What you learn in high school

As a high school French teacher, I spend most of my days thinking about how to connect with teenagers, not only to prepare them for a future career but to shape what may become lifelong passions. I don’t expect many of my students to major or minor in French, but I hope they all leave high school with the curiosity to travel, watch movies in other languages, or consider international perspectives on their own cultures.

So when I think about theater artists and audiences, I naturally also wonder about who they were in high school and how they first learned to love theater. How did our best actors discover the joy of morphing into other people? Who taught the English or Theater classes that would one day lead to Guthrie subscriptions or ARTshare memberships? And how did that education affect the types of artists and audiences these students have now become?

Looking at reporting on the most-produced high school plays, though, I’m worried that students aren’t being exposed to the excitement of really good, challenging theater. More than that – based on what we’re shown in high school, I’m a bit surprised that we have any innovative theater at all to see as adults.

Midsummer Crucible Night with Old Lace

The most recent data comes from a 2015 NPR analysis of data from Dramatics magazine about the most performed high school plays and musicals by decade since the 1940s. Two plays, Our Town and You Can’t Take it With You, have appeared in the top six every decade from the 1940s to the 2010s. Other common repeat performances over the past few decades include The Crucible, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Arsenic and Old Lace.

It’s not news to the editorial staff at Dramatics that these plays are old. The NPR article quotes their editors complaining about outdated tastes in theater in 1976, 1992, and 2007. The Dramatics editors attribute the conservatism of high school theater programs to a few causes, including the need for large casts with a lot of female roles and the fear of pushback from administrators wanting a “safe” choice of school play.

These are legitimate problems that performing arts programs have to contend with, particularly ones that are threatened by budget cuts--but what would it really look like to go to a high school that only performed the most popular plays and musicals on the list?

If your school is working off of a list of the top 21 produced plays from 2014-15, you could easily go four years without ever seeing a play written after 2000, since there are only two of them on the list. In fact, there are only six plays on the list written after 1980, and that includes adaptations of Charlotte’s Web and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged).

If your high school followed the list, you could easily think there’s no such thing as an independent female playwright (there are four on the list, two of whom were writing as part of a team with men). You’d be pretty sure that there weren’t any good plays set outside of America or Britain, except for The Diary of Anne Frank and a few Shakespeare plays set in Italy. And you’d know for certain that there are no good playwrights of color, since there are none (yes, zero) on the list.

More broadly, if your school played it safe every year, you’d have no idea that theater can be provocative, and that on top of its ability to entertain, one of a good play’s most valuable assets is the way it can change the way audiences think about the world.

Teachers love to blame things on the Common Core and state standards. But in this case – brace yourselves – it’s not the government’s fault. The 2008 Minnesota K-12 Academic Standards in the Arts include the following in its stated goals for high school theater students:

• Analyze how the characteristics of Western and non-Western styles, such as Kabuki, Noh, Theater of the Absurd or classical contribute to the creation of, performance of, or response to theater.
• Analyze how a work of theater influences and is influenced by the personal, social, cultural and historical contexts, including the contributions of Minnesota American Indian tribes and communities.

Not only are these excellent goals for high school students, they’re not so bad for professional theater companies either.

High School theater trains young artists and new audiences

So Minnesota educators are thinking in the right direction. I bet these objectives are being put into action in theater classes, among students who’ve already opted in and expressed some interest in theater. But when it comes to the plays high school audiences actually get to see, they aren’t exactly bucking the national trend by putting on groundbreaking new works by American Indian playwrights. (I wish!) In the 2015-16 school year, Southwest High School put on Almost, Maine, Thomas Edison put on Our Town, and South staged both You Can’t Take it with You and The Diary of Anne Frank. (I tried for a more comprehensive list of high schools, but not many of their websites had been updated.)

I have great memories of theater in high school. We performed old standards like Our Town as well as some more unusual choices, like Jean Anouilh’s The Lark and Dylan Thomas’s Under Milkwood. In English class, we studied Waiting for Godot, The Bald Soprano, and The Zoo Story and read excerpts from Brecht and Artaud. Those moments are part of what has helped me to appreciate a good classic done well, but also to revel in theater that challenges its audience to think a bit harder.

But I went to an independent school with a liberal administration and a population of fairly intellectual families with the means to take their children to see professional theater outside of school. In many other communities, however, the high school play may be one of the only ways students and families are exposed to theater. Choosing a play to perform can send a strong message about what theater can and should be.

If the only plays students get to see – maybe ever – are plays by, for, and about white people from at least 30 years ago, then I have a better understanding of why it is so difficult for professional theater companies to build an audience base for diverse or challenging new work.

Students learn to accept and expect theater that is easy to watch and only peripherally or academically relevant to their own lives, and many of them will carry these expectations forward into their adult lives.

From an educational standpoint, this is meaningless.

And more perniciously, the kinds of plays we choose to stage can reinforce a cycle of artistic elitism, where those students with the most diverse and interesting artistic voices might never become interested in pursuing theater in the first place. Education is all about modeling the attributes we want to see in the future – so what kinds of artists and audiences do we want our students to become?