Getting Their Acts Together : Drama Workshop Gives Teen Moms Training, Plus Time to Be Young
Suddenly, 15-year-old Sonia Ochoa began to shake. Unexpected tears filled her eyes as sobs erupted from the audience of other teen-age mothers watching the scene.
“You weren’t there for me when I was growing up,” Ochoa said to her absentee father, although sitting next to her on the bench was only another girl in her acting class. “My birthday, Christmas--everyone knows when Christmas is--I didn’t get presents. Presents aren’t important, what’s important is remembering.
“You missed everything, it’s not fair,” said Ochoa, oblivious to the cries from the nursery down the hall that could have been from her own 4-month-old daughter, Lenora. “It kind of hurts me because I grew up without you. . . . You just can’t start in the middle, you’ve got to start from the beginning. Now it’s too late. Now I’m too old.”
Ochoa, who lives in Buena Park, has always loved acting. She took expensive lessons as a child, but when she dropped out of high school after one year and gave birth to Lenora, drama training was the furthest thing from her mind.
This summer Ochoa was among about a dozen teen-age mothers who took acting as part of the Fullerton Joint Union High School District’s continuing education program, thanks to the efforts of 22-year-old Joy Creel. Tuesday’s class was the last in the six-week session, but Creel said she may offer the drama workshop again this fall.
About half a dozen school districts in the county have continuing education programs for students with babies, but Creel’s has been the only drama class. In the once-a-week acting workshops, Ochoa and the others got a much-needed break from caring for their infants, gained confidence in expressing their emotions and made key bonds with others in similar situations.
“They’re starving for attention,” explained Creel, who graduated from the same school district five years ago. “They’re dying to share, they need the camaraderie. When you’re going through a hard time, the worst thing is to be alone. Acting class forces them to work together, so it’s built up a little bond.
“This is definitely a bonus, an extra,” she said. “They’re getting to be the silly, frivolous kids they can’t be 23 hours a day. They’re getting to be the kids that they are--to play.”
Creel, who started her own acting career eight years ago with commercials and has since starred with her identical triplet sisters in two television movies, began teaching drama while a communications major at Baylor University in Waco, Tex. When she returned home to Orange County after graduation, Creel decided to teach as a way to make extra money and keep her acting muscles limber.
Students enrolled in her junior high and high school workshops pay $15 per 90-minute session at a local racquetball club. But Creel teaches the single teen moms, as she calls them, free. And the students get credit for participating.
About 100 pregnant girls and teen-age mothers are enrolled in Fullerton’s continuing education program during the school year, and about 70 students participated in independent study this summer. Of those, about a dozen attended Creel’s acting classes.
Tuesday’s workshop in a makeshift studio at the First Baptist Church started slowly, as girls straggled in after leaving their infants in the day care center or meeting with a teacher in the independent study office.
In sneakers and shorts, Creel faced her charges, sitting in tiny wooden chairs suited for kindergartners, and reeled off names of improvisational exercises the girls can practice. After much persuasion, they formed a circle for a warm-up game, “ball of emotions.”
“Angry,” Creel growled, thrusting the imaginary ball across the circle. “Happy,” said Kandy Huffmire, 17, tossing the non-existent toy high into the air. “Sad,” Chastity Davila, 18, shot back, passing the buck to Michelle Gutierrez, 18.
After a few minutes with the ball, the girls followed Creel’s instructions to pair emotions with occupations. They sashayed across the floor first as confused dancers, then marched back as angry butchers.
“I’ve learned to express myself more,” Davila said. “I like being able to sit down in a room and feel comfortable with people, just talk and feel like they’re not going to back-stab me.
“Here, I get free time by myself and kind of just do what I want,” Davila said, a few minutes before strapping a baby pouch onto her shoulders and plunking 5 1/2-month-old Ariana inside for the bus ride home to Anaheim. “It’s work, but it’s fun.”
Like Ochoa, Davila wants to become a professional actress, and plans to take more classes and some day set up photo shoots to try and launch a career.
But others in the workshop are novices: Gutierrez said she failed drama back in junior high, and Huffmire has never before been on any kind of stage.
“I figured it’d be an experience,” said Huffmire, two months pregnant and already the mother of Devin, who is 8 1/2 months old. “You’re making fools out of yourself but people think it’s funny.”
Humor is at the center of the classes. Herself a student with The Groundlings, an improvisational group in Los Angeles, Creel uses games and comedy skits for warm-ups, and then has the girls perform scenes she collects at television sitcom auditions.
By the topics they choose for improvisation, Creel can differentiate among her classes. Junior high schoolers talk of sibling cat-fights and Nintendo, while high school students focus on college and jobs and clothes and cars. The scenes the teen moms create deal with “more intense situations,” Creel said.
In Tuesday’s session, one vignette had Davila on her knees, playing a toddler. Wailing, the actress begged for candy and reminded her “mommy” that when she had hit her earlier in the day she had promised the child a treat.
A few minutes before, in another skit, one girl asked a second whether she should have an abortion since she already has three children.
The most emotional and personal scenes grew out of “Confrontations,” an exercise in which the actresses say what they have always wanted to do to someone who hurt them in the past. Ochoa chose to talk to her father. Davila picked an ex-boyfriend.
“So how’s your baby and stuff? I heard you had a baby and girlfriend and stuff. Why didn’t you tell me?” Davila asked quietly. “I loved you and you just left me hanging. . . . I talk to my cousins on the phone and they tell me, ‘I saw Michael at a party and he’s with a girl,’ and I’m thinking, ‘A girl? What girl? He’s supposed to be with me.’
“It hurt me so bad, all I can say is, ‘Why, why, why did you do this to me?’ ”
What the girls say in class sometimes startles Creel, who is practically a peer of her students but has never experienced the trauma of teen-age motherhood.
The students exchange stories of Cesarean sections and breast-feeding between exercises; Creel is so oblivious to motherhood that when she first offered one of the girls a ride home she did not even think about a car seat for the baby.
“I hurt for them,” Creel said. “They’re going to look back in 10 years and say, ‘I got gypped of my childhood.’ I’d like to come in and be superwoman. . . . I can’t solve all their problems, but I can provide something that’s special for them, a perk.”
