“It was easily the highlight of my day.  This may seem dramatic but it’s eternally significant work.  Good job, brother.”

The above is what a friend texted me the night he attended the premiere of Our Place at the High School where I teach and co-direct the drama club, Schroeder Theater Company.  

I was struck. 

Last year, in the Winter of 2020, our club bought the rights and began working on Clue: On Stage, the high school live theater edition of the 1985 cult classic, Clue: The Movie.  The student players were thrilled, riding high on both Stranger Things induced ‘80s nostalgia and the thought of putting on such a masterclass of set design, sound and lights, comedy, character acting, and whodunnit mystery.  By March of 2020 we were scrambling to patch together what we ended up calling Clue: On Zoom.  The students were troopers.  They put their creative energies into perfecting facial expressions, waist up costuming, and finding the perfect digital backdrop for their “Colonel Mustard in the Library with the wrench” etc.  When three live Zoom shows were said and done, I was beyond impressed by each student’s interest in forging on and still creating something raucous after the stage show had to be downsized and digitized.  Through all the memorable highs and lows, it was the audience appreciation that stood out to me most.  Zoom participants blew our expectations out of the water, laughter was seen in the livechat, and audience emails of thanks and “wow, that was really really cool” flowed into directors’ inboxes.  After much advice to cancel or postpone the show “a few weeks until the pandemic is over”, maybe we really did a good thing after all?

This year, in 2021 (pesky two-week pandemic still in full swing) we hoped for the stage, but were staved off by masking and distance restrictions.  What are we going to do this year?  Should we have a show?  We had aimed for putting on Almost, Maine, but instead opted for Our Place by Terry Gabbard -- a similar play comprised of disconnected vignettes all taking place at an old dock where different people claim “their place”.  We decided this time to shoot it on site, on video.  Schroeder Theater Company -- a fledgling drama club -- presents Our Place: The Movie. 

Just as we had reinvented the wheel so to speak in moving Clue to Zoom the year before, we were now taking ourselves and the (many of the same) students into uncharted territory of filmmaking.  We auditioned, cast, borrowed cameras and gear from the school’s AV department, started masked rehearsals in a classroom, and scouted public locations along Lake Ontario to find “Our Place”.  Just over a month later we were filming as best we could.  The Great Lakes wind in April is tremendous.  The first day we met to film it was 34 degrees without counting for the wind chill.  We kept losing wireless connection to the student actors’ mic packs in their back pockets out on the dock.  Costumes and props had to be tied down. The kids kept coming.  They kept smiling.  They kept practicing their lines.  We kept meeting to film whenever students could all meet, ignoring bad light angles from noonday sun, reshooting takes when the audio cut out, and pausing for sometimes significant periods of time when fishermen marched onto the (completely public) dock to drop in a line.  One Saturday we stopped and tore down five different times to make way for powerboats to be put in the lake.  The kids kept coming, they kept laughing, they kept nailing their lines. “It’s their place, too,” one actress said.

On May 21 we premiered Our Place: The Movie.  The final product ended up being only 35 minutes long.  The district wasn’t able to get the A/C on in the theater in time for the Friday show, and it was 89 degrees.  Somehow we packed the house anyway.  There the audience was again -- year two -- filling up the school theater, fanning themselves with their programs, sweat beading on their foreheads — some streaming from online at home on a Friday night.  Why??  Who cares that much about high school theater?? 

“It was easily the highlight of my day.  This may seem dramatic but it’s eternally significant work.  Good job, brother.”

Creating things matters. Good art matters.  Productivity matters.  Participation matters.  Relationships matter.  Community matters.  Raising teenagers matters.  

I will never again ask myself if it is a good idea to figure out a way to make theater with my students.  Whether it has to be on the internet, pre-recorded, or to an audience of none, creating things matters.  These students have grown in marked ways as people, learners, and creators in the two years I’ve worked with them.  I am proud to have been a part of something that will truly last beyond a lifetime.  People matter.  The work we do with them reverberates beyond the walls of our high school, beyond the invisible boundaries of our town, and beyond the time markers of 11th grade.  I hope student actors and filmmakers learn the value of who they are, what they were created for, and the true value of their work.  I hope high school directors, and artists of all kinds, shake off the lies and learn that we were made for greatness and eternality.  On Monday I will help my students learn that even the little things last.

We’ll start with the fact that the dock there in Ontario, New York is forever “our place”.