VENTURA : Class’ Spanish Play Can Credit Firm Directing

Two weeks ago, parent Gretchen Milligan realized with panic that the student play she was directing at Mound School in Ventura might not come off.

The fourth-grade students in the play were goofing off during rehearsals and had not memorized their lines, Milligan said. So, she and teacher Virginia Barrison did what theater directors often do to whip their casts into shape: “We yelled at them.”

It apparently worked. When the cast of more than 30 fourth-graders in Barrison’s class performed their play before parents and students Wednesday, they not only knew their lines but delivered them with emotion.

Memorizing the dialogue was particularly difficult in this case because the play was a Spanish-language version of the Cinderella story. And most of the students began learning Spanish only last fall.

The “Cinderella” production, performed Wednesday evening at the school along with two other plays by fourth-grade classes, marked the first time that Mound students have acted in a Spanish-language play, school officials said.

Despite the difficulty of memorizing their lines in Spanish, some of the student cast members said there are certain advantages to performing a play in a language that most of your audience can’t understand.

“If we made a mistake, it wouldn’t matter,” said 10-year-old Alyson Schuster, who played Cinderella’s wicked stepmother.

Alyson and other students in Barrison’s class have been learning Spanish since last fall, when Milligan, whose daughter is in the class, began volunteering as a language instructor for the group.

In addition to the benefits of knowing a second language, Milligan and Barrison said Spanish instruction helps children to better understand California history, a subject taught to all of the state’s fourth-grade students. “The Spanish were here first,” Milligan said.

Even before the Spanish came, however, there were Native Americans. And one of the other two plays performed Wednesday at Mound touched on this aspect of California history. Carol Aulich’s class acted out a Native American legend called “Guasuita and the Gift of Fire.”

Another class performed a shortened version of the musical, “Peter and the Wolf,” which, of course, has no connection to the state’s history. But teacher Mary Spirito, who directed her class in this play, said students benefit from acting in any type of school production.

“It’s just the idea of getting on stage and performing and feeling they can do it,” she said. “They remember it more than anything in their whole school days.”