Tucson Weekly: Dramatic Difference (July 31

'Summer Stage' Gives Young Actors A Unique Perspective On The Arts.
By Margaret Regan
I'M TOTALLY SOLD on the arts for kids," Wendy Lehr was saying the other day at a local watering hole.
A frequent guest actor at Arizona Theatre Company in the late '80s and current associate artistic director of the Children's Theatre Company of Minneapolis, Lehr is a redhead who moves her supple body eloquently, even when she's just sitting in a café chair. She had abandoned the Twin Cities' gray summer skies for Tucson's scorching blue so she could teach a dozen high school kids to act and move and feel.
Review Tucson in summer was "perfectly lovely," she insisted, and anyway her week in the desert was all for a good cause. Lehr was lending her talents to Summer on Stage, a first-ever theatre workshop for high school students, put together by the Arizona Theatre Company, the University of Arizona Extended University and Childsplay, the acclaimed children's theatre troupe based in Tempe. Jon Gentry, an energetic actor and associate artistic director of Childsplay, was guiding the kids through five weeks of acting training and rehearsals for a production of Dylan Thomas' Under Milk Wood, set for August 7 and 8 on the Temple of Music and Art's main stage.
In Lehr's one week with the program, she was doing her best to help the sometimes literal-minded young actors understand that theatre is an "expressive art form." The way she did it was to put them through exercises designed to encourage movement and spontaneity, to help them use their "instrument," their body and voice. Thom Lewis, a well-known dancer with Tucson's Tenth Street Danceworks, also visited the kids once a week to teach them that acting is more than just reciting words.
Theatre, opined Lehr as she dug into her curried chicken salad, "gives kids the idea of an ensemble, of working together: It's even more supportive than sports. It teaches focus, self-discipline and self-confidence. It teaches them to be in the moment, to be spontaneous. And it teaches them compassion: walking in somebody else's shoes." And that's not even counting the obvious advantages of introducing teenagers to great literature they've never heard of before, and even getting them to memorize vast tracts of it.
Upstairs in the rehearsal room at the Temple of Music and Art, Gentry was putting at least a few of those lessons into practice. Lounging in folding chairs all along the walls, a clutch of teenagers bent intently over their scripts, silently studying Thomas' poetic Welsh-tinged English. In the center of the room, a long-haired boy in slouchy jeans and a girl in a pixie cut and skin-tight pants were doing a short scene from Under Milk Wood; and at Gentry's insistence, doing it over and over. Chris was portraying a man in love, and Erin a postman whom he was begging to take a letter to his lady love.
"She's a ruby!" exclaimed Chris. "Here's my letter. Put it in her hands now."
"You're both guys," Gentry broke in. "You know how guys can be. More like, 'She's a ruby,' buddy, wink, wink."
The kids gamely kept it up, with the wiry Gentry running around them gesticulating and offering directions, until Erin finally wandered off for a hit of soda.
"Put that down," Gentry ordered her cheerfully, "and do it again."
"You're so cruel!" she joked back. "Again?"
"Again," the director replied.
During a break from rehearsals, Gentry said he had chosen the 1954 play for its "range of characters and moods."
"With the characters and the narrator there are about 50 parts," he said. "The language is wonderful. It's a challenge for these kids. It's so visual in imagery.
"The kids are using a lot of language and words they've never heard before. It's much more poetic than they're used to. They're not saying, 'I'm angry.' It's more, 'the dark, moving clouds,' and so on."
The dozen students who signed on for the full-time, five-week program represent a wide range of theatrical experience, from those who'd done yeoman service in school productions to those who didn't know the difference between upstage and downstage, Gentry said. Yet the program aims to treat one and all with professional respect. They began their stint with the same meet-and-greet session that the ATC staff bestows on all professional actors beginning rehearsals at the Temple, said Susan Dick, who coordinated the program from the Extended University end. The main instructors all have worthy theatrical credentials, and theatre students from the UA were hired as assistants to give the high schoolers an idea of an actor's career path.
The tab for the program was a bit steep at $495 per student, but not out of sync with the price of other summer camps for kids around town. Five of the students were awarded scholarships. "The finances make us anxious," Dick acknowledged, but she said she's determined to keep the program going because Tucson offers so few organized summer activities for teens. (Extended University also ran creative writing workshops and an art program in conjunction with the UA Museum of Art this summer.)
"It's a nice beginning," said Gentry, who like the others hopes Summer on Stage will become a Tucson tradition. In theatre, he adds, you can take on big subjects, "push the box bigger. We're trying to open things up."
Under Milk Wood, a production of Summer on Stage, will be performed at 7 p.m. Friday, August 8, at the Alice Holsclaw Theatre in the Temple of Music and Art, 330 S. Scott Ave. There will be an open dress rehearsal at 7 p.m. Thursday, August 7. Admission is free. Artwork made by high-school students in the Art Making and Creative Process program will be given a lobby show. For more information, call 622-2823.

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