https://captimes.com/opinion/guest-columns/opinion-so-much-to-be-learned-from-a-play/article_f9ebd478-b71b-54a9-b8e9-02e4def0bc25.html
The Scene: 1969, Sauk Trail Elementary School, Middleton, Wisconsin. With my fourth- and fifth-grade students, I am producing "A Midsummer Night’s Dream." It is right on schedule, as much as anything can be on schedule in an elementary school.
The rural landscape is the perfect setting, with huge rocks for Puck to leap from, woods for sprites to hide in, and lovely green grass for the court of Theseus. These students, the Sauk Trail Players, are the young local talent, becoming characters for one more play before their summer begins. Complicated names of characters, such as Hermia and Lysander, Oberon and Titania are no problem for them. An abridged play with the poetic meter of iambic pentameter, no problem.
The plot, a clever story, is filled with magical events that change lives. Children become their characters, suspend their own disbelief, as they hide among the rocks and behind trees. They create action, interpreting lines as they go. The play is the important thing, after all.
Going through scenes, children see what life is, feel what their characters feel, even if from old times and old places. They experience the vulnerability of being in a play, showing who they are by what they know about their characters. They figure out how to use gestures and pauses to make their characters "real.” They learn how to work together in order to create a play, and, at the same time, they learn how to keep their own characters’ identities intact.
The play is a huge success. The audience claps. The characters come out for bows. Standing off stage, in the grass, I am absolutely certain that drama is a way to show what it means to be alive in our time, in any past time. As characters, the students have gone through adventures, solved problems, and changed along the way.
Scene: 1973. Evening. I am finishing up my Ph.D. at UW Madison. The phone rings. One of the former Sauk Trail Players, a junior high school student, is on the line. “I learned to read from being in the plays,” he says. “Do you remember me?” he asks. Of course, I did. But somehow I wasn’t aware that plays performed years earlier had helped him learn to read.
Scene: 2003, Boise, Idaho. The memory of the play is tucked away, far away in the past of 30 years. I see Mike Hoffman’s film version of "A Midsummer Night’s Dream." The film captures my interest, but I don’t expect it to capture my heart and carry it back to the 60s. Once again, I see my students as characters in the play, then lined up center stage front, bowing and ending their parts in a dream.
Such a dream of my own — that drama would make such a difference in their lives. Yes, I thought in l969 that drama would enrich their lives. Yes, I thought that they could learn to appreciate the form of theater and understand what actors went through to become characters. But students also became literate by reading to learn lines as they began to understand more about their characters and themselves.
The world of the play and their own worlds combined to change them in ways that I, as a beginning teacher, could not have predicted. And they did it all themselves, really. And so to the Sauk Trail Players, where ever you are, for what you learned about drama, about reading, about yourselves, more applause, like fragile notes on a butterfly’s wing.
Norma Sadler is professor emeritus at Boise State University.
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