neilsen –
Copenhagen International School,
Denmark
HANS ON!
In connection with Hans Christian
Andersen’s 200th birthday, we worked
on a production involving all our 2nd,
3rd and 4th Grade students. There
were approximately 100 students
altogether. Each grade level chose one
of the stories and worked on a way to
present it. The second grade chose
“The Ugly Duckling” and sang the wellknown song with the same title. They
created a movement piece using a
narrator. The third grade worked on
“The Emperor’s New Clothes” and
every child was asked to memorize a
very short line to contribute to the
story. The fourth grade contributed a
reader’s theatre presentation of “The
Little Mermaid.” which involved
everyone with reading, chorus work
and sound effects. In addition, one of
our language teachers devised a
movement piece with her students, to
tell the story of “The Nightingale” and
our 2nd and 3rd grade Drama Club
group presented a stylized version of
“The Snow Queen.” The performance
was held together by members of the
4th and 5th grade Drama Club who
shared poems written by HC Andersen
and first person accounts of parts of
his life. The Primary School Choir
opened and closed the presentation
with music and songs about Hans
Andersen and his famous stories. The
preparation and rehearsal period took
six weeks that was found to be just the
right length of time in order to keep
and hold a meaningful impetus for
children of this age. The Primary
Drama and Music teachers
coordinated the performance but all
the teachers were involved in putting
the production together.
THREE MORE SLEEPLESS NIGHTS
by Caryl Churchill, found in
Churchill, Shorts, NHB, 1990,
ISBN: 1854590855
This was done by a small group of last
year students. It is a wonderfully dark
short piece that deals with
disintegrating relationships. The play
consists of three scenes that take
place in three different bedrooms. The
first couple has an argument about the
husband’s adultery, in the second
bedroom we see another couple where
the husband keeps talking about cult
movies while the wife slips further and
further into depression, and in the final
scene we see the wife from the first
scene with the husband from the
second scene discussing their
relationship while repeating all the
mistakes from their previous ones. This
play is really good to do with the older
students as they can take on
responsibility for creating the
characters, and the play employs
Churchill’s device of overlapping
dialogue, which is a great challenge for
the students.
SUMMER – A RED TENNIS BALL
ON A COUCH IN A GARDEN OF
LOVE: an adaptation of
Shakespeare’s MUCH ADO ABOUT
NOTHING
This was a Senior School Production
(14-18 year olds). We decided to have
a stab at reshaping a classic. We
looked at the text, but basically built
each scene from scratch through
improvisation using a synopsis and
scene description from York Notes (!).
The students felt a great sense of
ownership of the play, and it renewed
their enthusiasm for Shakespeare.
Darren Scully – St Julian’s School,
Portugal
Three challenging plays: Bryony
Lavery’s ILLYRIA, Fousto
Paravidino’s NUTS, and Nick Dear’s
LUNCH IN VENICE
ILLYRIA is a country ripped apart by
civil war where even the children, have
known little else but fear. Title-tattle
and gossip mean that truth is another
casualty of war. Make shift military
switch sides according to the way the
Tom Schulz – Jakarta International
School, Indonesia
Beijing MS
war is going and terrorize the
community as they shake in their skins.
Leaders come and go and envious
bureaucrats jostle for positions. And
foreign journalists report watered down
versions for our consumption. Illyria
could be anywhere. As an ensemble
piece Illyria takes risks. It does not hold
back from graphic tales of torture,
rape, the abuse of power and the evil
depths of war. At the same time it
presents a positive vision of the healing
power of storytelling. The language
Bryony Lavery uses might shock some
parents. We think the supportive
structures of the ensemble mean that
our actors are comfortable and safe in
exploring such themes. We wrote an
explanatory letter to parents pointing
out Lavery’s ‘message’ and inviting
them to a symposium on the role and
purpose of theatre in schools:
Theatre is a dangerous thing... But
remember it is fiction. The place for
brutality and horror is on the stage not in
life and I believe human beings can
rehearse for reality through drama. It is
the nature of theatre to experience the
inconceivable. Illyria has a strong moral
standpoint and it doesn’t leave people in
the horror. The journey is through horror
to hope and resolution and to peace
which are huge and mighty things.
From the same collection, NUTS by
Fausto Paravidino is a very impressive
ensemble piece. The first half is
intensely funny as Buddy is left to take
charge of a beautiful house with an
impressive sofa and an even more
impressive TV. His failure to tell the girl
of his love for her lead to a series of
calamities as his friends turn up and
the place is trashed. By the time the
son of the owners has turned up
Buddy has been thoroughly
demoralized and walked over. The
second half is very different. All the
characters from the fit half reappear
some ten years later but all
relationships have been zeroed out
and they do not know each other.
Torture and humiliation alternate and
the humour is dark. Paravidino
explores the kind of mindset that
allows for police states to emerge and
maintain themselves. A final scene
offers an alternate reality as we are
taken back to the final scene of the
first half but with a twist and Buddy is
given another chance to assert himself.
This is great theatre.
LUNCH IN VENICE by Nick Dear is a
short piece, around 40 minutes, for a
cast of 6. The play is set around a
campo in Venice on a hot day. Five
students are ostensibly on an art trip
and discussion centres on the meaning
of art and its purpose in a society
which is destroying itself. Harley is a
knowledgeable, attractive and vain
young man while Ben, equally smart
but brooding reflects that all art glories
war. Conrad is tearing himself up
inside for his failure to find anything
meaningful in his life. Bianca is in love
with Harley and Emmy is fascinated
with food and Italian culture. It is when
Vivi, an older woman lost and trying to
get to the Hotel Bauer for lunch,
appears and disappears only to
reappear still lost, that the audience is
dealt a thunderbolt as we realize just
where the characters are and what has
happened. The truth of the play
resonates until the end as the
characters dance to Vivaldiís second
movement of the Winter concerto. The
play is a real challenge for a teenage
cast and the Sixth Sense-ish quality a
beautiful conceit.
All three plays can be found in the BT
New Connections Series/Shell
Connections available from the
National Theatre bookshop Check out
the website at
http://ntconnections.org.uk/
B.YOND: THE STAR
2006 Middle School Play
Written by Bill Titmuss, Tom Schulz
and Tom Bartlett
Directed by Tom Schulz, Bill Titmuss
and Tom Bartlett
Music created and arranged by Rick
Beder
Choreographed by Kat Carag, HS
student and Sara Becker
Actors: 54 students
Dancers: 32 students
Bands: 12 students
Tech crew: 10 students
This play is about Middle School
students and the possibilities of what
they may be or become. Our
production took place in two venues.
One venue was a Little Theater, the
other a large multi-purpose hall where
we constructed a replica of the Little
Theater stage. Each venue had live
music. Each venue had a large video
projection screen with live feed from
the other venue so the audience saw
both venues at once. This piece can
easily be adapted to a single venue.
ACT I: Two narrators in each venue
explain to the audience that they are
attending the Middle School
graduation ceremony. The video
screens come to life. A male student
dressed as a female science teacher
appears on the screen. The teacher
attempts to explain the vastness of the
universe, and quantum mechanics and
infinite possibilities. She explains that
perhaps the audience needs to see a
more “Down to Earth” metaphor. On
each stage there are eight Yonds, the
main character, lying in fetal positions.
As the video ends, eerie music starts
and the Yonds perform a “Bhuto” like,
slow motion birth. Eight “generic”
students wearing Trestle Theater
masks enter and watch the birth.
“Principal System” enters and says to
the mask characters, “You know the
drill, time to get these new kids in
shape.” The masks begin to teach the
Yonds, a ritualized repetitive
movement. The movement is
disquieting in its repetitive submission
to orders. The video feed is live in
both venues. The narrators sing “When
You Wish Upon a Star” the play’s
theme song. Then in one venue, half
the cast perform three stories about
Yond’s first day at Kindergarten. In the
other venue, we see three stories
about Yond getting into trouble.
Scene | 2006-7 March Issue 3 | 21
Dancers take both stages. Next, the
narrators in each venue remember
Middle School dances. The dance
starts with “Is It in His Kiss”. They then
join in with a modern piece by Nellie.
Act I ends with the principal busting
two Yonds for kissing.
Act II : The act opens with the repetitive
movement with reminders from
Principal System as to why the
students tow the line. Then as with the
first act, the audience sees three
scenes about dating and three scenes
about family life in each venue.
Between scenes there is a dance
number to “Shining Star” so the cast
can change venues. Next is a fiveminute video interview with HS
students talking about their time in
Middle School. Included in the interview
is discussion about their first kiss. The
final three scenes are set in a Middle
School classroom. The third and final
vignette shows a confident Yond, a
popular kid who does everything well,
quietly rebelling against Principal
System’s repetitive movement. The
students unite in defense of this Yond.
The casts exit both venues. Principal
System then explains that students
grow up and begin to see the
possibilities as to who they are and
who they may become. His job is
done. He then asks the audience to
quietly follow him out of the theater.
Both audiences converge outside
where all the students are assembled
and singing a slow a cappella version
of When You Wish Upon a Star.
Beijing MS
Beijing MS
Other than our original piece, “B. Yond:
The Star” last year, the last 3 of our
past 5 shows have been Tim Kelly
musicals.
GROOVY – A MUSICAL COMEDY
TRIBUTE TO THE 60’S
In GROOVY! you’ll celebrate the
hippies and flower children of the
1960s. Travis, Muriel and Alice decide
to throw a free Music, Beads and
Flowers Celebration. A popular singing
group, the Lemon Bugs, love the idea
and donate their talent. In no time,
crazily-painted buses start arriving at
Crumb’s Apple Farm, the site of the
festival. Everything is going nicely until
Mrs Porter, who hates ‘The Love
Generation,’ shows up and demands
that the local police close it down. If
this weren’t bad enough, two music
promoters offer the Lemon Bugs a
deal they can’t refuse if they will skip
the celebration. Although the hippies
might wear buttons that say ‘Never
Trust Anyone Over Thirty,’ their hearts
are in the right place and the
celebration triumphs. Great 60’s style
songs. Full length version of the one
act EVERYTHINGS GROOVY! Playing
time - 90 minutes.
INTERNAL TEAM MACHINE
Here’s an easy-to-produce musical! It
takes place inside the body of a high
school student. Marc Williams always
starts to sneeze whenever he sees a
certain girl he likes. Unfortunately for
several students, Marc’s sneezes go
too far. The teens, who were shrunk in
a fluke nasal spray accident, are
swooped into his nasal passages and
thrown into his body’s dark interior.
How will Chad, Mindy, Lavinia, Danny
and Julia, the prom queen wannabe,
escape? In their attempts, they elude
evil bacteria and take a rafting trip
through the circulatory system on a
toothpick. Watch the good white and
red blood cells battle hostile
intruders. Gasp in wonder at the
brains’ Command Center. You’ll have
fun with this show. Playing time - 90
minutes.
LITTLE LUNCHEONETTE OF
TERROR
Terror (and laughter) reigns when
Mongo, a rock-eating creature from
the center of the earth, contacts
young Pete Berserker, owner of Pete’s
Luncheonette. All the kids from high
school hang out at Pete’s. But they’re
no match for Mongo, who can control
thoughts, cause havoc and change his
22 | Scene | 2006-7 March Issue 3
shape. Actually, Mongo is a walking
bucket of toxic waste. He plans to
conquer Earth by enrolling the kids in
his personal army. First, however, he
drains their brains of ‘knowledge’ that’s why they have to read the entire
Encyclopedia Britannica! Pete’s
girlfriend tells him ‘With a little more
experience you could be a genius.’
Pete takes the message to heart,
ultimately sending the nasty Mongo
back to his own turf. The cast, of
course, is a wild bunch. One very
simple set, no production problems
and all the tunes are hits.
I have significantly rewritten these to
include speaking parts for 60 + actors
and to increase the ‘humor for adults’
aspect of the shows.
A catalogue of Tim Kelly’s plays is
available at http://www.playbureau.
com/catalogue.asp
ROBYN HOOD:OUTLAW PRINCESS
by New Zeland playwright John
Reynolds
This is a ‘pop’ musical, based loosely
on the traditional tales of Robin Hood,
with Robyn portrayed as a female
leading a female band of outlaws. It is
essentially a fantasy and the setting is
timeless. The characters can be played
by actors from any ethnic or cultural
group and is written for unlimited cast
numbers, predominantly female.
Instrumentation is for rhythm section
(piano, guitar, bass and drums) with
optional woodwind and brass or
synthesiser. It is possible to perform
this work with any combination of
these instruments, or piano only.
Sixteen songs, some solo, all written in
low singable keys.
Peter Shearer – British Council
School Madrid, Spain (formerly at
Southbank International School,
UK)
THE DOG BENEATH THE SKIN by
W. H. Auden and Christopher
Isherwood
Read this script and you’d most likely
think it’s impossible to stage, the
perfect example of two literati writing
for the theatre, or of a “play” providing
no more than a form for literature. Put
it on the stage, as we did, and you’ll
discover and create something electric:
a vision of Europe in the 1930s that is
both terrifying and hilarious. Especially
terrifying because we know what was
to follow (the play was first staged in
1936) and the authors’ prescience and
perceptiveness is astounding.
“My tree of knowledge expanded by several branches during those four wonderful days.”
Trine Kolbjornsen, St Johns International School, Belgium
Having been involved in an Auckland
University production of THE DOG
BENEATH THE SKIN, I knew staging it
was possible. A sprawling, episodic
and incisively satirical play, it involves
elements of epic and surrealist theatre,
revue and music hall, as well as a
chorus who speak some of the best
modernist poetry ever written. With a
large, keen group of high school actors
and drawing the main cast from IB
Theatre Arts students, we rehearsed
42 actors (a third of the high school),
most of whom were busy for the entire
show. The chorus work became the
challenge for first year IB students,
who also took cameo parts and
support roles. Second Year IB
students, busy with coursework and
Individual Projects, took on other
cameos while drama elective members
clocked up CAS hours by the score in
yet more cameos and ensemble work.
Mounting this play in our small studio
theatre, creating space for audience
and 40-something actors seemed
impossible at first. The solution came
by staging the piece in line, with
audience in four rows on each side,
close to the action. Which proved yet
again the adage: “Good ideas solve
problems.” Scene changes were drilled
over and over and thus an entire
generation of students learned to do
this properly. Design was simple and
we did not come close to realising the
design possibilities this play could
provide. The original music, by
Benjamin Britten, proved impossible to
get hold of. In any case (I’ve been told)
it’s well beyond the range of most
school voices. Just as well that a singable and memorable score by Mike
Peake, a London based musician, was
available and perfect for the play. The
music pastiches and parodies’ styles
move from the maudlin sentimental to
Kurt Weill, via Wagner and others.
Likewise, the performance rights are
held in New York and took some
tracking down (“Dog beneath the
what? Never heard of it!”), but we were
compensated for our efforts by getting
the rights for nothing.
HIGHLIGHTS: a quintessential English
village with the nastiest of
undercurrents; an ensemble madhouse
scene; an audience in tears of laughter
at cabaret artiste Dirty Desmond, who
destroys an original Rembrandt in front
of a genuine art critic; shortly followed
by transfixing poetry and a
denouement that draws the battle lines
for the conflict with fascism. This is a
play that will challenge any production
team (I recommend doing OH! WHAT
A LOVELY WAR a year or two earlier,
as we did, as practice and also as a
thematic, musical and historical leadup). THE DOG BENEATH THE SKIN
will also challenge preconceptions of
theatre and history. Most of all, it will
please, shock and captivate an
audience, while giving them insights
about where our society has come
from and where it might still go.
Pam Slawson – American
International School DhakaBangladesh
A COMPANY OF WAYWARD
SAINTS by George Herman,
published by Samuel French Inc
This is a contemporary play about a
modern Commedia dell’Arte theatre
troupe. I had a class of mixed first-year
IB students and younger high-school
students and wanted to do an in-class
production that would serve all of their
needs. The nine Commedia characters
were played by the eighteen actors in
my class - sharing the roles made
perfect sense since a Commedia
troupe could have more than one actor
playing a masque. The topic of the
play served as a springboard for IB
Theatre Arts students’ study of
Commedia conventions. They were
also able to practice applied research
of characters, Commedia performance
techniques, masks, costumes, and
history. The research was presented to
all of the students who used it in
designing masks, costumes and
developing characterizations. The
episodic nature of the text gave each
student their time in the spotlight and
made simultaneous rehearsing of all of
the various scenes possible. The
scene design was quite simple, and the
theme of the show – the importance of
working as an ensemble - was certainly
relevant to my own class as the diverse
group of students learned to work
together as an ensemble.
MANKIND & CO published by
Thomas Hischak Pioneer Drama
Service Inc, Denver, Colorado
I’ve always liked using this play with
Middle School students because the
subject of the play is usually relevant to
their studies (classical mythology), the
performance style is lively and leaves
room for a great deal of creativity, and I
can cast an infinite number of
students and spread the parts out fairly
equally among students, giving all
students a featured role. There are
narrators, which can be divided into as
many parts and played by as many
actors as one desires, and the
anachronisms, and opportunities for
clowning, dance, mime, and music
make it attractive to this age group. A
clowning concept was used and
Middle School students loved being
able to help pull together their own
mismatched costumes from our
existing wardrobe. They also were
allowed to design their own makeup,
basically painting their faces with stars,
hearts, lightning bolts, etc.
A COMEDY OF ERRORS by William
Shakespeare: Bollywood style
Shakespeare’s plays make great
material for understanding how a
production concept can be applied to a
play. I asked a class of Advanced
Theatre students to help me make
Shakespeare more relevant to their
audience. The result was a production
set in India and produced by borrowing
some conventions from the popular
Bollywood film industry. The characters,
conflicts, and situations in A COMEDY
OF ERRORS are familiar to the
Bollywood film genre. Already the
shortest of Shakespeare’s comedies,
we cut the script so it would play in one
hour without intermission. This was
easy to do by accessing on-line text
and deleting selectively. Music, Indian
dancing, 19th century costumes, and a
few selective name changes were all
that was needed to make Shakespeare
familiar in Dhaka, Bangladesh.
Sam Stone – Southbank
International School, UK
THE FORMAL by Sue Murray, an
Australian play approximately one
our duration
Overview – Grade 12 girls are getting
ready for their school Formal, (or Prom
as it’s also known.) Three fairies are
helping them get ready and comment
on the action throughout. There are
issues of body image, popularity,
Scene | 2006-7 March Issue 3 | 23
daughter / parent relationships and
friendship to name a few themes.
Excellent production notes and how to
stage using Brechtian theatre styles
therefore great for low budgets. Great
roles for girls, but the ‘dates’ are literally
cardboard cut - outs. My grade 10’s in
Australia directed, produced and
designed the whole production and did
a fantastic job. They actually cast one of
the Mum’s as a Dad and we had 2 male
fairies that worked just as effectively and
they also used males for the dates, but
these are really cameo roles. I would
use with Middle Year grade 10 students
or as a Grade 11 IB1’s play to analyse
Brechtian theatre. It could also be used
for an Individual Project for IB2’S to
direct and stage. It’s a fantastic issue
based piece of poignant play writing!
ANIMAL FARM by George Orwell,
adapted by Ian Wooldridge,
published by Nick Hearn Books,
London
Approximately one hour, with no
interval
Overview – ‘George Orwell’s satire on
the perils of Stalinism’. Animals take
over the control of their farm after
ongoing neglect and ruthless treatment
by their human farmer, but with the
pigs now in control of ANIMAL FARM
things appear to go from bad to worse
with some animals becoming ‘...more
equal than others’.
At the time of writing, I am about to
audition my Grade 6-8 students for the
Middle Years play in February at my
present school. The staff at Nick Herne
books has been so helpful with
regards to obtaining performing rites
and sending the plays. I would highly
recommend them to all teachers,
especially to new Drama teachers.
Easy to apply online no matter where
your school is.
It involves a large cast or you can
double up actors to have a cast of 6 if
your school is small. IB 1’s are involved
in costume and set design as part of
their Technical involvement in
production and I am going to appoint a
dramaturg too. There are helpful
production notes included and the
students appear to be very excited
about ‘doing’ the play!
Helen Szymczak - Marymount
International School, London
I only teach girls, so it can be a real
issue finding plays that are suitable.
Here is a list of some productions I
have done.
24 | Scene | 2006-7 March Issue 3
FIND ME by Olwen Wynmark
About a girl called Verity Taylor who at
the age of 20 was charged by the
police of damaging a chair in the
mental hospital where she was a
patient. Later, she was committed to
Broadmoor ‘from where she may not
be discharged or transferred elsewhere
without permission of the home
secretary’. Using a technique of
multiple characterization the play seeks
to investigate in depth the personality
of the young girl, to ‘find’ her – and at
the same time studies the effects of
her behaviour on the family, friends and
officials in whose care she is placed. I
had a cast of 23 actresses, so instead
of one actress playing Verity I had 5.
IB CLASSWORK
I do a lot of short performances with
my I.B girls as I usually have small
classes – no bigger than 6/7, so
combine a lot of skills in one project.
One student will direct, another
focusing on design, another on
technical and the others will perform.
Throughout their two years they all
have to alternate the various roles.
These are plays that have strong
women characters, and small casts!
KINDERTRANSPORT by Diane
Samuels, written in 1992
A full-length play- will need to choose
sections to perform. The play is about
a Jewish child being sent to live in
Britain to escape the holocaust. She
has to forge a relationship with a ‘new’
mother and she changes her identity.
Later her own daughter finds some
letters and asks her questions about
them which forces her to confront the
truth about her past. Cast (4-5): Evelyn
– English middle-class woman in her
50’s; Faith- Evelyn’s only child in her
early 20’s; Eva- Evelyn’s younger selfshe starts the play at 9 and finishes at
17 years old- Jewish German
becoming increasingly English; Helga –
Eva’s mum German Jewish woman in
her early 30’s; Lil – Eva/Evelyn’s English
foster mother. In her 80’s.
Structure is chronologically moving
forwards in present interspersed with
flash backs to the past as Evelyn’s
memories come back to haunt her.
Act 1 has some good sections for four
actors especially Act 1 Scene 2.
MY MOTHER SAID I NEVER
SHOULD by Charlotte Keatley
(written 1987)
A full length play- will need to choose
sections to perform.
Play about four generations of women
in a family, how they relate to one
another and how their different lifestyles reflect the changing
opportunities for women in society
over the last century.
Cast (4): Doris Partington born 1900;
Margaret Bradley born 1931; Jackie
Metcalf born 1952; Rosie Metcalfe
born 1971. The set is non-naturalistic ‘a magic place where things can
happen’. The play moves through
chronologically interspersed with
scenes of all four women playing
together as children. Scenes often
done in pairs to begin with and later all
four characters are together.
METAMORPHOSIS by Steven
Berkoff from Franz kafka‚s short
story written in 1969
Cast (4-6 – depends which section(s)
you do): Gregor Samsa, his Mother,
his Father, his sister Greta, his boss the
Chief Clerk, the Lodger. This play is a
physical theatre piece based around
the idea of Gregor Samsa waking up
one morning to discover that he has
turned into a beetle. This symbolizes
the way he feels he is treated by his
family and boss and seems to
represent his mental breakdown due to
having to work so hard and feeling the
pressure of people relying on him.
Opportunities for stylized acting,
costume, lighting and set design.
THE CONAHUE SISTERS by
Geraldine Aron, written in 1990
One act play- will need slight cutting.
Cast (3): Dunya, Rosie and Annie (all in
30s). The play is set in Ireland and is
about three catholic girls who killed a
boy when they were children. They
were curious about sex and made him
kiss them and then, feeling rapt with
guilt about what they’ve done, they kill
him. The play is based around the
three girls having a reunion and then
re-enacting the murder- taking it in
turns to play the boy they killed.
Michael Thomas – Regent’s School
Pattaya, Thailand
HAROUN AND THE SEA OF
STORIES by Salman Rushdie,
adapted by Tim Supple and David
Tushingham, published in paper
back by Faber and Faber,
ISBN 0-571-19693-4
The school is fortunate to have a large
space called the Globe and, like
Shakespeare’s original, it includes a
large balcony space behind the stage
which leant itself well to the epic scale
of the text. The Asian setting perfectly
matched the actual location of the
eventual performance, which took place
after 4 months of intensive but
enjoyable rehearsal. This was the first
large-scale drama production in the
school’s history so much time was
spent working on the creation of an
ensemble through games and
improvisation work based on different
kinds of story-making tasks. The cast of
35 assisted in the making of the
numerous props and elements of scenic
design and costume. The play also
provides great opportunities for
innovative music composition and the
students took every chance to
experiment with Thai instruments, most
of which were eventually included in the
final accompanying score. The
musicians were situated on the balcony
next to the actors who, when not
featured in a particular scene, acted as
a chorus on the action taking place
below.
THE LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS:
book and lyrics by Howard Ashman
and music by Alan Menken
This production involved nearly 40
students in Years 7-9 on stage with an
equal number in the orchestra. Most of
the students had already heard of the
show and, even when they had not,
they soon absorbed the memorable
tunes. A large design team, led by Year
12 IB Art students worked on the
creation of the giant plant Audrey 2
and an IB Theatre Arts student created
the choreography for the performance.
The rapidly expanding plant eventually
took over the audience at the end and
so remained faithful to Howard
Ashman’s original concept.
THE CANTERBURY TALES adapted
from Chaucer‚s stories by Phil
Woods and Michael Bogdanov,
published by Iron Press,
ISBN 0-906228-43-3
The plays provide a perfect blend of
magic, tragedy and moments of pure
bawdy humour, which found an
appreciative local audience! In order to
involve as many students as possible
the links between each tale were
developed to include more characters.
The plays were all co-directed by IB
Theatre Arts students. Elements of
Asian drama traditions were integrated
into the production including the use of
especially deigned masks and Balinese
Shadow puppets for the Franklin’s
Tale. The play was also performed to
students at the local Asian University.
Beijing MS
Tony Thomas – St Christopher’s
School Bahrain
AFTER JULIET by Shaman
MacDonald, Shell Connections 99
Cast of 15 (5m and 10f)
Picks up the story after the death of
Romeo and Juliet and takes place in
Verona during the fragile peace
between the warring families. There
are some excellent female roles,
especially Rosaline, who feels betrayed
by her cousin, Juliet, for stealing
Romeo away from her. The piece has
an incredible intensity, which builds to
a climactic finish. It was very popular
with our senior students (15-18). Easy
to stage – not too long – has some
very powerful and funny moments.
RESTORATION by Edward Bond,
Methuen
Cast of 13 (8m and 5f)
This is a very funny and dark piece. It
needs a strong cast, particularly for the
central characters and you have the
challenge of costuming a period piece!
It is a brilliant play about the injustices
of the class system in the early
industrial era. Very Brechtian in style –
loads of songs punching home the
political message but you could leave
them out. It does need cutting to
bring down to two hours. But an
interesting and entertaining yarn
nonetheless.
OUT OF THEIR HEADS by Marcus
Romer, Young Blood anthology of
youth plays
Cast of 10
Although this isn’t a big cast, you can
double the main characters and have
extra actors to people the clubs and
pubs that form the backdrop of the
play. This is a very exciting modern
piece that tackles the subject of drugs
in a non-condescending and truthful
way. It has a terrific central plot
involving a triangular relationship
between two guys and a girl and has
loads of opportunities to use modern
music and spectacular lighting
designs. It is quite easy to stage –
suits a studio that can become the
club using fluorescent lighting and a
few moving lights. High energy but
thought provoking, especially as the
story cuts to different locations very
quickly and tells the story nonchronologically. It has a very good
twist in the story too, which the
students like. Only suitable for high
school students really or maybe upper
middle schoolers.
Jen Tickle – TISA, International
School of Azerbaijan (formerly at
Bangkok Patana School, Thailand
and Overseas School of Colombo,
Sri Lanka)
All three plays listed below were very
much team efforts, and developed
through student led workshops as well
as co-directed by drama teachers.
THREEPENNY OPERA by Bertholt
Brecht and Kurt Weill
Universal Edition Ltd, 48 Great
Marlborough Street, London, W1F 7BB
(tel: 020 7437 5205 / fax: 020 7439
2897/ email:
[email protected] or
[email protected]
High School students. Needs a few
very strong singers for main male and
female roles. The orchestration has
some quirks and it’s not easy to play
but we were able to fit out a band
comprised of students and peripatetic
music staff. There are a few options
for the libretto – we worked with
Jeremy Sams’ fantastic lyrics from the
Donmar Warehouse version (available
on CD through Amazon) that had to be
toned down a little but made the whole
show so politically relevant for all
concerned. We had a cast of about
thirty, and created a whole chorus line
Scene | 2006-7 March Issue 3 | 25
“A fantastic experience steeped in ISTA values which left me feeling both exhausted and
inspired. We tried, we learnt, we discussed, we disagreed, we laughed and we made new
friends. Every primary teacher should be able to have this experience. For childrenís sakes we
Zoë Weiner, St. Julian’s School, Portugal
need more of this approach in our classrooms.”
of beggars and whores. Students
choreographed the main numbers.
Being in Bangkok we re-set it in our
local red light district, turning the theatre
into a cabaret bar with the audience sat
round tables, waiters and computer
monitors on each table which provided
captions, snatches of song lyrics and a
pictorial montage to enhance the
modern relevance of the song lyrics.
We also caused huge outrage and were
nearly shut down after the first night,
but I’d do it again any day!
(A HARD DAY’S) TWELFTH NIGHT
High school students with mixed cast
as large as you like. The Shakespeare
classic set in the 1960’s. An idea
taken from a music teacher in Beijing,
this was hugely successful as students
helped to play a part in updating the
setting, which gave them great
ownership as well as a refreshed
understanding of the dialogue. Duke
Orsino, in flowing ‘60’s hippy gear
enters strumming a guitar and singing
‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’; Sir
Toby Belch sings ‘I am the Walrus’ in
the kitchen and a chorus surrounds
poor captive Mad Malvolio accusing
him of being a ‘Nowhere Man’. It was
fun to work with the cast choosing
Beatles songs that fitted the text and
helped support it. Groups of students
choreographed the whole show that
took place in the round in a Girl Guide
shed decorated with saris and incense.
The music was simple to arrange for a
basic five-piece band and a small
string group, based on one of those
Beatles Complete songbooks for
piano. It was a great crowd pleaser
and a fabulous way to expose an
international cast and audience to
Shakespeare in a non-threatening way.
THE ARABIAN NIGHTS
Lower Secondary students and a large
mixed cast. This was quite a dated
text that we chopped up and turned
into a wonderfully warm show. We cut
the songs and work-shopped a
number of new ones that we made up,
based on fragments and folk songs
from many of the countries visited in
the play. It was easy to direct as it
fitted neatly into five sections which we
cast independently and then fitted
26 | Scene | 2006-7 March Issue 3
Shahariar and Scheherazade into the
transition sections. We were able to
explore many theatrical styles from
Beijing Opera to belly dancing,
fabulous costumes in rich colours, a lot
of dance and physical theatre with all
the students having a great deal of
input into their sections. We spent a
good deal of time focusing on the rich
cultural traditions of the Arab world,
which created some very valuable
discussions. We also had a Muslim
Dad come in and act as our sensitivity
gauge, as we added prayers and a
variety of Muslim cultural traditions and
phrases. We decorated the hall with
huge swathes of fabric like a Bedouin
tent; the local carpet merchant lent us
some (very valuable!) carpets for the
floor and local Indian and Turkish
restaurants sold food outside.
Kristen Van Ginhoven –
International School of Brussels,
Belgium
ALICE IN WONDERLAND AND
THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS
by Adrian Mitchell, rights from The
Peters Fraser & Dunlop Group Ltd,
Drury House, 34/43 Russell Street,
London WC2B 5HA
This was a middle school production
done in the style of Physical Theatre. It
is a terrific ensemble play that affords
tons of opportunity for use of
imagination. We had over 50 MS
students in the show, with 5 different
Alice’s. There was a ‘physical theatre
chorus’ that took over all the
responsibility for creating the different
environments. They became the water
by using fabric, they became the train
tracks or the forest or the flowers by
using their bodies and working as an
ensemble. They also used their
imaginations to create the different ways
that Alice grows and shrinks. We had a
‘storytelling chorus’ that took over the
responsibilities of narrating the story.
Many of the poems in the play were
delivered by this chorus using choral
reading techniques. We also had a
‘sound master’ who was in charge of
creating the sounds that accompanied
the show. There was a continual
soundscape and he and his assistant
had a sound booth on the stage filled
with all kinds of soundmakers. Then,
there were the actors who mostly took
on double roles throughout the play, as
there are so many parts to cast. They
were all dressed in neutral black
costumes and added extra bits to show
the audience who they were in that
scene. We had a physical theatre
specialist, Rebecca Patterson, come in
to give a workshop on a Saturday for
the kids early on in rehearsal, which
made a huge difference. The idea of
putting on this version of the play can
be daunting, as it is so complex and
there are so many environments and
characters, but, once we latched onto
physical theatre, minimalism (we started
with a blank stage with one platform the
length of the stage upstage) and sound
as our main vehicles to tell the story, it
became an excellent experiment in
using imagination and the MS students
who participated in it all said afterwards
that they never would have expected it
to turn out so well. They truly felt the
power of working as an ensemble.
SHAKESPEARE’S WOMEN by
Libby Appel and Michael
Flachmann, rights from Southern
Illinois University Press,
fax: + 618-453-1221
This play became a collaborative
project between the HS performance,
technical theatre, choir, strings and
visual arts classes. Plus, it also had
students in it who auditioned as part of
an after school program. It grew out of
a desire for the Performing Arts
department to collaborate on a project
that would afford all the students
diverse challenges in their specific
area. So, the play is basically a battle
of the sexes featuring Shakespeare’s
greatest scenes. We decided to use
each act to visit a timeline in history as
part of our concept. Therefore, act
one, where the male narrator is trying
to persuade the audience that women
are frail, using various scenes from
Shakespeare to illustrate his point,
moved from medieval to renaissance
to classical to baroque to romantic to
cold war. Act two then followed the
same timeline, although it was
presented from the female narrator’s
point of view, where she was proving
that women had infinite variety. The
S
Beijing M
Calderdale H
S
visual arts classes created art pieces
that were projected in each scene that
were inspired from artists of the time
periods, the choir and strings classes
explored music from the various time
periods and the performance class
explored acting styles. It included over
80 students and the school supported
the project by providing three in house
rehearsal days when the ‘full cast’
could come together to put the project
onstage. There were, of course,
elements that needed to be ironed out
as all the pieces of the puzzle came
together, but, working in this way
provided an incredible depth of learning
for the students and teachers alike.
Rob Warren & Sherry Weeks –
Atlanta International School, USA
24-HOUR PLAYS
Over a 24-hour period of time, working
with 6 Guest Directors and 5 Guest
Designers with various theatrical
backgrounds (clowning, improvisation,
comedy, dance, puppetry, tragedy, set
design, costume design, light design,
publicity & prop design.) High School
students had been divided into either
performance or production groups on
a sign up first come first sever basis.
Beginning at 7:00pm Friday night with
a family dinner each performance
group was given a Shakespearian
sonnet to create into a 5-10 minute
production using the Guest Director’s
background in theatre. At the same
time each production group worked on
designing, building or creating their
relevant production area. During the
first 12 hours scripts were written,
rehearsed and staged. The set,
costumes, props, lights and posters
had been designed and construction
was taking place. At 7:00am
Saturday morning both performance
and production groups were putting
final touches to their areas ready to
perform a dress rehearsal after
lunch at 12:00pm. From 1:00pm
onwards students were brought
into the theatre to begin staging
the opening and closing of the
show in addition to running a
tech/dress rehearsal. Little time was
left for final changes however some
groups managed to fit time in. All
production work had stopped and
these students began working on
technical positions needed to run the
show, for example backstage crew,
light & sound operators, ushers, tickets
& concessions. At 6:00pm the
audience arrived at the theatre to take
their seats for a night of Theatre. What
they didn’t expect was what 24 Hours
of little sleep, constant pressure to
taking risks and a Shakespearian
Sonnet could create. At 7:00pm the
curtain rose on 50 eager performers
and 30-inspired production crew who
had created something out of nothing
in 24 hours. This project is truly a
remarkable experience that shows the
power of ensemble and student’s
imaginations. My only criticism of this
project is the final productions can
focus too heavily on “in-house jokes”
or “things that only the 24-Hour
participants know about” and therefore
the final product can often be not as
clean or un-finished. However, to see a
production where no one gets cut,
every student is welcome and the
amount of creativity that occurs over
24 Hours is well worth trying.
THE DEAD MAN WALKING Project
by Tim Robbins
The DEAD MAN WALKING School
Theatre Project (the Play Project, for
short) is an opportunity to broaden
discussion about the death penalty
and involve schools and their local
communities in an inter-disciplinary
dialogue about this major social issue.
What is the Play Project? Check it out
at http://www.deadmanwalkingplay.org
Any description we give you would not
do justice to the experience our
students had on this project. It was
truly a remarkable experience all around.
JUNGLE BOOK by Edward Mast
This was a production I did with our
Middle School students a few years
ago. Although the script describes the
production as being set “not in a
jungle, but a jungle-gym”, we decided
to take this opportunity and research
how Rudyard Kipling’s writing was
influenced by the time he spent living
in India. Allowing the students to
research Hindu myths and making
connections between their Jungle
Book characters and the Hindu God’s
& Deities we decide to develop our
production on Indian culture and
traditions. Using this to guide us our
design team who were made up of
IBDP Visual Art and Theatre Art
students, who had been influenced by
a Julie Taymor production we had seen
in New York, decided to design the
production using masks and puppets.
What later became the set and the
actors’ costumes began as mock
sketches of an Indian jungle, a study of
animals at the Atlanta zoo, and
research done on Hindu art and
artefacts. This final production was a
huge success both visually and
through the process we took. Giant
animal puppets roamed the stage,
characters with masks hanging over
them, traditional Indian dancing and
music, and finally a group of Upper
and Middle School students who had
learned the true nature of theatre as an
ensemble art form.
Tom Wilkinson – Dresden
International School, Germany
(formerly at Colegio Roosevelt,
Lima, Peru)
From Lima
We began the year wondering how to
have as many students on stage as
possible and not do a musical. Having
always had a burning desire to visit
Friedrich Durrenmatt’s THE VISIT and
trusting other choices would not
provide the stage time necessary for
forty to fifty budding actors, Todd
Welbes, who taught and directed with
me, and I decided the time was right.
His comment, “It’s so dark and
devilish,” pushed the decision even
further. We cast the show with a
marvelous pair of actor lovers, Claire
Zachanassian and Anton Ill, but
surrounded them with a cast of
villagers who managed to control the
audience through almost three hours
of performance. We even added song
and dance as we wrote in parts for a
pair of Harlequin narrators who led the
Scene | 2006-7 March Issue 3 | 27
audience through the stage transitions.
The effect on the IB and MYP theater
courses was to provide a practical
context, allowing set, lights and sound,
and costuming as well as acting to be
the focus for many of the students. As
well, the idea of building a cast around
two ensembles, one of villagers and
the other of the evil visitors, proved the
cement around the performances
success.
With a small group of actors, we
explored the ideas of CHILD
LABOUR – thanks to M. Pasternak for
the push – in the very real context of
Lima and the street kids who cluster at
every street corner waiting to sell gum,
juggle, do flips or simply beg. Based
on research and real discussions and
using Boal image theater techniques,
the students explored the problem
realizing that who they were and what
they brought to their street corner
encounters was as important as
understanding street children
themselves. They developed a short
Forum theater piece for elementary
school children as part of CAS where
the actors followed their performance
with discussions about child labour
with the elementary students. The
investigation and performance led to
students working in orphanages
sponsored by a local Limian group
called Lima Kids, using drama games
and discussion techniques to get to
begin to understand the complexity of
the issues surrounding being a child
and alone in Lima. The year ended
with the graduating seniors who had
been part of the original group
spearheading a fund-raiser to support
Lima Kids which included performance
and hands on work with the schools
and orphanages associated with Lima
Kids.
Last, Todd and I with our Limian
Spanish theater colleague, Jose Luis
Meijia, produced a truly bilingual
production of Marivaux’s THE
DISPUTE. Based on a script
developed in English from a Neil
Bartlett production of the play (the
script is available through the National
Theater in London) at the Lyric
Hammersmith a few years ago and a
French version translated into Spanish,
we provided our small cast – 12
maximum – with the task of making
their own bilingual script from the two.
As Colegio Roosevelt is a bilingual
school this was in a sense easy.
Allowing the student actors to tell the
28 | Scene | 2006-7 March Issue 3
Calderdale HS
story, a simple one, in Spanglish, a
combination of English and Spanish,
the local Babel on campus, allowed
them to create a piece of theater that
in the end was essentially scriptless.
The original is equally delicious and is a
wonderful script for physical theater as
well as character work. And,
compared to THE VISIT, it lasted only
one hour. Plus it gave our students
experience with real improvisation,
physical acting and movement as well
as scripting skills.
Maggie Young – Pechersk School
International, Kiev
MORE LIGHT by Bryony Lavery
This play is a wonderful vehicle for a
group of girls. I used a group from
grade 9 to grade 12, second year IB
Theatre Arts. It has challenging
content and the chance for the
production team to shine also. One
student designed the set and another,
a series of dances for their Individual
Projects. We rehearsed over a sixweek period and performed for two
nights. It is a about the Emperor’s
childless wives and concubines who
are buried alive with him when he dies.
The only way to stay alive is to eat him.
The interesting thing in the play is the
concept that in their dire captivity they
find personal freedom. Each woman
and child discovers talent within
themselves that was stifled by the
confined life of the ‘harem’. When the
food runs out MORE LIGHT, the
warrior, goes out of the central
chamber to find more and finds more
than she bargained for!!! There is love
interest! MORE LIGHT, now published
as a separate edition, appeared firstly
in the Shell/National Theatre collection
Connections. A new set of plays is
commissioned each year. At last there
is a fund of challenging texts that are
relevant to the 14 – 18 age group. I
have produced four plays from the
collections over the last few years that
include THE CHRYSALIDS and
SPARKLESHARK.
THE GOLDEN DOOR by David
Ashton, is described as a ‘twelve shot
myth’. It is a great opportunity for a
group of 13-16 year olds not only to
act but to create wonderful
soundscripts and scenery. It is set
underground and involves two
opposing ‘tribes’ who are struggling to
find both resources and a sense of a
future. It contains big issues and yet
its world-under setting allows for both
technical and artistic innovation. It was
the final piece for my Grade 10 drama
class and provides the opportunity for
everyone to get involved. You could
rename it ‘a hundred and one ways to
use a camouflage net’! We worked on
it for six weeks, mostly in class until
the final week and they designed both
the set, makeup and costume as part
of their course. It is also part of the
New Connections collection.
THE VISIT by Frederick Durrenmatt
is a great script for senior students. It
is about an old woman, forced to leave
a small town because of pregnancy,
who returns to exact revenge on the
man who betrayed her. It has lots of
opportunity for a big cast, good
character development and interesting
set. It is flexible enough to allow for
wide ranging directorial visions and lots
of opportunities for IB Theatre Arts
students to flex both their Performance
and Production muscles. We
rehearsed over a seven-week period
and gave three performances.
Parts were filled from lower
grades where interest dictated.
ISTA
PROFILE
The ISTA Consultancy Service...
By Doug Bishop, Taipei American School and ISTA Board of Trustees
It took me years to recognize the
obvious: I can’t know it all; however, I
can get stuck in a rut. Although ISTA
festivals and TAPS helped expose
some students to other professionals
and expertise, the majority didn’t get a
chance. The ISTA consultancy
programme has proven to be a
godsend to address this need.
I remember becoming a more
vocal proponent of the idea of bringing
expertise home several years ago
when rising travel costs and perceived
danger caused increasing numbers of
my students to reject a trip abroad.
However, with the consultancy
programme, the expert came to us.
The beauty of this arrangement is
simple: instead of traveling to an event
set up by someone else, my students
stayed home and attended events
tailor made for them.
In January 2005, Greg Pliska
visited the Taipei American School for a
week long consultancy, as we
embarked on a script devising project
called Moxie, to raise funds for a
tsunami-relief effort. Greg helped
theater classes begin the process of
developing script ideas; he worked
with mythology classes on adapting
stories to the stage; he worked with
HS and MS play casts in character
development; he worked with teachers
after school on weaving drama
techniques into the classroom. His
work was a wonderful jumpstart to the
Moxie project, our production process,
and the second semester.
Two years later, in November 2006,
Sherri Sutton spent three days
presenting a very diverse range of
events. Her IB Theater class work
centered on styles; she also had
individual conferences with my six year
2 students about their research
commission. With beginning theater
and advanced English classes, Sherri
worked on both ensemble building and
character building. She developed
specific lesson plans with teams of
grade 6 and 9 humanities teachers,
while offering two open after school
improvisational theatre comedy
workshops, as well as meeting with
the cast of Woody Allen’s God to begin
the character building process. Sherri
left a wake of enthusiasm and energy.
In both cases, my kids and I felt
we’d been on holiday. The routine was
broken. New energy was palpable.
The ripple effects across the
school˜through teachers, through
theater students, through non-theater
students was certainly noticeable.
Thus, not only did my students and I
get a wonderful boost through the
experience but the status of theater
was raised in the eyes of the
community.
I can hear your thoughts: yes,
there are obvious advantages, but it is
pricey. True, expertise has a price. I
couldn’t have afforded it out of an
annual budget, to be sure. Unless you
have a very generous administration,
you probably need to do as I have:
seek help from your school’s support
groups. In my case, the PTA has been
amazingly generous in its efforts to
provide students and the community
with as much enrichment as possible –
particularly in the arts and writing.
Here we have a chance annually to
submit proposals to the PTA for
funding. For both Greg and Sherri, I
submitted a proposal in the spring of
the year before. Often, you can
connect with ISTA staff who will be at
an ISTA event in your region, saving
travel costs. For example, Greg went
on after Taipei to Michael Thomas at
Pattaya in Thailand, and Sherri stayed
on a day for a consultancy with the
Taipei European School, reducing
costs for both schools.
By early March, ISTA will publish
sites for next year’s events. Check
them out. Contact Sally Robertson
about a potential consultancy that
piggybacks on another event. Prepare
those funding proposals this spring...
and next year you will reap the benefits
of expertise that energizes both your
students... and yourself!
Go to www.ista.co.uk >
consultancies for more
information.
...geared up to help you
on home ground
Scene | 2006-7 March Issue 3 | 29
SHANGHAI TAPS
Shanghai American School, China – October 26-28 2006
Photographs: Courtesy of
Julie Ladner, Geoffrey Duffield
and Giel de Groot.
www.ista.co.uk