By Ann V. Klotz
“House to half.”
“Cue music.”
“Lights up.”
Behind the scenes, there is a small army of helpers. Ida, our dance teacher and my longtime collaborator, is backstage, and so is my husband, Seth. They will remind the cast where to stand for entrances, what props to pick up before going onstage. Another teacher hushes the chatter, reties scarves, soothes nerves. In the classroom off the theatre, two more grown-ups—our assistant head and our alumnae director—are doing their best to keep the makeshift green room quiet. Our runners, Kareen, a new ninth grader, and Gwyneth, a student in the eighth grade, stand ready to help the girls who must enter or exit from the back of the theatre snake their way down the stairs, past the little gym, and up the main stairs. Kareen could find anything—a lost script, a Sharpie, a safety pin, and Gwyneth, herself a ballerina, knew all about buns and securing flyaway hair with a little bit of spray. Our tech director, Joel, and one of our tech kids, Nixon, are at the boards in the back of the theatre, running sound and lights. Cara, our music teacher, is ready to conduct the ukulele orchestra in the opening song and the reprise which serves as the finale. Eleven adults—or almost adults—and 46 girls. The ratio of adults to children was almost right.
I’m the headmistress of an all-girls school, and between all the administrative tasks and the fundraising trips, I love making plays. In pre-pandemic days, I directed a play each spring with the girls in our Primary Division, grades K-4. We’d develop the script through improv, and I’d incorporate lots of the girls’ suggestions and ideas. My office would be transformed into a costume shop; Ida and I were always begging the homeroom teachers for more rehearsal time, and we wondered, every year, if the girls would pull it together.
“They always do,” Ida had reassured me a few days before this play, our first post-pandemic production, was scheduled to open.
Seated in the second row, a music stand holding my binder, my script open to the first page, I wasn’t so sure they could.
Back in the late summer, when the number of girls who wanted to be in the production swelled past 40, I returned to a script I’d written decades earlier for the children’s theatre I ran in college. I’d directed Meanwhile, Back at the Castle several times since then, but this time, I had to figure out how to expand the script. I wrote a few new stories; I double-cast The Emperor’s New Clothes and Snow White and Rose Red. I wanted each child to feel her part mattered. We rehearsed three afternoons a week from the end of August—when school began—until the end of September. It was preposterous to think that we could manage a full script in a single month, but the month was all we had. After that, my travel schedule picked up, so these four weeks were my window, my chance to be a drama teacher again.
The girls didn’t embrace my sense of urgency.
They were already tired when rehearsals began at 3:30, and 5 p.m. came in a blink with too much left undone. The cast was obsessed with eating their snacks, and if one forgot her snack or had a snack she didn’t like, sometimes there were tears.
I wrote notes to the families: Please send your daughter with a snack she likes. Please remember to send in her leggings. Please help her review her lines. Please try to pick your daughter up on time.
“You look like ants at a picnic,” Ida told the girls, rehearsing the choreography for the opening song. And they did, swarming the stage, clonking into each other.
“Again,” she commanded.
“Don’t forget to sing with your eyes,” I shouted from the back of the theatre. “No pasta fingers—extend the energy all the way out. And smile!”
I felt scoldy that last week of rehearsals, as if I were yelling when, really, I was trying to be heard above the girls’ chatter. I hoped, through force of will, to ready them for their single performance. I felt irritated that some girls still didn’t know their lines and were wrecking it for those who had worked so hard.
“If you don’t know your lines by Friday,” I announced on Wednesday, “you might not be able to be in the play at all.” I glared at the whole crew, sitting, dispirited, on the stage.
Cheap scare tactics. But effective.
“When is the play?” one child whispered.
“On Saturday,” her friend answered.
“This Saturday?” the first child gasped.
At the dress rehearsal, too many girls were still inaudible, even with the microphones hanging over the stage. I knew we just hadn’t rehearsed enough for any of the children to feel confident. We’d had illness, conflicts, too many kids, and clearly too little time. Some girls wanted to boss other girls; some were stuck saying lines in ways that made no sense, unable to break free of emphasizing peculiar words. Some children seemed blasé about performing; others had poured their souls into their roles, whispering lines to other actors on stage.
“You can’t do that!” I barked at one of the whisperers. “I know you’re trying to help, but if someone forgets her line, you have to save it the way your character would.” The children looked blank. For many of them, this would be their first time on stage. They had no idea what I meant. I took a deep breath. I did not like this impatient version of myself.
The play consisted of six stories, written as fractured fairy tales—and most were too long. The dialogue I’d written was quick and snappy, no challenge for college actors or even high school actors, but as one rehearsal had followed the next, I’d realized it was too sophisticated for most eight-year-olds. If you have to explain a joke, repeatedly, the flaw is with the script.
I was still cutting Snow White and Rose Red the morning of the show. The irate elf didn’t know her lines for the last section, and the scene was a train wreck. I called that cast a half hour before the others were due.
“The scene is too long; here’s what we’re doing,” I said, firm, refusing to be swayed by Claire’s plaintive eyes. She was the second Red Rose and knew all her lines. She knew everyone’s lines. I showed them the cut. We practiced. Twice.
“Got it?” I asked them.
“Got it, Ms. K.”
“You okay, Claire?” She nodded, mute, generous if reluctant.
I had told the girls early on that they never had to worry when I jumped up and down and told them what to do. The only time they had to worry was when I got quiet or pushed my glasses down my nose and looked at them over the red frames.
To reinforce how high the stakes were, I pushed my glasses down and looked over them. Stern. Sarah, the first Rose Red, trembled.
“All right, then. Don’t forget, Evelyn.” I glared at the elf. “It’s on your shoulders.”
The rest of the girls arrived, giddy and nervous.
“Where’s my plastic bag?” Evie asked, worried. The costumes were in large ziplock bags, laid out on the rows of chairs in the theatre, members of each cast grouped together with the same color T-shirt. There was a red row, a purple one, a green, royal blue, pale blue and black one. Otherwise, bedlam.
“Where did you leave it?”
“Over there,” she pointed to the green row. “Oh, there it is!” She skipped away.
“Will you do my hair, Ms. K.?” asked Lorelei.
“Is my bun okay?” asked Fiona, the long-suffering wife of the conceited emperor.
“I have my flower,” Leigh announced, delighted. She, double-cast as a rosebush and a nightingale, had mislaid her pink rose the day before. Kareen had found it under the props table.
“Eww, do I really need gel?” fretted Josie.
“You do,” I said, slicking back her wisps.
I remade messy ponytails, smiled, whispered encouragement. They were tingling with excitement. This was it. We worked the two scenes that had never gone well, and then we ran the whole show again.
“Will they be too tired?” Seth and I had wondered in our kitchen the night before, glum at how poorly the dress rehearsal had gone.
“Another run-through is our only hope,” I’d declared, and he agreed. They had to do one full run, no stops. They had to feel what the play could be minus the forgotten lines and my interrupting to tell them to stop standing in front of each other or to cheat out so we could see their faces.
“Half hour,” the stage manager whispered. “It’s 2:30. You told me to stop you so we can open the house. There are a lot of people waiting.”
“I know, I know, but we just have to finish. Let’s see if we can get through it.” We were still seven pages from the end, but this was one of the strongest scenes; the kids in this story understood pacing.
We finished. It was choppy, but worlds better than the day before. I could see that it might be a play—but there was almost no time in between the end of that final rehearsal and the start of the show. I had hoped we’d have time for a careful warm-up, had hoped to review a few more tricky moments, but we were out of time.
“Let’s make a circle, girls. Concentration, energy, consonants, volume, no Mack-Truck pauses. Light up the sky. Remember, it’s a play, not a work. I love you. Now, places.” Off they skittered.
That’s the crux of it, isn’t it? That I love them. I love making plays with children; I love watching them stretch, flowers to sunlight, striving to create a make-believe world. I love seeing them grow braver, more confident. I delight when a child makes a big choice, finds a new way to say a line, rolls with something unexpected that happens on stage. To be with kids making plays is one of my greatest joys.
From my seat in the second row, I watch the children enter from all directions: 46 third-, fourth- and fifth-grade girls, all wearing black leggings and their color-coded T-shirts. Many sported accessories: a crown or hat, a square of bright-colored silk tied like an apron or a cape, ribbon sashes that read Trusty Servant, or Wicked Witch of the West, or Guard. They move into position.
They speak the lines in the opening poem.
And I feel it. That moment of ebullience, champagne bubbles through my bloodstream—the play inflating to become a better version of itself. The girls are on fire, jumping cues exactly as I’d implored them to do at every rehearsal. Leigh, my nightingale, is enchanting; Eleanor’s line, “A handsome prince,” delivered saucily, brings the first laugh.
Directors know in a show’s first moments how a performance will go. And I know this: Scenes will go beautifully; lines and staging will fall into place. The emperor, another Evelyn, will be radiant, full of conceit, until he discovers he isn’t wearing any clothes. Then his astonishment and vulnerability will make me gasp. The witches will be hilarious. The irate elf will remember the new cut. The frog and the princess will be flawless—loud and funny.
Before me, from chaos, confidence emerges.
At the curtain call, thunderous applause will be followed by a bow that almost everyone will execute at the same time. On the girls’ faces, I will see grins, exhilaration, joy, wonder. I exhale. I know. This play—heroines on a quest filled with obstacles—like all great fairy tales, is headed toward its own happily ever after.
Ann V. Klotz is a writer, an empty-nester, and a frequent feeder of two cats and three dogs. She holds an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from Bay Path University, and her work weaves together reflections on forty-two years of teaching and lessons learned in motherhood. When she isn’t writing, she runs Laurel School in Shaker Heights, Ohio. www.annvklotz.com.
Photo courtesy of Laurel School