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."
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