When I Think About You

NOTE: I wrote this for my students after posting a cast list a few years ago. 

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When I was growing up, I was lucky enough to have parents and siblings who never stood in my way if I wanted to stage a play on the lawn, film a movie in the woods, have all of my friends paint their handprints on my bedroom wall, wear my New Wave clothing to church long after New Wave was a thing, or be anything I wanted to be. My teachers in elementary school were wonderful, creative and young, and they let me take the initiative to direct a stage version of The Dukes of Hazzard. In high school my teachers and administrators let me take over the school newspaper to the point that it was more like a tabloid, let me start new clubs, throw weekend parties, and generally do anything I came up with as long as it was positive and creative.

 In college I made friends who never said an idea was dumb or a goal was unreachable. They threw elaborate theme parties, joined every organization on campus, played in bands, wrote and directed and starred in plays, painted each other’s dorm rooms and cars and bodies, and always encouraged each other—and me—to go for whatever it was we wanted to do. When I directed my first play at the university, all of my friends were involved, doing whatever they did best—the guys in the band were my musicians, the kids from the art department made my set and playbills and posters, my classmates were the production staff, and all those beautiful performers from the SGA Coffeehouse were my actors. I’ll never forget how that felt—that feeling of family between unrelated people that I only know how to achieve by creating something together.

Because of all those years of that kind of treatment, I don’t have it within me to say no to the creative aspirations of students.  That’s the real reason Lake Howell does so many plays—I don’t want to say no when the idea and the passion are strong, because no one ever said no to me. Or if they did, I didn’t really listen anyway. Yes, I have created hurdles that people have to jump in order to direct a play at Lake Howell—but the ones who really want it always get to direct something, and I’m proud of that.

One of the hardest parts of my job is putting up cast lists for plays. In a strictly mechanical world, the best player for each part gets the roll, and everyone else who auditioned just goes home to look for more audition notices. In the professional world, of course, that’s not really what happens. People get cast in parts because their agent knows the producer, or because they needed someone who fit the Johnny Bravo suit, or because redheads are the big thing this year, or because they are hot, or because they are in the union, or not in the union, or they are typecast, or whatever. Maybe they were the best, maybe not.

In educational theater, the goal is to balance the best performances with some kind of equal playing field. If the best person got the lead role every time we had auditions, it is very possible that the same person would literally star in all twelve plays in our season. If someone is dependable and fun to work with, do they get chosen over someone who has incredible stage presence but a bad temper? How many times do you turn someone down because they didn’t quite make the cut before you bump them forward—maybe even past stronger candidates—and say, “This is your chance—don’t waste it”? What do you do for the technician who finally gets the courage to try for a speaking part and barely makes it through the audition without passing out? What about the guy who looks exactly like the actor who played that part in the movie version? How do you tell someone how much you care while also telling them it’s not going to happen this time—again? What if a freshman beats out a senior? What if the exchange student has an accent so thick that no one can understand them? What if the best actor won’t stop playing lacrosse? What if the best actress is barely pulling a 2.0 GPA? What if someone is simply tired that day, or sick, or their girlfriend just dumped them? What if they are the principal’s son—and also the best actor? What if they are amazing but no one has ever seen them before and we just don’t know if they will follow through?

So I post my list, and then sit back and think about all of the people looking at the list online in their homes, or over the phone with other friends, and I try not to think too hard. Thinking too hard makes you want to reach out to every person who doesn’t find their name on the list and say, “I know—I know.” Thinking too hard makes you wonder if the person you thought would appreciate the middle-sized role you gave them will actually just resent you for it, to the point where that role might better have been given to someone who would have been transformed by it. Thinking too hard makes you want to give up. Anyone who has ever cast a play probably knows what I’m talking about.

For me, all I can do is remind myself that while you can’t buy the world a Coke, you can at least show everyone where the bottling works is located. Whatever play we are working on—it’s just one play. It will be created, it will be presented, it will be documented, and it will be remembered. And then there will be another one, and another, and another. If the opportunity you seek has not been fulfilled here—I promise you, there are a thousand more you can create for yourself. You can direct a play, act a scene, sing a song, paint a set, make a collage, invite fifty people to your house to film your own reality series, throw a party, plan a trip, write a script, sew a costume, give yourself a make-over, create a fad, do your dance, show your skills, design your game plan, make a portfolio, take a picture, cook a meal, paint a portrait, slam your poetry, start a movement, form a club, lead a group—anything you want.

There are a lot of things that I’m not very good at, but in general I am pretty strong in the area of not saying no to people who believe in their ideas. Every time I don’t say no to a positive and creative idea, I think about my second grade teacher painting the numbers on my cardboard General Lee, my Ma helping me construct my Titanic costume for the Boy Scout Halloween parade, my friend Dean designing my pop-up book playbill for the Purpose of the Moon, or my principal never telling me how many shows is too many for one school.

 Thank you to everyone who never told me no, and thank you to everyone who trusts me enough with their dreams to ask me to say yes.

There’ll be no more message tonight.

How I Became a Theater Instructor

 I grew up in a family of teachers. It was not my intention to become one, however. When I was in elementary school I decided I wanted to be an actor—specifically, I wanted to be on The Dukes of Hazzard someday. I took it very, very seriously.

When I was in middle school I began writing a lot, and eventually joined the high school newspaper staff. Through my work on the newspaper, I was able to interview many of the teenage movie stars and singers of the 1980’s. After my telephone interview with River Phoenix, I got into a long conversation with his publicist and his personal manager. What they had to tell me about managing a performer’s career fascinated me, and from then on I always made a point to talk to publicists and personal managers after I was done interviewing their clients. By my senior year of high school, I was set on becoming a publicist. My senior English teacher was extremely supportive of this idea, but my guidance counselor was openly disappointed with me. My parents were always very clear that we were to choose our own careers and to be independent, so I had their good wishes but did not receive much practical help from the guidance department at my school.

Because of the lack of direction at the high school level, when I started at the University I was torn about what my major should be. I had been warned that a degree in Communications was too broad, so I finally chose English/Professional Writing. I continued writing entertainment columns and reviews for the university newspaper, and also had a radio show on the school’s station. In my second semester at the University I had to take a Speech class, and the professor, Dr. Gary Balfantz, truly changed my life. I had long ago given up the idea that I would ever speak in front of groups or do anything that wasn’t done in an office or on the phone. He pushed me to become active in the theater department and provided me with the opportunity to travel around the country performing.

I began to doubt the value of an English/Professional Writing degree for me, and after talking with my parents I decided to add a Secondary Education component to my degree so that I would have a few more career options when I graduated. I still did not picture myself teaching, but imagined I might go into a graduate program in performing arts.

My senior project at the University was a play that I adapted and directed based upon a short story by Tom Robbins entitled The Purpose of the Moon. While this project was still in development, I had to do my field experience for my Methods of Teaching class. Two weeks in a middle school classroom convinced me that I was going to be a teacher after all. I completed my Student Teaching the following spring, and graduated from the University with a Bachelor of Science in English/Secondary Education.

My dad encouraged me to accept any teaching position that was available. I applied for every single English position advertised in our professional library at the University. I had three offers in one week: a bilingual classroom in Crystal City, Texas; a missionary school in Bogota, Columbia; and a private school in the Rift Valley of Kenya. Despite my willingness to complete those applications, I was suddenly unready to move to Africa. I sometimes wish I had gone for it, but I am very happy with where I am today, so I don’t regret my decision. I took a local night school position in which I taught English to a group of students who were out of regular school as they were processed through the court system for a variety of reasons. I was surprised at how much I came to care for these most difficult of students, and ever since then I have been especially drawn toward working with behaviorally challenged teenagers. This has made me popular with guidance counselors!

Later that year, the night school job turned into a regular daytime job in the Wilson School District in Pennsylvania. I taught yearbook, drama, and English. I quickly realized that my heart was in teaching theater, and when the administration of Wilson made it clear that a full-time drama teacher was not in their future plans, I decided to move to Florida where full-time positions were more readily available. I quickly found a job at Lake Howell High School in Winter Park, and I have been happily teaching theater classes there for sixteen years. (Four years later, Wilson got a full-time drama teacher. Such is life.)

My greatest challenge at Lake Howell has been my enormous class sizes. I have had classes with as many as 85 students.  My average class size is about 50. This is partially due to the school’s efforts to meet the Class Size Amendment in academic courses, but it is also because I have a policy of not turning away anyone who signs up for theater. I have learned a great deal about crowd management, but I am always working to improve my methods of keeping as many students engaged in our daily classroom activities as possible.

My best development in recent years has been to embrace portfolio assessment in my classroom for all of my courses. I am very proud of the results, and more importantly so are the students. Every LHHS theater student graduates with a solid document of all they learned about public speaking, acting, production, and management.

Building a Costume Collection from Scratch

One of the production setbacks I faced when I started teaching at Lake Howell was that someone had accidentally discarded the theater department’s costume collection. All that was left were the things from the final production of the previous school year—two bright yellow wigs and a variety of tights. Coming from a school with multiple well-stocked costume rooms, I had never worried about acquiring costumes before. In the years since then, LHTC has been blessed with a very large costume collection. In today’s entry, I will give some ideas about acquiring costumes.

A photo of my classroom during my first week at Lake Howell High School (the entire costume collection is at right):

PUBLIC DONATIONS. Never underestimate the willingness of the public to donate amazing things for educational purposes. Many individuals have vintage clothing that they feel sentimental about but are glad to see used by budding actors on the high school stage: wedding dresses, military uniforms, prom dresses, etc.  All you need to do is find them, convince them to donate, and make them feel glad that they did. At the beginning of each school year, I place a donation-request flier in every staff member’s mailbox at our school, send one home with every one of my students, get it printed in the school newsletter and on the webpage, and hand it out at Parents’ Night. I place ads on free online networks like Facebook and Craigslist, and on bulletin boards at local grocery stores, and boldly ask yard sale managers if they might be willing to donate their leftovers to our school. Have your students write thank you cards to everyone, and include a note on school letterhead for tax deduction purposes. A sample flier:

RUMMAGE SALES AND RE-GIFTING. Part of my success in collecting donations is my complete willingness to take literally any type of clothing whether it would be useful to our theater department or not.  Many people who are donating clothing simply want to clean out an attic, garage or closet, and don’t necessarily want you to pick and choose what you are going to take. I have a team of students who enjoy sorting through the donations; we keep the good stuff, have a rummage sale to sell the rest for $1 an item, and send the leftovers to a local charity like Goodwill or the Salvation Army. 

BUSINESS PARTNERS. Another way to bring in donations is to contact local businesses that use uniforms and see if they might be willing to send some your way. Hotel valet uniforms can be used to make a wide variety of costumes, from Prince Charming’s somewhat generic military jacket to tunics for the Flying Monkeys in The Wizard of Oz. I was also pleasantly surprised to find several hotels had an overstock of themed costumes from past promotions  which they were glad to bestow upon a high school theater company—one hotel gave us dozens of pinstriped engineer coveralls, and another gave us a truckload of Hawaiian shirts and Tiki decorations. Theme parks, movie theaters, prom and tuxedo shops, security companies, restaurants, utility companies, and other businesses are all possible donors. I had a group of students brainstorm a list of local businesses to target, and had them take letters to the manager or owner of each business. We tracked our success so that we could hit up the same businesses again in a year or two.

YOUR SCHOOL DISTRICT. Your own school district is another resource for finding costumes. My county school system has a surplus warehouse, where old band uniforms and dance-wear go when schools buy new gear. The band jackets can easily be transformed into a variety of military and ceremonial uniforms, and much of the dance-wear that I’ve found has only been used for one season of Color Guard or Dance Team and then discarded. At the end of each school year I put another flier in all staff mailboxes requesting donations of unwanted clothing, books and furniture as they clear out their classrooms at the end of the year—more fodder for our annual rummage sale.

PARTNER WITH OTHER LOCAL SCHOOLS AND THEATERS. Another key element, in my opinion, is to build a mutually beneficial relationship with other local high school theater programs and community theaters. What is the point of four high schools each owning an identical set of Pink Ladies and T-Birds jackets? Sharing saves everyone money and storage space. Open up a dialogue with theater teachers at other schools—compare your upcoming production needs and see where you can help each other out. The same can work with community theaters as well.

INVEST IN A SEWING MACHINE. I can’t sew—not even a button onto my shirt—so I am always glad to find out that I have students and family volunteers who can. In order to take full advantage of their offers of help, I had the most experienced seamstress in the bunch pick out a sewing machine for me to buy for the classroom. On sale and with the school’s tax exemption, I got a great machine for $200. More and more of my students are learning to sew—it has been an excellent investment.

Because of my school’s generous allotment of storage space for our costumes, I have been lucky enough to go from half a rack of leftovers to a comprehensive collection that lends for free to all local schools, churches, community groups, and theaters that ask. Despite our large collection, we are still always inviting donations, running rummage sales, and actively building a better collection. If you have addition ideas for building a theatrical costume collection, please share them below. And I’d like to take this opportunity to thank all of the hundreds of people who have so generously donated clothing items to Lake Howell Theater Company. Your kindness has provided a world of opportunity for my students and our community.

Some photos of one of our costume rooms today:

You Need an Assistant

In my first years as a theater teacher, I was young and had a ton of energy and a million creative ideas about all the things we could do on our stage. My ideas tended to be extremely ambitious, and my timetable for accomplishing them tended to be optimistically short. Without going into detail about my meltdown during a production of REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE, I'll just share with you the first and most poignant lesson I learned from a student: the kid playing Plato looked at me with a sad face and said, "You can't do it all yourself, sir. It won't work."

It hadn't occurred to me that I was trying to do everything myself, but at the moment he made the remark, I was sitting in the sound booth writing (in pen!) in someone else's prompt book, a torn costume slung over one shoulder, and wet paint across the back of my hand from the set I had been painting moments before. I had the students broken down into crews to do all this stuff, but didn't quite trust them to do it. A year later I got a similar remark from a parent who found me building Roman columns on the loading dock of our theater while the Homecoming dance was happening in the cafeteria nearby: "This looks like a heroic way of drowning yourself, James." She didn't mean it as a compliment. It was time to admit not just that I couldn't do it all myself--but that I shouldn't. I was hurting my theater company and taking opportunities away from other people.

If there's any way to avoid it, a theater instructor should never be the only adult involved in after school theater activities. I am still surprised after all these years at how many former Thespians and one-time stage crew members are hiding among the faculty of my school. I made one remark at a faculty meeting about doing GREASE as the school musical, and that afternoon I received a dozen emails from teachers who wanted to get involved. I'm admittedly paranoid about having other adults take over my program (in my auditorium, I'm a benevolent dictator) but I found that using a rotating list of volunteers, each with specific areas to monitor and jobs to oversee, allowed the adult involvement to be a blessing to my program without becoming a thorn in my side.

The parents of my students have been another amazing resource. Not to sound mercenary, but anytime a student mentions a family member who is a builder, electrician, plumber, lighting or sound technician, seamstress, hair stylist, etc., that information goes into a binder I keep on the shelf closest to my classroom telephone. While their children are still in the program, these parents often donate time and talent to helping us produce shows and maintain our facility; after their children graduate, they can generally be counted on to give a great price for any work that needs to be done. (And some still do it for free!)

Parents are also great resources for providing a more sympathetic presence than I personally present while I'm directing. A mom in our backstage hallway during a play is much more likely to provide comfort for a student who forgot his lines or just got dumped or is having a panic attack than I might provide as I power-walk from the workshop to the AV Tech booth. Parents can help keep a makeup table from turning into an invitation to shoplift; organize a backstage buffet; drive to Home Depot for more paint; call Denny's to reserve tables for fifty people; help students use power tools; enforce dress code, patrol dark corners, administer First Aid, etc. Our school district has a great volunteer registration program that screens applicants, records their donated time, and provides annual awards for the hours that are accumulated.

Members of the community have also become an indispensable part of my theater program. Before I had any budget for paying guest speakers, I found that many professionals are glad to volunteer a few hours to the school for a variety of reasons. First I contacted local voice teachers, and invited them to come to my classes to give a sample voice lesson to my acting students--in exchange, the voice teacher could hand out fliers to dozens of students she otherwise might never have met. When we bought tools from Home Depot, the general manager of the store agreed to send two workers (on the clock) to our school to train the students in how  to use them safely. Local college theater departments were more than happy to send representatives to talk to my classes and do acting exercises with my students. Cosmetology schools sent students to help with hair and makeup training before big plays. As our budget grew, we were able to hire a prosthetic makeup designer to do demonstrations, choreographers, technical trainers, and so on. Not only has this helped me to improve the education my students are receiving by filling in many of my weak areas, but it has also helped to connect my students to the community--bringing them good advice, letters of recommendation, internships, and jobs after graduation.

In addition to adult assistance, I've learned to rely on students as well. I'll write a separate entry about our student leadership program, in which each area of our theater company (Costumes, Props, etc.) has a student leader, but in additional to this Executive Board, I also have a designated assistant for each play production. My assistant can make an organized list of notes for me so that I'm not constantly writing my ideas on the nearest piece of scrap paper; she can take messages to the set crew working in a different room; he can retrieve the important item I left in my classroom when I moved to the stage.

I also establish a student assistant in each of my classes, often a senior who found herself assigned to a theater course because of a hole in her schedule, or a technician who was placed in my acting class and can't be moved to Stagecraft, or a 16-year-old community theater veteran who can probably afford to do some filing while the rest of the class rewrites a scene from Romeo and Juliet. Every time I find myself beginning a task that my student assistant could be doing instead, I stop immediately, write out instructions on a Post-It note, and place it on the assistant desk I set up across from my own. My district does have a wise policy against allowing students to grade papers--but they have no problem with a student typing up monologues, filing documents, collating papers, making a list of every athletic sponsor with a billboard on our stadium fence to find out if they might support the arts as well, etc. The student quickly assumes a certain level of ownership of the program by fulfilling these duties, and often becomes intuitive about what else they might be doing to help. And meanwhile, I stop trying to do everything myself.

I take a great pride in knowing that if I were to be incapacitated for awhile, my students, parents, and community volunteers can be counted on to keep everything going in my absence. To me, that is a more solid legacy than the hope that everyone will say, "What a guy, he did it all himself."

Producing High School Theater

I began teaching in 1994 at a high school near Reading, Pennsylvania. In my years there I taught senior  English, Yearbook, and two section of drama for grades 10-12. I quickly realized that I would be much happier if I was only teaching theater-related courses. The school was not large, however, and the Principal was not interested in seeing the drama program expand beyond two classes and a few after school performances each year, and so in 1997 I accepted a position as a full-time high school theater instructor at Lake Howell High School in Winter Park, Florida.

Although Lake Howell opened in 1975, the entire school moved to a different facility for the 1996-97 school year while major renovations were completed on the LHHS campus. The night I arrived in Florida I was given a tour of the soon-to-reopen campus. My classroom was a 1300-square-foot carpeted studio with ceilings 25 feet high and a small office and storage room in one corner. The space had been intended as a music lab, but was graciously given to me as the new theater teacher. There were six large wooden tables still in their boxes, waiting to be assembled; forty brand new blue plastic stackable chairs; a brand new teacher's desk with a rolling desk chair; and a brand new computer and printer. It seemed like heaven.

The  auditorium, however, was a different story. In Pennsylvania I was the proud custodian of a 900-seat theater with full wings, a fly system, and incredible storage space for props, costumes, and set pieces. In my new Floridian home, however, the auditorium was one of the few buildings that was left standing when the rest of the campus had been demolished and rebuilt. As such, it had been used for construction storage and then as a drop zone for all of the furniture and supplies being shipped back from the temporary school used the year before. It had no wing space--when an actor walked offstage, he would walk into a concrete block wall. The air conditioning ducts for the entire building traversed the space where a fly system ought to be located. An enormous retractable band shell was onstage with no way to remove it because there were no roll-up doors built into the facility; students moving the individual towers of the band shell around had ripped many of the stage curtains.

Then I asked where the costume room was--or the prop collection---the makeup...and no one knew. There had been some costumes, but the administrators thought that maybe the previous drama teacher had taken them with her wherever she went. With some minor investigation, I learned that she did no such thing.  All of the set pieces, costumes and other items had been sent to Seminole County Surplus instead of being moved to our refurbished campus, and with the exception of one box containing two yellow wigs and a variety of clown costumes, Lake Howell Theater Company owned nothing.

My aim in this blog is to share some experiences I had in starting a high school theater company with very few resources, in the hope that some other theater teacher somewhere might find some of these ideas useful in building a new program or jump-starting an existing one. I have been so lucky to have a supportive administration, an enthusiastic and talented student body, great friends in the theater community, and a patient and helpful group of family and friends. Maybe this will be my chance to pay all of that forward.