Theaters Reaching Out to Students in San Diego : Stage: Old Globe and San Diego Rep programs go to the classroom to awaken student interest.

Pat Gage stood at the front of her honor’s English class at Granite Hills High School with a bemused, somewhat confused expression. “Outside are two people named Alex and Andrea,” she told her students, “and I don’t know what they’re going to do.”

Gage knew that the two Old Globe Theatre representatives were going to talk to her class about Moliere as part of the Globe’s student outreach program Playguides. However, judging from the props and costumes scattered across the room, Gage also knew this was not going to be any ordinary lecture.

Just then, two heads poked through the classroom doorway. Alex Perez and Andrea D. Fitzgerald stared into the room, pointing fingers at the students and surveying the scene with wide-eyed fascination. The two actors waddled into the classroom and began performing a series of slapstick comedy routines in the style of the commedia dell’arte.

Fitzgerald portrayed a highbrow school teacher, Perez, a smart-aleck student. They made silly faces at one another, kicked each other in the shins, bumped into one another and made a mess of a simulated lesson plan.

More importantly, Perez and Fitzgerald captured the students’ attention. After they’d finished their sketch, the two performers led an engaging 50-minute discussion about Moliere, who Frenchified the commedia dell’arte tradition. This all served as an introduction to the Globe’s productions of the 17th-Century playwright’s “The Flying Doctor” and “The School for Husbands,” which were playing at the Globe at the time of the school presentation.

The Globe’s Playguides, like the San Diego Repertory Theatre’s Project Discovery program and the La Jolla Playhouse’s currently-out-of-commission Performance Outreach Program, sends theater personnel to San Diego County schools to stimulate interest in live theater. For students and teachers, these outreach programs provide an entertaining introduction to theater and a diversion from traditional teaching methods. For the theaters, however, educational outreach programs are crucial instruments of communication, and are directly linked to the theaters’ hopes for survival.

“The theaters have to get out there,” Old Globe Theatre Education Director Diane Sinor said. “I feel very strongly that theater is not going to survive if we don’t make a concerted effort to acquaint kids to theater and get them hooked on theater. In this country, it is the older people who have the theatergoing habit. But how do we engage the younger people?”

Gage says Playguides gets the kids interested.

“They loved it,” Gage said after the in-class Playguides presentation. “There was a very positive response from the kids. It really is a nice package for the money.”

The package includes an in-class, pre-performance introduction to the material, tickets to a production and a post-production seminar with the cast. Cost is $8.50 per student.

“They told us about commedia dell’arte and it was entertaining--more than if the teacher just lectured or if we just read about it,” 12th-grader Jennifer Rubenstein said. “It was like watching a play.”

On occasion, it was more like being in a play. In order to demonstrate the nature of Moliere’s verse drama, Perez and Fitzgerald led the class through an ensemble poetry project. Perez worked his way up and down the rows of desks, asking each student to contribute a few words to an iambic pentameter composition; Fitzgerald transcribed the developing poem on the chalkboard.

The end product--Perez titled it “Ode to a Dark Class”--was silly and contrived, but it demonstrated the complexity of writing verse drama. As Perez pointed out: “It took us ten minutes to write these eight lines, and this is pretty bad. Moliere’s “The School for Husbands” is one hour long and his poetry is fantastic.”

The value of participatory learning was not lost on the students.

“We were able to participate when we made up the poetry ourselves and so it was a more active way of learning,” Rubenstein said. “I think everybody liked it because everyone got involved.”

“It got us to participate a little bit more,” fellow 12th-grader Christina Maule said. “It’s important to get as many people involved as possible to break up the pace a little bit.”

Madison High School drama teacher Doug Hollenbeck has been working with Playguides for four years. On a recent Wednesday, he and 45 of his students traveled to the Old Globe Theatre to see the two Moliere plays.

A 21-year veteran of the San Diego Unified School System, Hollenbeck is a big fan of Playguides.

“After the play, we went and sat down in the front and the actors came out. Even the leads came out,” he said. “My students were just in awe. The actors sat down with us and Diane Sinor ran a question-and-answer (session). The actors were so accessible that you wouldn’t recognize them. They looked like you and I.

“What’s really great about the Old Globe is they act like real people. They share their knowledge with you and they make my students feel real important.”

Students are also important to San Diego Repertory Theatre Managing Director Adrian Stuart. Stuart is enthusiastic about his troupe’s outreach program, Project Discovery which, like Playguides, involves in-class presentations and tickets to see productions. Unlike Playguides, however, Project Discovery is free to students. The Rep also provides transportation to schools that don’t have their own buses.

“Project Discovery is actually a program that was developed at (the Providence, R.I.-based) Trinity Repertory Company by Adrian Hall specifically to develop future audiences,” Stuart said. “As far as I’m concerned, it’s a model program.”

The numbers support Stuart’s convictions. Trinity Rep spokesperson Lynn Kelly said 33% of their company’s current subscription base first experienced theater via Project Discovery. Trinity Rep has been operating Project Discovery for 26 years; the San Diego Rep program is three years old.

“Their success absolutely demonstrates that the future subscriber base comes from today’s Project Discovery audience,” Stuart said. He also insists that bringing young people to the theater creates a different mood in the audience.

“Our immediate dividends come in terms of the audience energy,” Stuart said. “It’s extraordinary, absolutely extraordinary. There’s a thirst for the work, for the experience. The responsiveness is amazing.

“During ‘A Christmas Carol,’ the homeless version we did two years ago, there’s one point where Scrooge smacks one of the young rascals in the play, one of the kids. The response from the young audience was amazing. The students were yelling ‘Get him! Get him!’ The students are much more vocal than the older audiences.”

Stuart said that he gets satisfaction knowing that students were moved by their theatrical experiences.

“One of the teachers was telling me that on the bus trip to the theater, the kids were being pretty cynical and arrogant about going to the theater,” he said. “On the way back, these same students who were generally non-communicative, were discussing and debating the issues in the play.

“Project Discovery is opening a communication door.”

The La Jolla Playhouse is also committed to opening its doors to students, but funding shortages have forced the Playhouse to put their primary student outreach program on hold.

“We haven’t been able to fund the POP Tour (Performance Outreach Program) the last couple of years,” Playhouse Artistic Director Des McAnuff said. “But we fully expect to get a tour out again next season, either in the fall of this year or, at the latest, spring of next year. We’re fund-raising in earnest to make that happen.”

The Playhouse still has a few small-scale educational programs intact, but McAnuff says sometimes students show up at the theater whether you’ve tried to attract them or not.

“It’s interesting what can reach young people,” McAnuff said. “When we did ‘The Seagull’ with (film star) Phoebe Cates in 1986, it was amazing to see the number of young people at the production. (We knew) that they weren’t coming to see Anton Chekhov. They were coming to see Phoebe, but, as it turned out, they were introduced to Chekhov.”

A similar situation arose with the Playhouse’s 1991 production of Chekhov’s “The Three Sisters,” which featured Cates, comedian-actor Jon Lovitz and film actor Nancy Travis. Still, McAnuff said, casting big-name stars is hardly a reliable method for attracting young audiences. Instead, creating theater which speaks directly to young people is the ideal way to encourage long-term interest.

“The issues that our young people are facing in this day and age--racial issues, AIDS, the homeless, an education system that is getting less and less support, single parent families--those are the issues that the theater needs to be addressing for young people,” McAnuff said.

“I hope that we can channel our resources to doing more for young audiences.”