School is finally starting to get interesting...a bit. My intro to theatre class is probably my favorite so far because it is the only real class introducing materials and plays I haven't read before (or at least ones I'm actually interested in). We just finished reading a play called "Master Harold and the boys" which is about what it's like to live in South Africa as a white person while being friends with the native blacks. And tomorrow we are discussing a play called "Top Girls" which is all about what it means for women to be successful. They are very interesting reads and provide fun debates in class :)
In my play analysis class, we have read "Enemy of the People" and "Equus". Neither of those plays sparked my interest all that much but next week we are reading "Doubt" (which I have read before and absolutely loved!) I don't have all that much to report in any of the other classes.
We had our first show of "A Thousand Cranes" yesterday morning.We performed it twice (first time was for 6th graders and the second show was for 4th/5th graders). For those of you who don't know the story of "A Thousand Cranes", it is a true story about a Japanese girl named Sadako who gets Leukemia from the radiation poisoning of the Hiroshima bomb in WWII. She started to fold oragami paper cranes in the hope to reach 1000 as it is Japanese legend that folding a thousand will grant a person a wish. Sadako sadly dies before she is able to fold 1000. Her friends and classmates finish folding her cranes and now she is recognized as a symbol for peace and has monuments in Japan and Washington D.C. I was only there for the first show since I had to get to class, but my stage manager told me that during the second show, there was a blind boy and after the show his teacher asked if he could hold the props and oragami cranes to "see" what everyone was talking about during the show. When he held the paper cranes, his face lit up and everyone was so touched they started crying. There was also a girl in the audience who placed cranes at the monument in DC for her grandfather who fought in WWII and another student was a leukemia survivor.
It is for reasons like the above that I absolutely love theatre. I love how a simple show can affect and touch the lives of so many people with drastically different backgrounds. A show can unite an audience in a way that isn't possible in sports or seeing movies. Theatre brings to life REAL human emotions and allows the audience to connect to the characters they are seeing onstage. It allows us to know that there are people like us out there and that our problems are problems that everyone has. We can know there is always someone who will listen to us. It is the joy of bringing together a crowd of students for 30 minutes to teach them about peace. THAT is what makes me get up in the morning and deal with the long hours and all the other stress that comes with the job.
Hopefully there will be more to write this weekend. However I desperately need to go to sleep! Thanks for reading!
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