Hurricane Camp gives children chance to stage a rescue narrative
On Wednesday morning, eight children huddle on the first floor of the Main Street Theater’s annex, trying to decide what happens after the grim reapers save the pixies.
“A wedding? Or a dance party?” someone suggests.
The response is unanimous: “Nah!”
The tone’s off. As part of the theater’s Hurricane Camp, the children, ages 8 to 11, are tasked to write a play by noon, rehearse it in the afternoon and present the production to the younger participants by 3 p.m.
The theme was supposed to be death — hence the reapers — but the play’s plot, as well as its theme, is now less macabre. Still, a musical sendoff is inappropriate, the group decides.
The writers ponder their protagonists’ motivation. The grim reapers aren’t in Pixieland simply to harvest souls. They’ve come because they’ve recently been laid off and have decided to help the Lost Souls find their homes.
Pixieland, after all, has been flooded. The grim reapers saw it on television. “They’re like the first responders during Harvey,” says Ian, one of the participants.
So the play turns into a rescue narrative — a sci-fi parable about spurring into action during disaster time.
Teaching artist Brandie Minchew is happy with the new direction. One girl, Lorelei, tells the group that the grim reapers don’t want
to just sit around while they’re unemployed. They want to do something to help. Minchew agrees with her note.
“I love the theme of not just sitting still and watching, but going and doing something,” Minchew tells Lorelei.
“But we’re not like the grim reapers,” Aubri, a participant wearing a “Houston Strong” T-shirt, points out. “In real life we’re kids, so we can’t do anything.”
During the height of Main Street Theater’s in-demand Hurricane Camp — a post-flood tradition first started in the wake of Hurricane Ike — children crowd the theater’s spaces and work on creating stories. It’s a much-needed service for parents waiting for schools to reopen and a necessary creative outlet for children, some of them stuck indoors during Hurricane Harvey and the days following the devastating storm.
The participants speak about watching their parents haul garbage out of flooded homes and closed-down schools in the past few days. They’ve been seeing these kinds of stories for nearly two weeks.
But, for the Pixieland Flood group, the camp isn’t just an escape from the traumas of the hurricane. They’re communing with other artists their age, digesting one of the first major disasters of their lives.
Minchew notices how different writers look at flooding in different ways — how Lorelei’s optimism exists alongside Aubri’s somber observation that not everyone who wants to help can.
And so the teachers at Main Street Theater are communicating with some of Harvey’s youngest affected population via a surprisingly effective language — theater. The play has the sheen of silliness you might expect from something written in three hours by seven or eight fourthgraders, but within the grim-reaper/pixie plot is a stunning metaphor for crisis.
It’s half past 11 in the morning and the play is almost done. After lunch, they’ll begin to rehearse. Minchew goes through her three-act outline, taking in last-minute suggestions for how to punch up the story.
Aubri has an inspired subplot exploring how the floodwater permanently changes the natural environment of Pixieland, but it’s too complicated, so the idea’s tabled. Ian takes a stab. His legs kicking the air under his chair, he tells the group what the grim reaper does when he finds the pixies. He delivers the detail with a smile: “Maybe he can get her a tetanus shot.”