Confessions of a teen Tevye

Here’s my prediction about Seth Kamenow: Years after his graduation in June from L.A. Unified School District’s Hamilton Academy of Music, he won’t be able to name any of the songs played at his prom, nor will he be able to tell you anything that the speakers at his commencement had to say.

However, Seth will, for the rest of his life, remember significant chunks of the songs from “Kiss Me, Kate.” He may even remember some of the dance moves he performed in the chorus of Hamilton’s production of that Cole Porter musical this spring.

The high school play or musical is one of those events that occurs at just the right time and just the right place to leave an imprint on its participants forever after. I know this. It’s been 30 years since I padded my 115-pound frame, spirit-gummed a beard to my pimpled face and made the most convincing approximation of Hebrew prayer a 17-year-old Pennsylvania Lutheran could improvise. Yet when I hear “If I Were a Rich Man” on the supermarket sound system, my shopping cart becomes Tevye’s milk wagon, and for a few moments I’m in my private Anatevka, sweetly and vividly remembered.

The fair lady sniffing melons flashes a knowing smile my way as she hums along with “I Could Have Danced All Night,” her feet recalling steps learned in hundreds of hours of after-school practice sessions. Notice that stout middle-aged fellow in the checkout line mouthing “Sit Down, You’re Rockin’ the Boat” under his breath? Want to bet he was once in his school’s “Guys and Dolls”?

Playing a role in the high school play is an enduring experience; indeed the idea itself of putting on a high school play is as perennial as fall football and spring graduation.

In spite of budget cuts for arts education, the unavailability of recent popular shows (high school performance rights for “Les Miserables” became available only last year), and the “adult” language and themes of much contemporary drama, schools and students still want to present plays and communities want to see them.

Why?

I think it all comes down to the idea of transformation. So much of the joy of performance is in the “abracadabra!” moment. The magician’s flash paper becomes a fluttering dove. The girl in toe shoes becomes a swan. A stage manager speaks to us from an empty stage, and we see the New England village he tells us is there.

Those magic moments

We know as the school auditorium lights go out that we’re about to witness an enormous risk -- putting oneself on display. The stage lights come up, and the kids appear. They’re in control, groomed and highlighted, word-perfect and alert and listening to one another. “Abracadabra!” That’s our boy or girl on the stage, transformed. We’re transformed too -- elated, reassured, satisfied.

And isn’t transformation the essence of adolescence? The rehearsal and performance experience is, in a way, a metaphor for those years.

At first, the teen actor, like his offstage self, feels awkward: “How do I look?” “What do I do with my hands?” “Does what I just said sound dumb?” “Will they laugh?” “Will they like me?” Suddenly, after a few weeks, without warning, a confidence-making moment of self-realization strikes: Instead of the customary offstage feeling of never knowing the right thing to say, onstage the words are there and they’re perfect. What to wear, how to move, how to act -- they’re all part of the script. At last!

A book-burdened girl stares at the floor as she shuffles between classes. Maybe she eats her lunches alone. Other girls seem more confident, more knowing and more popular. But put her on stage as Annie Sullivan in “The Miracle Worker,” and she’s the ruler of the universe, teaching Helen Keller to communicate with the hearing, seeing, speaking world. She’s the embodiment of determination, intelligence and love at the water pump as Helen speaks for the first time. Transformed. Mature. The Monday after the performances, the school hallways are less isolating.

Drew Messinger-Michaels, a sophomore at Hamilton in Los Angeles, knows the feeling. “The thing about performing,” says the 16-year-old member of the “Kiss Me, Kate” cast, “is it’s making or doing something better than yourself.”

Stan Wlasick, who has taught drama and directed four shows a year since 1980 at El Rancho High School in Pico Rivera, would agree with that. “The kids are so unafraid and willing to take risks. It’s exciting for them and safe for them,” he says. “They can reveal things they can’t reveal in everyday life; if they’re shy in life, they can come out and be something else on stage.”

The newfound confidence isn’t left on the stage or the costume rack after the final performance. Wlasick thinks the most rewarding part of his job is “to make the students feel more comfortable expressing their ideas in front of people.” He adds: “Drama opens their eyes, and they’re able to be more empathetic.”

Although the stereotype is that drama geeks are taunted, even abused, by the rest of the student population, Seth finds the opposite is true. Singing and dancing in front of his nonperforming schoolmates “widens communication with them.” Whether that’s due to the heightened empathy that Wlasick observes in his student actors, or simply the respect nonperformers come to feel for anyone who would risk appearing on stage, the result is that the school play transforms parties on both sides of the proscenium.

A self-described New Jersey “theater mom,” Nancy Benincasa volunteered backstage on the nine high school productions her three children appeared in while attending the Hun School of Princeton. With each play, she witnessed subtle changes in the students as they progressed from first auditions to rehearsals and performances, then, finally, to the cast party.

Benincasa calls the transformation process “the magic,” noting: “Boys are usually embarrassed at first; they fight the magic terribly.” Conversely, she found, “girls want all the magic they can get.” Eventually, though, the boys come around, feel the adrenaline rush of performance, and by closing night, Benincasa says, “they never want it to end.”

It’s not only the kids who are transformed. In the final weeks before the performances, Benincasa says with a laugh, “things just start disappearing from home. You always see someone’s patio set on stage.” She cringed as she watched a gold ball gown from her closet transformed on the Hun stage year after year, first as a dress in “Antigone,” then a vest in “Grease,” finally showing up as pieces of trim in “Noises Off.”

At home in ‘Our Town’

Many fortunate schools regularly present lavish productions in state-of-the-art performance spaces, complete with orchestras, professional-quality sets and costumes, and cutting-edge direction and choreography. Yet, one of the most durable plays presented year after year in schools throughout the country requires no set, no orchestra, no elaborate lighting and the simplest of costumes: “Our Town,” by Thornton Wilder.

According to the play’s licensing agent, Samuel French, more than 200 schools presented “Our Town” last year. It’s amazing -- and reassuring -- that in the noisy, media-drenched, fame/sex/scandal-centric 21st century, a play celebrating the honest truths of daily life, love, marriage and death continues to resonate.

On the surface, nothing much happens in “Our Town.” The Stage Manager tells us it’s a typical morning in Grover’s Corners, N.H. We meet a paperboy on his pre-dawn rounds, a milkman and a doctor just coming home from delivering a baby. Before we know it, 2 1/2 hours have passed, a boy and a girl have grown up and married, the girl has died in childbirth, and the audience agrees with her that life on Earth is a wonderful, precious thing.

I’ve long thought that if there is such a thing as the Great American Play, it’s “Our Town.” Its artful construction and language, the way it involves and moves us through the power of suggestion, and its canny ability to speak potently to differing cultures and generations -- what other modern play comes close?

Filmmaker Scott Hamilton Kennedy filmed a largely African American and Latino cast at Compton’s Dominguez High School in 2000 through rehearsals and performance of the play, the first play presented at the school in two decades. Kennedy’s finished film, “OT: Our Town,” seen on PBS and at film festivals, not only shows the play’s ability to transform its diverse cast and audience into the residents of Grover’s Corners, but also the ability of the Dominguez players to transform Grover’s Corners into “their town.”

Experiencing life

Thousands of miles north of Dominguez, in an Alaskan island fishing village, Petersburg High School presented “Our Town” earlier this school year. School secretary Benita Tulloch happily talked about how impressed she was by the play’s ability to “take you back” as it conjures up one’s own memories of the life events Wilder dramatized. She watched the students in the audience as they adjusted to the lack of sets and props. “As they got into it,” she recalls, “they realized props weren’t necessary; it was the people and their memories and the life cycle of the town ... that impacted the students and caused them to think about things they haven’t thought about before.”

Tulloch could have been speaking of Grover’s Corners when she reported the production’s capacity attendance: “Our community is close-knit, so anything the school provides draws in everybody.”

Caesar Rodney High School in Camden, Del., has one of those glamorously equipped school theaters. However, because drama and art teacher Eddy Seger believes “high school is the last great place we have as adults, as a society, to tell kids what we think is important,” he’s spurned lavish production capabilities to mount the bare-stage “Our Town” three times since 1988.

By transforming his students into the inhabitants of Grover’s Corners, Seger allows them to explore “those things we think are important,” things we’re often told but need to experience to really learn.

I know if the speaker at my high school commencement told us that we’re all a part of a community; that love is rich; that loss is inevitable; and that small, everyday things have big meanings we’re too busy to appreciate, the message was lost on us that day in the rush to get out of there.

Instead, I learned those lessons, in part, by leading my fellow villagers out of Anatevka, watched by an orchestra, a stage crew, my family, my friends, my tormentors, my teachers and hundreds of people I’d never met. Some of them, I hear, still talk about it.

I’ll never forget it.

David Rambo is a playwright based in Los Angeles.