An open-ended solution to teenage troubles

By Elisabeth Marshall

Few of the students packed into East Rock auditorium seemed to be paying much attention to the actors onstage. One student, leaning back with arms crossed and a baseball hat over his eyes, looked ready for a 9 a.m. nap. Another, giggling sporadically, kept nudging her friend in the back row and pointing toward unsuspecting classmates. The Open End Theater (OET)—a non-profit company composed of Yale undergraduates, New Haven students, and the occasional paid adult—had just started its performance of Devonya's Decision, a play about high school pregnancy, in front of a notoriously difficult audience: a crowd of middle school students. Yet after only a few minutes of dialogue filled with teenage slang and rips on an overzealous hall monitor, even the most restless of middle-schoolers began to take notice.

COURTESY THOMAS GREENE The cast of the Open End Theater brings together New Haven residents, Yale undergraduates and New Haven students to talk about tough decisions through drama.

"You're grounding me?" an incensed Devonya yells at her onstage mother. "I'm 16 years old, practically an adult! You had a baby by the time you were 16."

The students are absorbed into the play by the time it reaches its climatic junction—Devonya herself now burdened with her own pregnancy—allowing the moderator to begin his discussion with a more energized audience. "What should Devoyna do?" Richard Squeri, a professional counselor, asks in a booming voice. "Do you all understand the options?" After calling on a few outspoken kids, he orchestrates a vote. The students make their choice: an overwhelming majority declares that Devoyna should keep the baby. The audience seems satisfied, even as the actors reconvene in an imaginary welfare office to complete the production. "That was a receptive audience," Open End Theater Executive Director and retired Yale professor Thomas Greene declares afterwards, "but in the past they've come up and asked for autographs."

What's my motivation?

The success of the OET has always depended in large part on the audience's response. Its very intent, as actor Lisa Grinfeld, TC '01, explains, is to get students thinking about the issues they bring up while avoiding any sort of directed moralizing. However, with its recent move into the Blue Book as an integral part of the requirements for Theater Studies 225a, "Production Seminar: Theater in Education and Community Service," the OET must now also prove itself to be a beneficial addition to the Yale curriculum.

COURTESY THOMAS GREENE

Assistant professor Nadine George, who will be teaching the course, has confidence in its academic value. "I believe combining theory and practice is an invaluable way to learn, especially in the arts," she said. "I developed the framework for this course so that students will be able to investigate the larger issues surrounding arts in education and community development...I don't think anyone here doubts the importance of this work." Greene himself has spent several months of his retirement encouraging the Yale administration to incorporate the OET into its curriculum, not only to allow students to devote more time and energy to the four-year-old company, but also to ensure that students will no longer suffer from scheduling conflicts due to early morning showtimes.

The company hasn't needed to rely on curricular backing in the past. "There has been a huge positive response from community leaders, teachers, and even students," Grinfeld gushed. But the benefit that the OET stands to gain from a group of academically-motivated Yalies is impressive. George promises that there will be opportunities for students to work in design, sound, scriptwriting, and video production. That's an appealing prospect for a theater company currently dependent on old, frequently-reworked scripts, and sets that boast a makeshift computer terminal as their most sophisticated prop. The company, George said, "is looking to build its repertoire" in the upcoming months of student activity.

A gaggle of gowns

Actor Pansy Garrett, a former student at East Rock and currently a sophomore at Southern Connecticut State University, warned that "when [the audience] sees Yale students coming in, they're like `oh, here they come preaching!' But when they see a little piece of themselves in [the actors who grew up New Haven], they really start to think." Neither Swennen nor Garrett wants the company to become overly affiliated with Yale at the cost of alienating its audience. George dismissed this fear. "I don't think anybody is interested in making this a wholly Yale-run organization. That would be antithetical to the mission of having students of different ages work together."

COURTESY THOMAS GREENE

Either way, the possible consequences of expanded Yale affiliation will be tempered by the syllabus of Theater Studies 225a, which dedicates just three of its 13 Thursday meetings to actually performing with the company. The rest of the class periods will be spent analyzing such topics as the National Standards for the Arts, various community-centered theater initiatives, and other issues related to the arts in education.

Meanwhile, some cast members hope that the upcoming semester will bring changes in the company, allowing it to venture into new territory. "I feel that it was a good decision to structure the OET the way it is now," Grinfeld said, referring to the company policy on avoiding all personal comments during the performances, "but I would like to see incorporated some aspect of students talking to students, a sort of peer counseling between actors and the audience." Currently, actors only respond to students' questions as their onstage personas would—even during the discussion that takes place after the play ends—in an effort to avoid what Greene called an adult-sanctioned "preferred solution." Yet Grinfeld noted that some Yale students have a harder time capturing the audience's attention when socioeconomic or racial differences become evident. "That's why I would like to talk to the students as me, as a student. People all respond better to what is familiar."

Grinfeld also feels uncomfortable with the students' voting patterns: each performance of Devonya's Decision, barring one, has concluded with the audience voting overwhelmingly in favor of Devonya choosing to raise her baby. Swennen, noticed this phenomenon and attributed it in part to peer pressure, but does not object at all to the theater's current policies. "I've seen kids forcibly pull down their friends' hands when they try to vote for adoption or abortion!" she said. "After watching us onstage, the kids are hungry for a definitive answer. But the whole point is that there is no clear-cut solution, and we want them leaving unsure so that they'll think through what they feel is best." Greene's own description of his company emphasized that "it is essential to this theater that it presents no preferred resolution and promise no satisfactory outcome" to issues as painfully intricate as teenage pregnancy.

An open end

While new internal discussions, soon to be coupled with classroom debates, promise to change the course of the OET, members can fall back on the company's past successes for guidance. In its first four years of performances, the theater has built up a devoted following among its participants, most of whom frequently rave about their experiences. "It was like a breath of fresh air when the high school students came through the door, talking about their schools and stuff going on in New Haven." Swennen said. "It's a great reminder that the world doesn't rotate around Yale, which it sometimes feels like when you spend all your time on campus."

The company has also received a nearly universal vote of confidence from its young audience. Though Greene initially worried that middle school students would be too young an age group to approach with the issue of teenage pregnancy, he has overseen several performances in which one or more of the audience members were themselves pregnant. He treasures student responses suggesting that his message is getting through. As one middle school student wrote on a response sheet, passed out after all performances, "Yes I liked the play. Yes I would recommend it to a friend because it has to do with everyday life, and it teaches a lesson that all teenagers need to learn." Greene could hardly have phrased the company's mission better himself.

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