As the cab pulled into the driveway, I got a glimpse of a sign propped against a telephone pole, starkly gray, black and white. On it were the typical details of any theatre production: the company, the dates and times, the title of the show, the website. Depicted was a single leafless tree, suggesting perhaps Waiting For Godot, or Spoon River Anthology, or maybe even a spooky Halloween attraction. I knew the show I was headed to was going to be a heavy one, so the foreboding promised by the sign wasn’t inappropriate; it followed a dictum I believe in strongly, which is truth in advertising. I just didn’t expect this for a high school play.

The play in question, about which I knew next to nothing beyond a website marketing synopsis, was Infinite Black Suitcase by EM Lewis, a playwright new to me. It was being done as a “major black box production” at Staples High School in Westport CT, a school whose theatre program I have heard about for literally decades, knowing kids and parents of kids who had at one time or another been connected with the school. While challenges to other high school plays have taken me to other towns in Connecticut – Waterbury, Woodbridge, Trumbull, Milford – I happened to meet the head of the Staples drama program when we served together for one year (two meetings) on an advisory committee for Samuel French, the theatrical licensing company. So I’d been keeping an eye on what he was up to, even as more pressing issues in high school theatre took me elsewhere.

Had I visited the Staples Players website and found they were doing Twelve Angry Men/Women/People/Jurors or To Kill A Mockingbird, I might not have been so quick to head to Westport along with the commuter crowd on their way home on Thursday night. But the online description of the play, not out of character with the school’s past repertoire, about various residents of an Oregon town dealing both with impending death and the aftermath of prior losses seemed so incongruous in a high school setting – even a high school with a 200 seat black box in addition to a spacious main auditorium – that I had to go up and see for myself.

Jacob Leaf, Claire Smith & Jack Baylis in Infinite Black Suitcase at Staples High (photo by Kerry Long)

Before going, I looked up the playwright, wondering whether the author wrote specifically for high school productions, and discovered that she has a number of professionally produced works to her credit (the play premiered in Los Angeles in 2005) and that Infinite Black Suitcase was in fact receiving its high school premiere. This prompted me to ask Roth, who was directing the play with his wife Kerry Long, how he came to the play. He responded that the folks at French had put him on to it, as he had been looking for a relatively large cast contemporary play.

I attended the first of four performances, and until 10 minutes or so before curtain time, I wondered if anyone would be there, so empty was the parking lot and theatre entrance – as did some students who seemed connected with the show, milling in the hallway near the theatre. An audience did arrive, a bit tardy, filling the small theatre to perhaps a bit more than half of capacity. Once inside, the trappings of the school fell away and the environment resembled many an Off-Broadway house. Indeed, the fact that the theatre wasn’t completely full showed that challenging work is always a hard sell, regardless of whether it’s professional or academic. Of course, it was a school night.

Jack Bowman & Joe Badion in Infinite Black Suitcase at Staples High (photo: Kerry Long)

Obviously my intent is not to review the play or production, but I can say that it met one criteria I declared important when I first started writing about high school theatre, namely that the work challenged the students performing in it. Playing (mostly) grief stricken adults mourning or anticipating death in a series of short, intertwined scenes, the students were “punching above their weight,” rather than merely romping through an entertainment that catered to their natural, youthful exuberance. The play also fulfilled what Roth had told me led to its selection, in that the 16 actors were a genuine ensemble, each afforded at least one “moment” in the 80 minutes to showcase their abilities.

Contemporary drama is hardly unknown in high school theatre, although it was outside of my own experience years ago. A quick glance at the Staples repertoire over many years shows that, as did the most compelling portion of Michael Sokolove’s book Drama High, in which high school students performed Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa’s Good Boys and True. That said, in the Educational Theatre Association’s survey of the most produced high school plays, only one contemporary play makes the top ten: John Cariani’s Almost Maine (at number one). Surely Cariani’s play stands atop the list because while originally produced with four actors and lots of doubling, it easily affords the opportunity for a larger cast to play its many roles without repetition, expanding to meet the interest and needs of high school drama, where musicals with casts of 50 are far from rare. Cariani’s new play, Love/Sick, might well appear on the list soon.

The rest of the EdTA list is decidedly older plays, from public domain works like A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Importance of Being Earnest to American classics like Our Town, Harvey and You Can’t Take It With You. While I have affection for all of the plays which are most frequently seen, with a particular and deep admiration for Our Town, a play often mistaken for pablum when it is really a profound meditation on death, I do worry, as with musicals, that even as the canon of theatre literature grows, the majority of our high schools produce the same standards year after year, the experience at Staples, the popularity of The Laramie Project and Sokolove’s story of Levittown PA notwithstanding.

This may well be a byproduct of the downsizing of the American play. Ask any playwright and they’ll tell you how they have to craft their works for casts of four to six, preferably with a single set, in order to get them done; look at the most produced plays in America and you’ll find those small casts: Venus in Fur (two), Red (two), God of Carnage (four), Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike (six), and so on. So when high schools seek to involve as many students as possible in theatre outside of musicals, they’re forced back to the days when larger casts were de rigeur. On the one hand, we can say that this only reflects modern trends in professional theatre, and students should work with the same expectations, but in practice small cast plays either deny students the chance to learn about dramatic ensembles or the chance to tackle new work.

I have to hand it to Roth for putting his students up to the challenge of Infinite Black Suitcase, although I suspect it’s unlikely to be come a standard work in the high school repertory. But I’m also pleased to know that it’s not the only option out there. Student-written plays, although typically one-acts, afford high schoolers the opportunity to take on work by and about their peers, although that’s not without its challenges, as cases in Everett MA and Wilton CT have shown. Lend Me A Tenor author Ken Ludwig premiered one of his plays, a holiday show, at a high school near his home. There is also a thriving subset of writing targeting the academic market, though it is wholly unfamiliar to me.

One model that I wish were better-known or, better still, duplicated in the U.S., is the one forged by NT Connections in England, in which the National Theatre commissions new works by major contemporary playwrights specifically for secondary schools to perform. This may give the writers a chance to work on a larger canvas than they can with works seeking professional production, while letting the students take on modern plays crafted specifically for them that aren’t necessarily simplified for them or condescending to them, by writers they well might be reading about in the culture pages. Though I admire the concept, I regret knowing very few of these plays; I can, however, heartily recommend Mark Ravenhill’s Moliere riff Totally Over You.

I must come back to one last aspect of the experience of seeing Infinite Black Suitcase at Staples High. In my experience as an audience member seeing high school theatre, plays or musicals, I am always in the position of watching a show I’ve seen before, in many cases more than once, its words and music well known to me. With Suitcase, my experience was perhaps closer to the majority of my regular theatergoing precisely because I didn’t know it. I wasn’t spending the evening just seeing how well the kids managed to perform a familiar tale, I was actively engaged in watching the play itself, since I had no idea what would happen next and, for me, the Staples cast – of students I’ve never met, and so have no reason to respond to with indulgence or affection – is forever linked with the play, as with any show when one sees it for the first time. For Infinite Black Suitcase, they are my original cast.

P.S. I continue to learn a great deal about high school theatre as I see more and write more and as readers respond to what I write. If you have other examples of high school theatre giving students the opportunity to take on challenging contemporary or even new work, I hope you’ll share it in the comments section below. Teach me, and share so that other students and teachers can learn as well.

The issue, to me, is not whether Peter Pan is played by a man or a woman. The issue is whether Peter Pan has to be white.

Perhaps I should back up.

Mary Martin as Peter Pan

On Sunday afternoon, via tweets (and later articles) resulting from the semi-annual Television Critics Association press conferences in Los Angeles, NBC announced that the follow-up to their ratings hit The Sound of Music Live would be Peter Pan Live, utilizing the stage musical from the 50s which had already been performed live on NBC a half-century ago, in 1955, 1956 and 1960. As it had on stage, the production starred Mary Martin in one of her several signature roles.

The announcement set off a wave of dream casting on Twitter; I was one of many who called for thoughts, as did Scott Heller, deputy arts & leisure editor at The New York Times. The suggestions came quickly. “Bieber!” was shouted repeatedly, apparently with no one thinking about his recent erratic behavior and how that might work in a live scenario. Journalist Mark Harris jumped in with “Chris Colfer, call your agent,” which in the immediate rush struck me as a pretty good idea. One shrewd person proposed Taylor Mac, a fascinating thought. Elisabeth Vincentelli wrote a piece for the New York Post in which she suggested, among others, Hayden Panettiere, Daniel Radcliffe and Katy Perry; inviting comments separate from Elisabeth’s article, The Post asks, “Do you think America’s ready for a boy Peter? A tattooed one?” avoiding the more pressing question I ask.

I have no doubt there were many other ideas bandied about. But I never saw a single suggestion of a performer who was not white.

Jefferson Mays as Peter Pan at Centerstage in Baltimore (Photo by Richard Anderson)

It’s interesting that no one felt bound by gender in their musings, even though the slightly pre-adolescent Peter is typically played by an adult woman. That sense of traditionalism went right out the window (though hardly for the first time, since men have played the role before, mostly in the non-musical version). But if the Mary Martin-Sandy Duncan-Cathy Rigby dynasty was certainly up for reinvention within minutes of the announcement, why didn’t racial diversity come to anyone’s mind? Does no one remember Brandy as Cinderella in the 1997 TV movie of the Rodgers & Hammerstein musical, playing opposite a Filipino prince?

Granted, NBC wants a major star with the drawing power that Carrie Underwood brought to Sound of Music. If talent were the sole criteria, two performers who I think might be terrific in the role are Nikki M. James and Krysta Rodriguez. I’ve read that NBC would like to cast a male actor as Peter, and I’m sure there are countless famous choices who would suit – I wonder what Bruno Mars might do with the role.

Audra McDonald & Carrie Underwood in The Sound of Music

Of course, this breadth of thinking need not apply only to Peter: since Sound of Music and the 1999 TV movie of Annie were wise enough to cast Audra McDonald without getting tangled in the net of perceived historical accuracy (these are musicals, not textbooks after all), perhaps the Darling family and Captain Hook need not be staunchly Victorian white.  I have no doubt that the corps of Lost Boys and pirates will be cast multiculturally (the Spielberg film Hook helped set that standard more than 20 years ago), since that’s the “easy” route, but it’s the leads that must show the wider world.

Brandy and Paolo Montalban in Cinderella

On a related note, I am concerned about the play’s retrograde (albeit fantasy) version of Native Americans. Having never seen the Peter Pan musical (NBC is showing a remarkable knack for picking shows that highlight gaps in my theatergoing, or perhaps my childhood, as I was also new to Sound of Music), I do wonder how the character of Tiger Lily and the songs “Indians!” and “Ugg-A-Wugg” play today, not unlike Annie Get Your Gun’s now often-excised “I’m An Indian Too.” I must leave that to those better versed in the material. And don’t get me started on how it portrays Captain Hook, one of dramatic fiction’s better known disabled characters.

Obviously I didn’t see every fantasy casting tweet, and even within the 1,000+ folks that I follow, I may have missed suggestions of actors of color. Yet the reflex of those around me, one of which I quickly endorsed, were all monochromatic suggestions, and that’s where my concerns lie. Many years after repeatedly hearing of Michael Jackson’s dream of playing Peter Pan (admittedly with a troubling overlay unique to that man), we revert to the dominant race in England from the era when the play was first written, rather than flying towards a spectrum of color on our way towards the third star to the right and straight on ‘til morning.

Breaking down blinkered thinking about race is an enormous opportunity, especially when the vehicle for doing so is a beloved family musical. The ball’s in your court, NBC – and in the court of all you dreamcasters too.

The rise of internet culture has caused many shifts in how we consume information, with one of the more amusing side benefits being the rise of the fictional Twitter user. Disregarding spambots, the anonymity that comes so easily online has birthed such figures as @BronxZoosCobra and @ElBloombito, to name but two. In the theatre realm, the sunny cheerleading of @BroadwayGirlNYC has found adherents, but the sharper tongues (or typing) of @WestEndProducer and @Actor_Friend have launched them into real world publishing, within weeks of each other.

For those who haven’t been following them, a quick précis. West End Producer is, ostensibly, an individual on the production side of theatre in England, whose dishy asides about every aspect of the business always conclude with the simultaneously charming and condescending #dear. I have struck up a Twitter acquaintance with this person, we’ve shared a few jokes and they sent me a signed copy of their book. I’ve noticed their unwavering dedication to chronicling TV talent competitions as they air on weekend evenings (which can be bewildering, since the shows don’t play in the US) and just learned of a mutual passion for Sherlock, but this TV fixation doesn’t suggest someone at the country homes of those with bold faced names on the weekend. I’m newer to Actor Friend, whose full nom de tweet is Annoying Actor Friend, but the online persona is that of a snarky actor, seemingly more of a dedicated gypsy than an above-the-title star. While I won’t guess at gender (though WEP’s appearances in a latex mask disguise would indicate male, and in a  book blurb, one writer suggests AF is female), I’d hazard that AF is in their 20s while WEP is likely 30ish (or more).

In their books Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Acting But Were Afraid To Ask, Dear (Nick Hern Books, £10.99) and #SoBlessed: The Annoying Actor Friend’s Guide To Werking in Show Business (CreateSpace, $13.99), WEP and AF dispense pearls of wisdom in their trademark styles, freed from the chains of 140 characters at a time.  Early in each book, one gets the full force of their characters:

“Casting Directors are usually very nice people who like drinking far too much alcohol, and mostly during the day. The ones that don’t drink usually have other habits, which can’t be discussed here – but often end in them being discovered on a bench outside Waterloo Station at 5 a.m.”  – West End Producer

“Even after you’ve questionably noted your music, nervously mumbled some directions, and shakily clapped out a tempo, there will be an accompanist who has no effing clue how to play your Jason Robert Brown song. Seriously though – whenever I don’t get a callback, I usually find a way to blame the accompanist. It doesn’t matter if they played my audition flawlessly. It’s still their fault.”  – Annoying Actor Friend

“A serious actor has to approach acting in a serious way. This can be achieved by using various methods. One of the easiest ways is by not smiling – particularly if you don’t have good teeth. A serious actor should always save his smile for special occasions. However, this does not mean you can’t smirk. Smirking and smiling are two very different things indeed.”  – West End Producer

“As a performer, Annoying Actor Internet Law requires you to read anonymous online opinions about you, take them personally, and then complain about how all those people on theatre message boards are stupid, even though their comments are secretly murdering you from the inside out.”  – Annoying Actor Friend

Now you might imagine that an entire book of this arch tone would grow tiresome, let alone two, and I’d readily agree with you. That’s where both of these books turn out to be surprises. #SoBlessed, while the thinner of the pair, both literally and figuratively, pretty much drops all pretense of a character in one of its longer chapters, “On The Road,” which deals with touring. Offering a pointed critique of touring conditions and contracts, AF gets into some detail about the challenges of an actor’s life on tour. AF’s advocacy regarding compensation has taken on even greater urgency among some members of Actors Equity, with the full Twitter support and perhaps instigation of AF, has raised a stir about the pay structure of touring agreements over the holidays.

Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Acting is more comprehensive than its title suggests, ranging over many fields in the theatre, including producing itself. While the occasional Britishism may befuddle the less worldly reader, the advice dispensed among the punchlines is in fact utterly practical, simply delivered in a tone unlikely to be heard in classrooms at Yale or the Tisch School. “When you audition,” observes WEP, “there’s always a moment when you’re perfect for the role. It’s the moment before you come through the door.” WEP also wraps up the book by enumerating concerns that face the theatre, going beyond flippant remarks about Andrew Lloyd Webber to touch upon rising ticket prices, competition from the electronic media and the need for everyone in theatre “to be braver.”

They may have found their fame in the briefest of missives and gained followings with their dark and knowing wit, but in the end West End Producer and Annoying Actor Friend are both passionately dedicated to the theatre, doling out genuine wisdom and information with nearly every wisecrack. If one is on a budget and has to choose between the books, I give the edge to WEP, even though those in the US have to wait for its release here in the spring via TCG (it seemed to be a favored holiday gift in the UK, judging by my Twitter feed). But both make for irreverent supplements to more staid but perhaps equally inspiring books in theatre. And they are not annoying. Not annoying at all, dear.

My parents were not theatergoers and my youthful memories are not filled with reveries of family trips to New York to see shows. I can remember being taken to the theatre only twice as a youth by my parents, once in 1969 in New Haven (Fiddler on the Roof, national tour) and once in about 1975 on Broadway (The Magic Show). Yet there was something embedded in my DNA which made me interested in performance; I was writing plays (almost all adaptations of existing works) in elementary school with very little frame of reference and undoubtedly even less skill.

I longed to be an actor, and vividly remember my envy of Danny Bonaduce on The Partridge Family, thinking if he could be on TV, so could I. This was a bit odd, because I was a rather socially awkward child who didn’t mix well with most kids in my elementary years; I read constantly and had to be pushed outside into fresh air, where I invariably kept reading. Unlike many drawn to performing, music didn’t have a big role in my childhood, outside of Top 40 AM fare once I had my own little transistor radio. My parents didn’t have a record collection to speak of; I do recall my mother’s beloved two-disc set of Harry Belafonte at Carnegie Hall, and some assorted children’s records, such as the Mary Poppins soundtrack and Danny Kaye’s Mommy, Give Me a Drink Of Water and Tubby the Tuba. Cast recordings, which loom large in the memories of theatre pros, were absent, save for Fiddler on the Roof (culturally imperative, but rarely played) and West Side Story (likewise, but we only listened to “Dear Officer Krupke”).

So I’ve often wondered how I managed to be cast in lead roles in each and every show (save one) that I auditioned for in junior high, high school, community theatre and college, and why being on stage or in speaking in front of large groups has never frightened me. I’ve come to understand that part of the appeal, and the ease, came from the stage offering the exact opposite of day to day life. On stage, I always knew what to say and when to say it, and when I did it right, I was rewarded with laughter and applause. It was a startling contrast from the uncertainty of casual interaction. Where did I learn this skill? Comedy records.

As a tween and teen in the early 70s, in the pre home video era, I was completely entranced by comedy recordings both current and from the relatively recent past.  My brother and I came together primarily over our basement record player and the comedy collection scavenged from yard sales (and Monty Python on PBS). We had a bunch of the earliest Bill Cosby albums, the deeply politically incorrect Jose Jimenez In Orbit, a Smothers Brothers disc and (purchased new, smuggled in) George Carlin’s AM/FM and Class Clown. These are the ones that come to mind; there may have been more.

We listened to these albums over and over as if they were music, and reached the point where we knew entire routines by heart. Not just the words, but the pacing, the inflections, the comics impersonations of other characters and performers. Each routine was a song, and we would recite along with the records. We worked to perfect Carlin’s Spike Jones “hiccup” before we’d ever heard a Spike Jones record. We were mesmerized by them, long after the surprise of the jokes had faded; of course, the contraband Carlin album made us very adventuresome among our peers because of its “dirty” language (we were perhaps 12 or 13 at the time).

I never of thought about these records as scripts, but they were almost sacred texts to us. If we learn to perform first by imitating and later by finding our own style, then we were taking a suburban master class from performers at places like The hungry i in San Francisco before we’d ever been on  an airplane and before we would have been old enough to gain admittance even had we managed the trek. The lessons ran deep: a couple of years ago, a gift set of Carlin CDs accompanied me on a road trip, and my wife was both amused and annoyed by my ability to recall every moment with precision, despite my not having heard the material in many years. Did I ever find a style of my own, moving beyond mimicry? That’s for others to say.

My actual performing years were brief, covering 1977 to 1981, 10 shows in all. I was perhaps the fussiest Oscar Madison in history, since most see me as a Felix; I probably shouted more than any one of the 12 Angry Men as Juror 3; I managed to make the characters of Will Parker and Albert Peterson the most inept dancers in their history. I suspect I was best in roles that called for comedy over movement or voice: the Woody Allen stand-in Axel Magee in Don’t Drink The Water, the meek Motel Kamzoil in Fiddler, and the dirty old man Senex in A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum (my college’s newspaper noted a distinct Jewish paternalism in my performance at age 19).  Whatever I had, I owed not to the performers from the Golden Age of Theatre, who I would only come to know later, but to the stand-up comedians who were the writers and performers I took close to heart – if for no other reasons than that they were repeatedly accessible on the technology that was available to me.

I do not suggest that aspiring performers should run out and start learning comedy albums by heart, though one could do worse for understanding timing and pace. Of course, now we can watch and not merely listen to comedians and work out their full routines step by step; I wonder whether the visuals would have added to our mimicry or distracted us from the deep concentration on words and delivery that took place as a ritual in our cluttered basement, our nightclub of the mind. But I am sure of one thing: there are many ways to find one’s way to the stage, and mine was through the storytelling and punchlines of some modern masters of the comedy genre.

P.S. My vocal coaches were Tom Lehrer, Stan Freberg, and Allan Sherman. But that’s another story.