So I wrote last how I had drafted a play for the Language Festival. It was a very tiring, but rewarding experience.

I worked with 20 students from the 5th grade, whom I do not teach, and one student from one of my 4th grade classes. The title of my play was Story Trouble. It was about two students who hate to read. Their character names were Page and Turner. They start throwing the books around in the library and get caught by the librarian, Miss Hardback, who orders them to clean up the mess. The two start to clean up but then decide to take a rest. They fall asleep and while they are sleeping suddenly the characters from the books they were tossing come to life. The Cat in the Hat is behind the characters’ “awakening.” The problem is that the characters do not know where they are or from which story they have come. The Cat in the Hat wakes Page and Turner up and they have to figure out which characters belong to which stories in order to send them home. At the end of the play, the characters sing and dance. At the same time, students fill the theatre aisles with books and sing the same some in a flashmob style. The theme of the play is that reading is magical and books are full of adventure and fun.

I picked stories that the students were familiar with — so there was the Cat in the Hat, Goldilocks, Humpty Dumpty, Little Red Riding Hood and Grandma Wolf, Cinderella, Captain Hook, Peter Pan, the Seven Dwarfs, the White Rabbit, Chicken Little, A little Pig and the Wolf, and the Grinch. What was difficult in directing this play is that many of the kids’ English levels were low. So before we could get into the acting, I had to work on the pronunciation of the lines and the meaning of what they were saying.

The funny thing is that in China, the teaching style is for kids to just memorize things and spew the words back verbatim. Comprehension is of little concern. So in class, I can ask questions from 1-10. But if I change the order of the questions, the order of their responses will not change because they memorized 1-10 without any clue of the meaning. So if question 1 is “How old are you?” and question 10 is “What day is today?” and I change the order and ask question 10 first, I will always get the answer, “I am 10 years old.”

So rehearsals were very slow going. The pronunciation was off and the lines were read with no expression. I only had 4 1/2 weeks to whip the show into something I could be proud of. At first, I thought I would do the Pedro Almodovar style of acting: I would perform every character and they would just have to mimic what I did. But the kids were very shy and not used to performing in such an expressive manner. So it made them even more introverted or frightened to try. Plus, these were not my students. Only one in the cast was from my classes. The other students work with the other drama teacher and his style is very different from mine. So I had to start from scratch and build trust with them so they could feel comfortable performing in front of me.

Now you may be wondering why did I pick these kids if they did not know me???? Well, the other drama teacher cast them without my knowing it and then dumped them and the responsibility for directing on me. I did not have the heart to recast the show since he had already told them they had parts in the play. None of the boys he selected wanted to play the lead, so I brought in a student from one of my classes. I wrote about him before. He is the black student who gets a really hard time. So only my student knew the acting terms like improvise or pantomime or tableau. There was no way we would ever get to be show-ready with one rehearsal a day.

I went to the administration and explained that I needed to increase the amount of rehearsals, which would result in an increase in my hours causing me to rack up overtime. I was told it was fine and I scheduled the additional times. We met two times a day to rehearse: an hour at lunch and 1.5 hours after school. The flashmob would be comprised of 180 students from my classes. I would rehearse the song and the dance with them during my class times so that by the time the show came about I would just have to position them in the aisles and work out a safe way to get them into place for the song and exit the theatre. The week before and of the festival, I would increase rehearsals to 3 times a day adding in a 6:30-7:30 rehearsal slot.

What seemed like an impossible task started working. I had time to go through the play line by line and talk about what was happening in the play, the intentions of the characters, and basically develop a relationship with the kids so they no longer felt uncomfortable with me and they were able to take directions without feeling like I was criticizing them. My classes were picking up the song and dance, and I was able to select 6 classes out of my 18 that were show-worthy.

At the start of all of this, my sister came to visit. I felt bad and was rather grumbly because underneath I was terrified that I couldn’t pull it off. She was kind enough to help me divide the play into small scenes so that it was able to focus better on the tasks needed rather than being overwhelmed by the weight of the entire production. I also called my friend Katherine Perry who gave me advice and words of encouragement.

With the increased rehearsal schedule, the students started responding. Then my next fight was to get the set, props, costumes, and backdrop together. I had drawn a sketch of what the set should look like (a typical library – bookshelves, tables and chairs – which I had planned to take from some of the classrooms that were recently built, but not being used). The school has a costume shop that employs seamstresses. I was told that anything I needed would be made by them. At the start of this process, I pulled pictures of the characters and examples of Halloween costumes of those characters so that they could be made. I was told they could easily be made. I was told to photograph the library at school and the school would have the backdrop made of my photo so from the audience it would look like the library continued beyond the set.

My school is owned by the richest real estate company in China. They build expensive gated communities for the emerging rich families in China. In the middle they build a school to pilfer more money out of these families. However, the school provides no books or resources.

The school is big on having large scale productions. The advertising wing of the real estate company printed the backdrop I needed. The costumes were another story. At the last minute, the school forced the parents to buy the costumes for their kids. As a result, some of the costumes did not arrive until two days before the performance. The set was not moved into the theatre until two days before the show. They made the students in my play carry the huge bookcases and tables from the 4th floor of a building on the other side of the campus to the theatre. Now the halls and stairs are tiled and very slippery. I cannot even imaging this happening in the US. If some little Johnny fell on the steps and was crushed by a bookcase in the US, can you imagine the lawsuit and repercussions???? Well, this is China!

Towards the end of the rehearsals, the kids were actually starting to get the whole acting process. I was thrilled to see they started coming up with their own ideas for actions and reactions for their characters to do. By the time we did the dress rehearsal the 2 evenings before the performance, my show was terrific. I was really proud of the hard work the kids had done. The principals (American and Chinese) were thrilled with my play and expressed how impressed they were with the students’ performances. They had never seen Chinese students with such expression and that the students’ English had improved immensely.

There was another production in the festival that a Chinese teacher had adapted and directed. It was a 30 minute version of The Merchant of Venice acted by 4th graders. It was absolutely horrible. Not only was it boring but the kids had no clue what the story was about or how to say the lines. Instead of Christians and Jews, they were saying crystals and jewels. There is a line in Merchant, “all that glitters is not gold” but I assure you it is not a play about jewelry. The Chinese principal asked me to work on that play to improve it. He had my classes cancelled the next 2 days so that I could improve the other show. Is this a school or summer stock??????

I rewrote some sections of the play and directed the students so that there was a marked improvement over what it had been. But I could not get over why anyone in their right mind would have picked Merchant of Venice for 4th graders who are just learning to speak English. It is a very complicated and politically charged play for adults. Why??????

On the day of the festival, the lead boy, the black student, disappeared. No one could find him on campus. I had walked him to the rehearsal space where all the children were having their make-up applied. Then I had to go back and work on Merchant. That was the last time I saw him that day. When it was time for the show, he was nowhere to be found. The other kids were already in their costumes and no one felt comfortable with the lines to do his part. The other drama teacher offered to play the part. So he performed in the play with the other kids. At first I was horrified watching because he did not know the lines and he kept saying other character’s lines. It was a mess. But looking back, the kids did a great job because they were able to act around him and keep the play going. The flashmob at the end was terrific. It wasn’t the show that I had worked for, but it was still something to be proud of.

At the end, the student showed up with another Chinese teacher. She found him by the school entrance. He would speak to her in Chinese and she would tell me in English what he said. At that point, I blew up and said, “He is American. He can speak to me directly!” Once he no longer had his interpreter, he plead the 5th. No matter what I asked, he just looked at me with this smug face and refused to speak. So I have no clue where he was or what happened.