Group Adds Drama to School Life

Young authors don’t have to write like Shakespeare for their plays to see the light of day. All they have to do is A.S.K. the right people for help. The Audrey Skirball-Kenis Theater Projects is a nonprofit organization that helps bring new works to the theater and sends professional playwrights, actors and directors to local schools to help students learn the craft of dramatic writing.

A.S.K. playwrights have set up shop this fall at Valley Alternative Magnet School in Van Nuys and Canoga Park High School, where over the next 12 weeks, the high school students will engage in a variety of exercises and activities designed to help build confidence and writing skills. The students will learn to turn their ideas and experiences into short plays.

The 16-session “Playwrights in the Schools” program ends with an all-school assembly featuring readings of student works and a daylong event at the Skirball Cultural Center, where professional actors will read selected student pieces. All of the student works will be published.

“Students often enter the program thinking that theater and writing are boring,” said A.S.K. coordinator Bryan Davidson. “We’ve found that the students who are most successful in the program are often the ones who are struggling academically.”

The program, which is funded by A.S.K., selects schools that have poor access to arts enrichment opportunities and that demonstrate faculty and administrative support for arts efforts.

PROGRAM NOTES

Community Outreach: The Country School in North Hollywood is geared up to resume a peer program it initiated with the Fred Lull Special Education Center in Encino last year. Second-grade Country School students travel to Fred Lull once a month to share arts-and-crafts projects, to read books and to sing songs with the Encino students. The now-third-graders who participated in the program last year have planned a joint field trip to see a professional production of “Alice in Wonderland.” Trips to a museum and to Chinatown are on tap, as well.

“Our kids are finding out that people learn differently, and it alleviates their own learning struggles,” said Carol Koepenick, the second-grade Country School teacher involved with the program. “They are learning a tolerance for others.”

Opera Buffs: About 280 local elementary school students will have the chance to perform in “A Muskrat Lullaby” next month when the Los Angeles Opera brings its five-week, in-school workshops to Verdugo Woodlands Elementary School in Glendale, Canterbury Avenue Elementary School in Pacoima, Vanalden Avenue Elementary School in Reseda and Vena Avenue Elementary School in Arleta.

The young opera enthusiasts will meet with L.A. Opera artists and staff to learn singing, acting, staging and costuming in preparation for their November performances of the specially commissioned work.

END NOTES

Peggy Renner, the Glendale Community College history professor recently awarded the school’s 13th annual Distinguished Faculty Award, will present “Education in Revolutionary America” Thursday at noon in the auditorium. Renner, who serves as chairman of GCC’s history department, also is the coordinator of the college’s Women’s History Month events.

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