The Orphanage at Studio Wayne

Show photos are by Adam Holmes

Our little homeschool has had an accidental unit study on antisemitism, facisim, and the Holocaust. First there was all the news, of course. But then it happened that we saw or worked on several plays with those themes—Underneath the Lintel gets there, as does Fiddler on the Roof (which we saw at Shenandoah Summer Musical Theater), the Animal Farm adaptation we saw at Grand Valley last fall, and Indecent, which Petra watched with me on Broadway HD. Cabaret is coming up at ShenanArts, so we’re planning to see that, and we wound up leaning in, reading Number the Stars and planning a trip to the Holocaust Museum.

But the biggest component, by far, was The Orphanage, at Studio Wayne. It’s based on a true story of an orphanage in the Warsaw ghetto in the 1940s, where Janusz Korczak cared for over 200 children, teaching them to care for each other and the community, and trying to prepare them for the horrors that were coming. Silas played Josek, an orphan whose best friend is killed on a risky mission for supplies. It was the first play he’d ever been in that was not at all goofy, which was a stretch for him. One of the directors told me that he did the entire first read in an Irish accent…

He also learned a fact that my Shakespeare people will recognize immediately: actors laugh so much more when working on a tragedy than a comedy.

Silas is working on getting better at memorization, and he was (for once) open to my advice on strategies and techniques for learning lines. He worked on them every day, and that work paid off. We used techniques that deepened his understanding of the text, and allowed him to observe the playwright’s craft in action. One of my favorite observations he made was that there’s a conflict between two kids about a magazine early in the play, and it seems like it doesn’t matter much. But then, later in the show, the same exact words come back in a much more weighty situation. “I love the architecture of this script,” he said when he told me about this discovery.

The script was a brand-new one, by Utah playwright Melissa Leilani Larson. Because she’s connected with the Wayne, which has produced several of her plays, the kids were able to communicate with her, sending questions and dramaturgical notes—including “female cardinals are not red” and “pinochle is an anachronism.” She actually changed the script to reflect their note about the birds, and the kids all think it is very cool that something they pointed out made a tiny change in this script, that will be repeated every time it is performed, anywhere in the world. No word on whether she’s taking the note about the card game.

I remain endlessly impressed with and grateful for the quality of the pedagogy at Studio Wayne. I’m not sure if they explicitly tell the kids that there is a particular educational goal of each show (or even if they think of it that way), but Silas often identifies the most important thing he’s learning. On this show, the teaching artists at the Wayne leaned into the dramaturgy side of it, bringing in experts to talk with the kids about the Holocaust, Judaisim, and how to play pinochle. Silas thought all of that was interesting (“None of these characters have plot armor, because it’s a true story.”), but what he identified as “the education component” was “the *technique* of acting. It’s so interesting!” On our car rides home, he told me all about the things he was learning about objectives, tactics, beats, responding, cuing. They worked on physical storytelling, and the power of breathing together.

Even though this story was obviously very dark—and the kids had to embody some upsetting and frightening events, without the protection of knowing that they were pretend, I completely trusted co-directors Corey Holmes and Lesley Larsen to care for this group of kids, pushing them to be uncomfortable and stretch themselves, but never unsafe. They practiced check-ins, de-roling, and other acting techniques that help protect actors’ mental health when engaging in heavy material. Silas had a great time on this show, and also developed a deep and empathetic understanding of history that he had not experienced before.

The play even got my kids (finally) interested in historical fiction. I’ve never been able to convince them to let me do historical fiction, or even realistic fiction, for our read-alouds. They want dragons and magical worlds and history didn’t cut it for them. This play shifted that, I think. They both loved Number the Stars, which we read right after The Orphanage closed. They finally get what I’ve been saying for ages, that novels are a wonderful way to learn about the lives and perspectives of people in the past.

Theater education is powerful. When I talk about this play, people always ask if I think Silas will be an actor when he grows up. I think it’s much too early to tell, and also, that’s not the point. He learns skills in every play that will serve him in any job he decides to do. He practices collaboration, empathy, creativity, working on a tight budget and an immovable deadline, seeing the world through someone else’s perspective and imagining why they might take actions he doesn’t agree with, being comfortable in front of a crowd, processing praise and criticism, reflecting on what went well and what he hopes is different next time. It’s, frankly, pretty impressive how much a kid can get out of a month of rehearsals, when the directors are this good.

This show was a stretch for him. He worked hard, and he learned so much.