Today, my first grade class put on its first public performance of their stage adaptation of Anansi Does the Impossible by Verna Aardema. We read the story about a month ago, and the students wrote their own play based on the book. They did a great job. We practiced it as a reader's theater for a few days, and eventually we put it away. About two weeks ago, a coworker asked if we would like to perform something in the Celebration of Language program for students in grades K-2. I thought of the play, which seemed like a good fit and had the added benefit of being something on which we had already had hours of practice. Those were my thoughts, but it turned out I was being a bit idealistic.
So over the past two weeks, we practiced the lines. The students were robot-reading instead of using expression, so we practiced without the script. They knew the story inside and out, and they did a pretty good job once they got used to the idea. We made costumes and props and built a slide-show with backgrounds for each scene. There were six main speaking parts, a narrator, someone to run the slide show, and the rest of the class made up the "chorus." The main roles practiced every day, and the extras practiced a few times when we rehearsed as a whole class.
Today was the big event. The "star" of the play was absent. His understudy did a great job, but that left the narrator role unfilled. The next best-rehearsed narrator has processing problems that keep him from readily speaking his thoughts. I also had to replace the person who ran the slide show with someone who has the computer helper job in our classroom. I thought he would be a natural, but he hadn't been present at enough rehearsals to understand the scene changes. Then, one of the actors, who is a bit of a daydreamer on a good day, forgot to speak into the microphone when she remembered to speak at all. The large group of actors got very silly. One girl ran up to the microphone several different times making random comments. One boy jumped off the risers, hit his head on the pull down screen where the background was being projected. The screen rolled up with a bang. The boy fell down on the stage, stunned, and was escorted off by another adult. The campus monitor came up to make sure everything was safe, and instructed the students to speak into the microphones without touching them. I ran around like a crazed person catching up the slide show with the current scene, giving lines to actors caught in the headlights, shushing off-stage actors, prompting the narrator, and handing out props (or sliding them onto the stage when I forgot to hand them to the actors on their way onto the stage).
I am pretty sure only about 10% of the play was actually heard and understood by the audience. I know that it went on at least twice as long as it should have lasted. I doubt my colleague will ever again ask us to participate in such a program. I waffled between feeling mortified, angry, relieved, and exhausted, but my students had a great time. Even though all the while they were silly, grumpy, complaining, wrestling, fighting, shooting the finger, stealing, crying, laughing, running, rolling around, falling down, sliding, and generally causing mayhem, or maybe because they were all of those things, they had a great time.
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