If there is such a thing as perpetual motion, youth theater in Saline Michigan shows it. Little more than a week ago, Shrek the Musical finished a wonderful three-day run on our local high school stage. Saline Varsity Blues will begin holding auditions for its upcoming musical review starting tonight. [1,2]
This Friday, Saline Community Education Cultural Arts will debut its 2019 “Junior Theater” this Friday at 7:00pm in the Liberty Auditorium. Subsequent performances will be offered on Saturday, March 16 at 7:00pm, and Sunday, March 17 at 2:00pm. [3,4]
While such things are the focus of proud parents’ calendars and frequently made front pages when The Saline Reporter was our solo hometown newspaper, the true impact has always been larger. The youth who go through this playing parts large or small, in or outside of the limelight, move forward differently.
Even if “theater” isn’t their thing.
“You learn about collaboration,” Saline Area Schools Cultural Arts Program Specialist & Theater Manager Rebecca Groeb told Saline Journal last weekend. “It’s required to put stuff on stage.
You also figure out pretty quickly, ‘Wow! I have to be very diplomatic if I’m going to get anything done here.’
It’s a process that also necessarily exposes raw vulnerabilities, in a most public way. That collaboration isn’t simply one of learning to trust almost everyone involved in the production; inescapably, it is becoming known to them, knowing that they know, and knowing that they know that you know that they know.
To expand on this, Ms Groeb shared an experience she herself had had in directing Superindendent Scot Graden for a brief cameo role for one of her Junior Theater productions. Notwithstanding difference in age and authority between the elementary school students and him, she saw him go through what appeared to be all the same emotions, from the reality that hits with wardrobing, to anticipation of stepping onto lit stage from obscurity of the wings. [5]
He only had a few lines, but I wasn’t sure how he felt about memorizing them. He was playing a school superintendent — I know, typecasting — and he was carrying a clipboard. So I said, ‘You know, you can just write your lines on the clipboard and read them if you want.
Right away he looked at me and said, ‘Rebecca, there are students in this production with 172 lines to remember. I have nothing to complain about.’
He was a part of the cast.
She spoke from her own years on the stage as well, beginning from the first hook, in the fifth grade, when she saw what her mother did with the part of Gertie Cummings in the first Saline Area Players musical, Oklahoma! She saw a very different side of her mother, the late Teddy Groeb; at the same time, immediately fitting. [6-8]
“That was cool to me, and it got me thinking,” she added. “There wasn’t much for then for kids. So Doris Krauchaar, our music teacher, adapted things. That was really clever of her. We performed on the old Union School stage. I learned to sing. I learned to play a part.”
This would be her path from then on in the public school system, through her own graduation in 1981 from Saline High School. It also brought her onto the same stage with her mother for any number of Saline Area Players performances. [9]
I think of that to this day, acting with my mom.
Theater is a place where we can be passionate. Once you experience that, it becomes part of who you are. You bring it to your expression of whatever you choose to get involved in. Sports. Engineering.
It’s also an opportunity to heal hurts in our life. It provides a community for that. It focuses emotions on a specific goal and end. Then it’s an activity for getting there in an intense, deliberate manner with connectionst hat are difficult to replicate elsewhere.
One of the benefits of having grown up in this community, having been intimately involved in youth theater throughout, is an ability to remain connected to those who have gone through this Saline Community Education offering sometimes decades earlier. Indeed, D² Enterprises covered some of Ms Groeb’s earliest work as an artistic director in this community with Varsity Blues during the 1980s. [10]
“Thirty five years later, I have students come back to me to talk about their performances,” Rebecca Groeb concluded. “I see them as confident adults, people more able to express who they are. I see it, and they tell me they see it in themselves, because of doing this.”
References
- “SHS Drama Club ‘Shrek the Musical’ plays Ellen A Ewing Center for the Performing Arts, ready to exceed expectations” Dell Deaton (March 1, 2019) Saline Journal.
- “The 2019 season of Varsity Blues: A Musical Review” Varsity Blues.
- “Saline Community Education Cultural Arts” Saline Area Schools.
- “Liberty School” Saline Area Schools.
- Scot Graden (home page).
- “How ‘Oklahoma!’ Birthed The Modern Musical” Laura Stavropoulos (August 1, 2018) U Discover Music.
- “Past Shows” Saline Area Players.
- “Laurey fights with Gertie!” Izt Ilys (November 16, 2014) YouTube.
- Saline Area Players (home page).
- Saline Varsity Blues (home page).
