Setting the stage for a vibrant community
My son is now in rehearsals for his fourth musical. When the announcement for the summer musical arrived a couple of weeks ago, he took no time at all to decide that he was eager to join his fifth show. He can be a shy kid (despite his love of drama of all kinds), so his enthusiasm for performing says a lot about the people running the production.
I recently talked to Anthony DePoto, the director of the shows, and one of the creatives behind the group that organizes them, ERA Productions (he’s the A, along with Erin and Rob). When I told him about my project — writing about art and the community — his eyes lit up, and our “15 minute” conversation stretched to half an hour and would have been longer if he hadn’t needed to get back to directing the kids in “Annie, Jr.”
Anthony grew up in Danbury, and his passion for theater started at Western Connecticut, where he had intended to study to become a teacher. The teaching drive never left, though, and he channels his love of theater into inspiring others to feel the same way about the magic of sitting in a dark room and watching a story unfold on the stage.
When I teach the drama unit in my introduction to literature classes, I ask my students to think about how Broadway — the center of drama in the United States — sits right in the middle of Manhattan. That physical centrality reflects the importance of drama to human culture.
Anthony argues that Manhattan and Ancient Greece aren’t the only places where drama occupies a coveted central location, and his goal is to keep the metaphorical spotlight shining on theater in suburban Connecticut. His other venture, innerAct Theatre, is devoted to theater arts integration and training teachers and others to use dramatic techniques in their jobs. The skills required for theater are the same skills that we could and should use all the time: confidence, collaboration, and creativity.
He has worked with many different organizations, including the Sacred Heart University Men’s basketball team, which dramatically underscores his point about the centrality of theater. It helps with team building, which is just community at a smaller level, and the improvisational nature of the workshops fosters that thinking on one’s feet skill that we all need to improve.
However, during our talk, Anthony kept coming back to the kids he works with in the Bethel Parks and Rec program, the program my son attends so faithfully. The kids seem to be the heart of Anthony’s mission.
The kids involved in community theater are all working toward a common goal, sharing the tasks but each working with their own strengths. The cliques that often plague kids in schools break down. They discover that the theater gives them a space to be safe while exploring their creativity and producing something larger than themselves.
These benefits are not just nice things for theater kids but are also crucial elements in fostering a vibrant community. In theater, kids learn how to think outside that black box on the stage and see how important their imaginations are. The theater becomes a giant stage that displays what the kids are capable of and allows the community to shine.
The intangible gifts that theater brings to the community as a whole and the individual kids are incredibly valuable, so valuable that I’m not going to complain that “Tomorrow” and “Hard Knock Life” are going to be stuck in my head for the next two months. It really is worth it to see kids experiencing the joy of creativity.