the playmaking project
Modeled after the hugely successful 52nd Street Project in New York City, Berkeley Rep’s Playmaking Project strives to introduce students of various levels and familiarity with theatre to the magic of the dramatic impulse through improvisation and writing exercises. During this 2-week workshop, students learn how to respond to their creative impulse, develop those impulses into characters and follow the characters into dramatic situations to create their own play. At the conclusion of the 2-week residency, professional actors perform the plays for the playwrights’ families and friends. The Playmaking Project has occurred at Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School, Rock La Fleche Community Day School and Camp Wilmont Sweeney.
empowering youth through drama
This was going to be different. After walking through the metal detector and waiting for every door in front of me to be opened by keys I could never even touch I began to understand the world that my future students dwelled in. I was about to face, with five of my coaches, thirteen incarcerated young women armed only with the prospect that I was there to teach them something about “how to write a play.” I had spent the last three visits at this facility up the hill at Camp Sweeney, the minimum security institution (for boys only). This was our first Playmaking with only girls at the Hall.
How would they respond? These girls know a lot about life, they know how difficult it can be and they are just now learning about the consequences of their actions. How resistant to this process would they be? How much would they care?
The girls entered, dressed in their pink and blue uniforms. Where I was expecting sullen and detached faces I was greeted with talkative, attentive, respectful young women. Above all these students were anxious to begin writing. A true blessing with this kind of work. Because this work gets hard, very hard.
The program consists of a two-hour session, five days a week for two weeks. On the final day, we bring in a group of professional actors for an extended rehearsal and on that night (or afternoon), the plays are performed for an audience of family and friends. The Playmaking Project is based on the successful 52nd Street Project in New York City. The primary goal of Playmaking is to empower young people through the creative process of writing their own short play and seeing that play performed by professional actors in front of a live audience. Oftentimes, it is the only experience they have ever had that will validate them as artists, or as someone who has ideas that are worthy of attention. For this reason, Playmaking works especially well with young people who are not successful in the mainstream educational system, those who may be in trouble, incarcerated or who are labeled “problem kids.”
From the beginning, Snook, a vivacious and sharp young woman, wanted to know “how” they were going to write their own play. Having faced this question many times I answered with my usual cryptic response, “These plays will come from you.”
Now, if I were a student in this program, that answer would tick me off. But I’ve cultivated that response over the past two years for a variety of reasons. The main reason being that it is true. This program, and the skilled artists that I work with, allows these girls to access their inner voices and put them down on the page. We guide them, give them a structure for finding their voice, but in those two weeks it is THEIR work and THEIR world that comes forward.
For some, it will be the very first time that they will have success with writing. For others, it will be the first time that they feel like what they say actually matters and that people will listen to them. Brittany called the process “crazy,” and we heard many times, “Is this right?” (another question we get very often). To which the response is always, “Do you think it’s right?” At the beginning of the first week, the response is a hesitant nod of the head. By the end of the program the answer is always a strong and definitive, “Yes.”
But the REAL pay-off of the program comes on the very last day, the very last action these young women will take under our tutelage. After the actors have performed the writer’s script for the entirety of Buena Vista (along with a few functionaries and guardians), the writers stand in front of their clapping peers and—beaming—take their bow, basking in all the post-performance glory. They are not the only ones who cannot contain a huge, wide smile. After an hour-and-a-half of hearing these scripts performed, my face actually hurts from grinning.
(This article was written by Christopher Morrison, former Outreach Coordinator for the Berkeley Rep School of Theatre, about the Berkeley Rep Playmaking Project at the Buena Vista Education Center, a Juvenile Court School.)