I tagged along with my 10 year olds class for a morning of live theatre.
The drama for me as a parent is more about what happens in the audience and less about what the actors are doing on stage.
The kids were ushered into their seats, jockeying to be next to their besties and began to scan the crowd for Justin Bieber. Failing that, they looked for people they might know.
Almost instantly, a group of girls recognized a friend from their swim group who was at the same performance with her school. There was an immediate jump-shout-wave as the girls yelled each others’ names from about 6 rows away and delighted in the genuine excitement of seeing each other for the first time since practice the previous evening.
They waved like sisters separated at birth running into each other unexpectedly having lived on different continents but always knowing the others were out there—somewhere.
They yelled arbitrary things like, “How did you get here?” and when “School bus!” was the response there was a resounding, “Same! Same! What are the odds?”
The play started and with no insight about the content, the lights dimmed and two actors appeared on stage.
There were actually three actors (one hiding behind a screen) but for twelve seconds, it was meant to look like two until the adults in the crowd realized two, identically dressed people were playing the subconscious mind of the main guy. All three eventually appeared on stage together, drawing deafening shrieks and gasps from the ten year old audience.
The two were dressed in monochromatic outfits, dull colours, white make-up and some sort of beige hats that might have been made out of felt.
One boy in front of me whispered to his friend, “I think maybe they’re transgendered?”
It was then I knew the kids in the audience thought maybe this play was meant to draw from their earlier health class conversations and apply these new terms to something practical.
The kids behaved themselves and really only whispered during the play to determine seating arrangements for the bus ride home and to marvel at running into someone they knew.
They asked each other, “Did you see her?” a few times just in case it was a mirage.
Another successful fieldtrip in the books with just one conversation about whether wearing beige means a person is transgendered.
Progress.
