Plays are Greek to them

About 120 toga-wearing La Cañada Elementary School sixth-graders re-wrote and acted out parts of ancient Greek plays Monday, using props made out of cardboard and paper ? everything from swords, to lyres to the head of Medusa.

Meghan Fuelling, 12, and her team of students decided to modernize “The Golden Fleece,” turning it into a comedy.

Medea, played by Caribay Franke, 12, asks the great musician Orpheus, played by Austin Lee, 12, to sing a lullaby, hoping that the dragon guarding the golden fleece will fall asleep so Jason and his Argonauts can take the fleece without a fight.

But instead of singing a melodic tune, Austin starts rapping.

“No! A lullaby!” Caribay said. “What kind of musician are you?”

The students who crammed into the library to watch the plays laughed.

“We wanted it to be fun,” Meghan said. “We wanted them to want to watch a Greek myth. It was good.”

Sixth-graders in California study ancient Greece, and the teachers at La Cañada used the myths to help teach history and language arts by asking groups of students to modernize the plays and perform them, said teacher Bob Berger.

“Kids learn more if they have experiences,” said Berger, who helped organize the event for the third year with fellow teachers Trysha Glaser, Kimberly Lauxen and Caroline Chai. “They have a better appreciation for cultures if they do something in addition to reading about them. They will remember this the rest of their lives.”

Each sketch was based on classics that feature ancient Greek gods such as Zeus, Hermes and Apollo, and characters like Hercules. They lasted about five minutes and the sixth-graders performed them all ? approximately 40 skits ? in four or five hours.

“What’s fun is to see what different interpretations they come up with,” Berger said. “They relate a lot to comic book heroes and these [Greek gods] are like the first superheroes.”

Lance Bird, 11, liked the challenge of writing and acting.

“I liked it because it was a group project and you didn’t have to think up everything on your own,” Lance said. “We can use a lot of people’s ideas and mesh them together.”

He wasn’t convinced every student would want to remember their time on stage.

“If the play is a hit, you want to remember it,” Lance said. “But if it’s a flop and dies you won’t want to remember it because it’s too embarrassing.”

His experience was a memorable one, he said.

His team’s play about Hermes and Apollo was a hit, he said.