EDUCATION ANNUAL REPORT

2015 – 2016

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EDUCATION FUNDERS

Amy and David Abrams

Annenberg Foundation

The Bendit Family Foundation

Sol and Margaret Berger Foundation

Gina and David Boonshoft

Barbara Britt

Bulova Stetson Fund

Con Edison Company

Deutsche Bank

Jennifer and Bud Gruenberg

Rona Jaffe Foundation

Jephson Educational Trusts

The JPB Foundation

The J.M. Kaplan Fund

The Rita J. and Stanley H. Kaplan Family Foundation

Blanche and Irving Laurie Foundation

The Lucius N. Littauer Foundation

Claire and Cornelius Marx

Mellam Family Foundation

The Monteforte Foundation

New York City Department of Cultural Affairs

New York State Council on the Arts

Noah and Susanna Schankler

The Harold and Mimi Steinberg Charitable Trust

Sharon Sullivan and Jeffrey B. Kindler

Sy Syms Foundation

TD Bank

Theatre Forward

Tiger Baron Foundation

Laurie M. Tisch Illumination Fund

Michael Tuch Foundation

Barry C. Waldorf and Stanley Gotlin

The Walt Disney Company

Anonymous

Funders and Staff

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TEACHING ARTISTS

Chris Ceraso

Charlotte Colavin

Dominic Colon

Allison Daugherty

Andy Goldberg

Alexander Greenfield

Kel Haney

Elise Hernandez

Jeffrey Joseph

Kate Long

Victor Maog

Andres Munar

Melissa Murray

Carmen Rivera

Nilaja Sun

Judy Tate

Candido Tirado

Liam Torres

Joe White

STAFF

David Shookhoff, Director of Education

Amy Harris, Assistant Education Director, Coordinator—Paul A. Kaplan Theatre Management Program

Wade Handy, Education Programs Manager

Eric Szkarlat, Summer/Fall Education Intern

Emily Quartarone, Spring Education Intern

Staff

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Introduction

MTC Education continues to serve a diverse population of learners — adolescents and adults from all walks of life and from economically and geographically disparate communities, both in the New York Metropolitan area and, through TheatreLink, our distance-learning program, all over the country and around the world. As the following pages suggest, we custom-design our programs to meet the varying needs of the groups we serve, but this large portfolio of offerings has just two main objectives — to teach participants how to look at plays and how to write plays, thereby deepening their understanding of themselves and the world.

The broad demographic spread of the populations we serve is a critically important strength; we cherish the opportunities we provide for rich interactions in our theatres and other learning platforms for a mosaic of individuals who in the normal course of events would never encounter one another.

That said, from our inception in 1989, MTC Education has determined to seek out and serve students whose lives had been largely informed by difficulty and trauma — students labeled at-risk, and indeed, adolescents and young adults who had found themselves enmeshed in the justice system. Our Write on the Edge playwriting residency program, which we designed in the early 1990s, empowers such young people to give dramatic expression to what is on their minds and in their hearts; we want to enable them to give voice to their fears and their pain, but also to their dreams and aspirations, their ideas about the world. Often we find we are giving them the opportunity to reimagine their lives.

Our newest program, Stargate Theatre, extends and amplifies our capacity to connect with this population. A summer-long theatre-making and workforce-readiness project, Stargate enables us to work with court-involved youth under our own auspices — in our rehearsal studios and theatres — rather than at schools and jails run by government agencies. This new paradigm presents us with unprecedented challenges but also provides the exciting possibility of creating a “positive pipeline” through which we can continue to support this underserved population in their efforts to rejoin their communities and become productive citizens.

Stargate is a complex, demanding, and rewarding new initiative. You will find more details in the following pages, along with descriptions of our entire array of programs that bring the power of live theatre into the lives of thousands of diverse and disparate individuals each year.

David Shookhoff Director of Education

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2015 – 2016 Schools

2015 – 2016 TheatreLink Schools

The Bronx 1. Bronx Pathways to Graduation - Bronx Regional 2. Bronx Pathways to Graduation - DeWitt Clinton 3. Bronx Pathways to Graduation - Mary Mitchell 4. Bronx Pathways to Graduation - NeON 5. Community School for Social Justice 6. East River Academy* 7. The Marie Curie School for Medicine, Nursing, and Health Professions 8. Passages Academy - Ryer Avenue*

Brooklyn 9. Abraham Lincoln Young Adult Borough Center 10. Brooklyn Pathways to Graduation - Marcy Avenue 11. Brooklyn Pathways to Graduation - South Shore 12. Brooklyn Technical High School 13. Downtown Brooklyn Young Adult Borough Center 14. Edward R. Murrow High School 15. William Maxwell Career and Technical Education High School

Manhattan 16. Bard High School Early College 17. Collegiate School 18. Dwight School 19. The High School of Fashion Industries 20. Manhattan Academy for Arts and Language 21. Manhattan Pathways to Graduation - Chelsea 22. Manhattan Pathways to Graduation - LGBTQ Center 23. Urban Academy Laboratory High School 24. The Young Women’s Leadership School

Queens 25. Flushing Young Adult Borough Center 26. Newcomers High School 27. Queens Pathways to Graduation - The Hub 28. The Young Women’s Leadership School - Queens

Long Island 29. North Shore High School

New Jersey 30. Alternative Design Academy 31. Academy for Enrichment and Advancement 32. Arts High School 33. County Prep High School 34. Jose Marti Freshman Academy 35. Memorial High School 36. St. Peter’s Preparatory School 37. Union City High School

* facility for incarcerated youth

1. Anatolia College (Thessaloniki, Greece) 2. Ashland High School (Ashland, OR) 3. Clements High School (Sugar Land, TX) 4. Columbia High School (West Columbia, TX) 5. Cordova High School (Cordova, TN) 6. G-Star School of the Arts (Palm Springs, FL) 7. Laramie High School (Laramie, WY) 8. Loyola High School (Wilmette, IL) 9. Marlborough College (Marlborough, United Kingdom)

10. Mount Saint Joseph Academy (Flourtown, PA) 11. Orange High School (Orange, CA) 12. Poinciana High School (Kissimmee, FL) 13. Sacred Heart College (Johannesburg, South Africa) 14. Shannon High School (Haltom City, TX) 15. Smithtown High School (Smithtown, NY) 16. Spotswood High School (Spotswood, NJ) 17. Springfield High School (Springfield, OR)

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TheatreLink

Schools

• 1

2 •

• 3 • 4

• 5

• 8

• 11

•

12

• 6

• 13

• 14

• 17

• • 15

16

9 •

• 10

New York Area Schools

• 7

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Facts & Figures Founded in 1989, MTC’s Education Program has enriched the lives of more than 100,000 students and will continue to grow as an integral part of Manhattan Theatre Club.

PROGRAM GOALS

To deepen students’ understanding of themselves

and the world through the medium of theatre

To help develop a knowledgeable, perceptive new

audience for the theatre and for the arts in general

To help stimulate participants’ imagination, creativity,

and critical-thinking skills through active engagement with challenging new theatre works

To improve the ability of classroom teachers to teach

the arts and to incorporate arts education into the curriculum

To provide training for early-career theatre

management professionals

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67 Schools

2,675 Students

101 Classroom Teachers

88 Classrooms

19 Teaching Artists

5 Student Matinees

8 Professional Development

Workshops

3 Family Matinees

30 Interns

9 Subscriber Workshops

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Core Program

A great many of our Core Program schools are “repeat customers,” having partnered with us for five years or more. And of that group, a significant number regularly elect to participate in more than one unit per year, affording their students the opportunity to study and attend two or even three MTC productions.

Doing so enables students to encounter a range of dramatic material, often in contrasting styles or genres. They get a glimpse of the myriad forms that plays can take. Seeing works by such disparate authors as Sam Shepard, Richard Greenberg, and Florian Zeller in a single year provides a rich survey of contemporary drama. Each of those writers offers insights and illuminations of particular aspects of human experience, each with a unique voice and sensibility, affording students multiple perspectives on themselves and the world.

These repeated encounters also enhance students’ skills of perception. They learn how to look at plays in general

— like athletes, through repetition, they build their theatre-viewing “muscles.” Our students learn, for example, to make connections between a particular scene or moment and a play’s overall meaning, to discern the clues writers provide about the characters and conflicts, and to notice how a play’s structure and form reflect and reveal its content.

Education Initiatives

Students attend a matinee of an MTC production after intensive classroom preparation. Four workshops with MTC teaching artists and four led by classroom teachers enrich students’ experiences of the performance. Students discuss the play, do improvisations on its themes, perform key excerpts, and write scenes of their own. This work provides specific insights into the plays being studied and deepens the students’ understanding of theatre in general. To ensure continuity, MTC maintains permanent school partnerships.

Students show off their programs as they wait to see Our Mother’s Brief Affair.

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Magda Adamczyk, an English teacher at High School for Fashion Industries in Manhattan, is one of our partner teachers who recognizes the value of bringing students to more than one play. Ms. Adamczyk and the assistant principal, Nancy Moore, make it possible for a class to do three Core Units each year. In 2015–16, Ms. Adamczyk’s AP English Literature and Composition class studied and attended Sam Shepard’s Fool for Love, Richard Greenberg’s Our Mother’s Brief Affair, and Florian Zeller’s The Father.

As Ms. Adamczyk pointed out in a recent interview, all three works deal with family relationships and dynamics, albeit from radically disparate perspectives. This simultaneous commonality and disparity led to rich classroom discussions about how each writer approached the idea of “family.” Further, for Ms. Adamczyk and her students, the three plays “bend reality” in different ways — to varying degrees the central characters have a shaky grasp on their pasts and the present. The uncertainty and unreliability in all three narratives provided abundant opportunities for debate and reflection and enabled the students to compare and

contrast the MTC productions with other works they were studying. The dramatization of dementia and mental decline in The Father, in particular, resonated strongly with the treatment of madness in Hamlet, Jane Eyre, and The Yellow Wallpaper, all three part of Ms. Adamczyk’s course syllabus.

Ms. Adamczyk values the consistent high quality of the MTC repertory — she is confident that each of the three productions her students see will be first-class. Having been exposed to more than a few programs that bring students to the theatre, Ms. Adamczyk says, “You guys have the best shows.”

Teaching Artist Kate Long works with students at High School for Fashion Industries.

Students from High School for Fashion Industries enjoy participating in a theatre game.

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Write on the Edge

As noted in the introduction, Write on the Edge primarily serves at-risk and incarcerated adolescents. This year, in addition to conducting three playwriting residencies at East River Academy, the high school on Rikers Island, we were asked by the Department of Education to be the inaugural arts partner at a newly created low-security placement facility in the Bronx. These LSPs, as they’re known, are designed to allow youth who had been incarcerated upstate to serve their sentences closer to their home communities. Teaching artist Marilyn Torres partnered with teacher Stacy Miller to facilitate the playwriting process of the very small cohort of student inmates at the site in this first year of its operation. The results were very encouraging — several strong plays and a lot of heartfelt poetry emerged from the residency. We look forward to expanding this relationship.

In addition to these four residencies we offered to incarcerated youth, we provided 24 to schools serving high-poverty and high-needs students all over the metropolitan area. We continue to work extensively with high school equivalency programs (currently termed

Pathways to Graduation) in the Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Queens, one of them, new to us, serving LGBTQ students in Manhattan. We also continued our collaboration with three Young Adult Borough Centers (YABCs), two in Brooklyn, one in Queens; these are night schools designed to serve under-credited older youth, many of them at risk of dropping out without a diploma. And we also worked with several other kinds of alternative schools and programs in Manhattan and in Union City, New Jersey.

Virtually all the students from these schools first studied and attended an MTC production, and used a theme or idea from the production as the prompt for their plays. The work that emerged from the young people at these relatively far-flung and disparate schools (17 in all) was almost invariably deeply personal while at the same time remarkably varied in subject matter and tone, ranging from heartwarming to heart-wrenching to hilarious.

Among those in the first category is Choice of Life, a poignant play by a young woman at a high school equivalency program in Brooklyn about a Muslim daughter battling to extricate herself from

Education Initiatives

Students develop original scripts inspired by the Manhattan Theatre Club production they have studied and attended. A team of professional actors, directors, and classroom teachers supervise the writing and revision process.

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the imminent marriage her father has arranged (see excerpt below). A student at the Manhattan LGBTQ Center wrote a powerful, affecting work about a teenage graffiti artist whose mother finally allows him to go to Paris to meet his estranged father, an established painter, so that the son can fulfill his artistic dreams. And at Flushing YABC, the audience was reduced to helpless laughter by Mafia Babies, a brilliantly crafted comedy about the desperate but inept last-minute efforts

of a procrastinating student to come up with an idea for a play assigned by his teacher.

These and the hundreds of other student-written scripts this year testify eloquently to the ways Write on the Edge releases the imaginations of the young people we serve, enabling them to give dramatic form to their ideas about who they are and who they might become.

An excerpt from CHOICES OF LIFE

by Amira W.

Jana: Dad, I trust you with everything, but if I marry this guy he won't let

me do anything or go anywhere, he's always going to tell me to stay in the

house.

Father: So what? You're a girl. You must listen to him.

Jana: Dad I am adventurous. I want to explore the world. I’m not locking up

myself for, no one.

Father: Are you out of your mind? You want me to tell the people no after

five years of engagement. Stop being selfish. Think about me. Think about

people talking about how mean we are?

Jana: Why is it always people — what they going to say? Why can't we just be

us and have our own feelings and our own dreams?

Father: Because that's part of our culture and you know well that we have to

follow it.

Jana: But that was in the old days. Life changed. We are into 2016 and I

won't marry someone I don't feel comfortable with. That’s all.

Father: You know it's my fault that I bring you to America. I should have

left you in Qatar like the rest of the Yamane girls, sitting at home waiting

to get married without going to school and changing their minds like you

did.

Jana: Dad, Habibi, please calm down. You don’t understand me and you’re too

angry.

Father: I think I heard enough.

Jana: Dad, do you remember that night when we were in Qatar and you got very

sick. Me and mom were so worried about you, but we couldn't do anything

because we don't know anything. I don't want to feel that again. I can’t

just see you in pain and not do anything. That’s why I want to be a doctor.

Dad: I have one condition!

Jana: As long as you say you’re going to end this marriage, I'll do anything

you want.

Father: As long as it makes you happy I’ll end this marriage. But my

condition is for you to be the best doctor ever.

Jana: I'll do my best. I promise.

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TheatreLink Students in geographically isolated communities collaborate on a playwriting/production project via the Internet. Classes at each site write an original play based on an MTC production; their play is then produced by students at a partner school. Using distance-learning technologies, students confer with MTC teaching artists, study the MTC play, and communicate with their partner school. The work culminates in a video presentation of each play.

One of our continual challenges is maintaining the “link” in TheatreLink. Schools utilize a password-protected website with email and chatroom functionality, and in many cases videoconferencing technology, to communicate with one another and their MTC teaching artist. Participating schools span ten time zones, operate on various academic calendars, and can face a variety of unexpected interruptions unique to their location. Scheduling live multi-point videoconferences with the partner school and their assigned teaching artist or even slightly more analog text-based conversations using classic internet chatroom technology requires careful coordination by all parties.

This year, our schools experienced disruptions caused by floods, snowstorms, strikes, and even regional power outages. Despite these obstacles, and much as professional playwrights commissioned to deliver a new play on schedule, each school met the deadlines necessary to deliver a complete script to their producing school.

A new addition to this year’s process was the “Pass Week,” which occurs when a school sends the play they wrote to the school charged with producing it. In the past, there was not a built-in opportunity for each school to take time to explore the play they received before beginning the rehearsal process. The addition of the “Pass Week” allowed schools to communicate with one another about their plays, asking and answering questions about dramatic structure, character motivations, and regionalisms. In some cases, final revisions were made to scripts, strengthening the plays before they officially moved from the page to the process of realizing them on stage.

Toluwani, the student at Sacred Heart College in Johannesburg who directed Funny Bid’Ness (written by the students of Loyola Academy in Wilmette, Illinois), sums up the importance of this period by saying, “Knowing the context of the play is essential because it is easier to link the different parts of the play together.”

“Pass Week” became an especially rich opportunity to reap the benefit

Education Initiatives

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TheatreLink affords its participants throughout the process: bridging regional differences and enhancing understanding of others through a collaborative and creative art form. Tayva, a student at Ashland High School in Oregon, had the opportunity to see her class’s play, Prop Ring, performed by students at Anatolia College in Greece. She reflected: “There are very different cultures all around the world, or even just the country. I was very surprised with the different way the other school wrote the play [versus] the way we wrote our play for Greece.”

Kate, another student at Ashland High School, summarized the cultural exchange aspect of TheatreLink by sharing, “By producing a play by another school, I was able to learn a lot about what it is like where they live without even going there. I loved how each school incorporated the culture of their home into their script.”

An excerpt from PROP RING

by Ashland High School’s TheatreLink Class

Jonathan: Why didn’t you ever respond to any of my calls?

Rosalind: You called me?

Jonathan: Oh, come on, you know what I’m talking about.

Rosalind: No, Jonathan, I don’t.

Jonathan: I have been calling you and and texting you all these years, ever

since I left. And after a while I started to write letters because I knew

you still lived in the same house. (ROSALIND looks confused.) You really

don’t know?

Rosalind: My dad changed my number after you left. He said some boy was

always calling and he didn't want me around boys. You know how dads are.

(She laughs, nervously. JONATHAN doesn't even smile.) Look, Jonathan. I’m

sorry. You know I would’ve answered you if I’d gotten them. It wasn’t my

fault. (Steps toward JONATHAN.) You know I would’ve answered, right?

Jonathan: (Not looking at her.) It was me.

Rosalind: Huh?

Jonathan: I was the one always calling you. I just wanted to talk to you. I

didn’t want to lose touch. At first, your dad was the one who picked up a

lot, always telling me you weren’t home. Eventually, no one even picked

up.

Rosalind: My dad wouldn’t do that! He adores you!

Jonathan: (Angry.) Does he really? Is that why he kept me away from you all

the time? Even when we were kids, he would always tell me to go play with

something else. He hated you hanging out with me. Why? Is it because I'm a

boy and you're a girl? Did he really think a boy and girl at the age of ten

were going to…?-- I mean, we were little kids! (Rambling) We were climbing

trees, and picking flowers, and playing hopscotch. We were playing pirates

and princesses, and chasing butterflies, and--

Rosalind: And we did. We did for as long as we could.

Jonathan: Parents ruin everything, I swear. Okay, well that settles the

calls, but what about my letters? I wrote to you every week for years. You

can’t tell me you didn’t get one letter.

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Stargate Theatre is assuming an increasingly prominent place in the portfolio of MTC Education programs.

Once again, last summer we recruited and hired a company of 18 young men, paying them, as always, minimum wage as hourly employees of MTC, whose job was to create, rehearse, and perform an original theatre piece. Most of them stayed the course through the seven-week process; at the culminating, triumphant performance in City Center Stage II on August 22, 2015, their deeply moving but also surprisingly funny work, Deeper Than Skin, was greeted with a standing ovation by an audience of youth justice professionals, MTC staff, and funders, as well as friends, family, and members of the company’s support networks.

The enormous success of Stargate 2015 was largely due to several crucial innovations. Paul Gutkowski, a licensed clinical social worker with extensive background with our subject population as well as in theatre, joined the leadership team, complementing the expertise of artistic directors Judy Tate and Steve DiMenna. We also created a much clearer and appropriately detailed Code of

Conduct for the young men to sign, spelling out the company’s responsibilities and our expectations of them. We devised internal protocols for managing counterproductive behavior, with Paul taking the lead role in ensuring that the company and the process proceeded smoothly and efficiently. As a result of these changes, even when, infrequently, it became necessary to “counsel out” company members who were not fulfilling their obligations, the work was able to proceed with minimal disruption.

Stargate Theatre At-risk and court-involved youth develop workforce readiness and literacy skills through an intensive seven-week theatre-making process. The program culminates with a performance of their collaboratively written play in an off-Broadway venue.

Education Initiatives

The entire Stargate Company at a rehearsal.

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A major highlight for Stargate was the filming and airing of an hour-long documentary on the project by WLIW/WNET, the local PBS affiliates. On February 8, MTC and WNET jointly hosted a screening of the documentary, which was produced by the same team that had created an eight-minute film about the project the summer before. The screening was attended by several company members, who joined an audience of MTC’s and WNET’s friends and patrons.

At the screening, we announced another exciting development — an enormously generous gift from MTC board member Sharon Sullivan and her husband, former board member Jeff Kindler, that will ensure the continuation of the summer iteration of Stargate for the

next ten years. (See “New Next Year” on page 23.)

In addition, by special invitation, Founding Artistic Director Judy Tate and two company members, Leviticus Mitchell and Denzel Alexander-White, presented on Stargate at the annual national summit of the Committee Encouraging Corporate Philanthropy. Their presentation was preceded by a screening of the eight-minute WLIW/WNET documentary. This same “speaking team” also took part in MTC’s annual Spring Gala, offering compelling testimony about how Stargate Theatre changed their lives.

The two documentaries, along with other video material, can be viewed at stargatetheatre.com.

Film crew captures rehearsal footage for the WLIW/WNET documentary.

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Because Write Now! is open to any student with a desire to learn about the craft of playwriting regardless of previous experience, the challenge and reward for the teaching artist is creating a space where both novice and more experienced playwrights can learn simultaneously. This year proved unusual in that all the participants in the fall iteration of the program had some previous experience writing short plays while all the students in the spring were new to the art form.

The fall students’ preexisting

understanding of structure allowed them to delve more fully into their characters. Teaching Artist Jeffrey Joseph observed that many high school-aged students write from their own experiences, so understanding a character’s motivations ultimately helps them understand their own personal choices, errors, and triumphs. “For example,” notes Joseph, “there was one young woman who wrote about the end of an abusive relationship, and because she was able to assess the situation from the more neutral perspective of a playwright, she could

articulate how manipulative her boyfriend had been and forgave herself for incidents she’d always seen as her fault.” This process allowed the characters to be richer but also helped the young woman learn about herself.

Write Now! Highly motivated high school students learn about the art and craft of playwriting through weekly after-school sessions conducted by master playwright/mentors. Participants develop plays by bringing in successive drafts for critique by the leaders and the group. The program culminates in a rehearsed reading of the participants’ work by professional actors for an audience of family and friends.

Education Initiatives

Students in the fall session read a peer’s play out loud.

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For the writers in the spring session, the program needed to return to the basics. Joseph explained that while students had previously written short stories or poems, they needed to grasp “the idea of conflict that was recognizable and strong, and can drive the action [of a play]. They wanted to write stories or ideas, but needed to funnel [those thoughts] into a dramatic format.” The teaching artist frequently asked the students to define what each of their characters wanted and how those needs put them in conflict. This lesson proved seminal, as many students referred to it in their program evaluation. As one student noted, “Jeffrey taught me how to make the characters appear realistic to the human race.”

Students in the spring session share feedback.

An excerpt from BEHIND THE CRIMSON MASK

By Juan Carlos N. (Spring 2016)

Alex, a wrestler on the verge of retirement, comes into conflict with Bobby

over the line between reality and fantasy in the business of pro wrestling.

ALEX: Can’t we sit down like civilized human beings and have a conversation?

BOBBY: No.

ALEX: Come on now. Be rational.

BOBBY: Rational! Ha. How do you expect me to be rational when you cheat me

like this?

ALEX: Relax. No one is cheating you like anything.

BOBBY: Why do you lie to me in my face like this? Huh? Here I am trying to

put someone over with the crowd and you have to make him seem weak. I don’t

understand why you bury him like —

ALEX: Bury him?! Look, if someone my age buries somone in his mid-forties,

younger than me I might add, then —

BOBBY: You were supposed to be the loser. I’m the booker. That means what I

say goes. I picked that he is the winner, not you.

ALEX: But didn’t you see the crowd pop? Never in a million years were they

expecting me, The Mason, winning the title after years of falling short time

and time again.

BOBBY: Yes. Yes, I see. When is the next show?

ALEX: Thursday, Bobby, Thursday.

BOBBY: You lose it Thursday.

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Professional Development

Professional Development Workshops serve as MTC Education’s curriculum laboratory. These two- to three-hour offerings, most led by Education Director David Shookhoff, each focus on a specific MTC production which workshop participants then attend. In the workshops, teachers and teaching artists have an opportunity to try out a variety of teaching strategies, all intended to illuminate the play under study.

Typically these workshops include scene writing; theatre games, improvisations, and other types of “on-your-feet” work; the reading and discussion of excerpts from the play under study; and reflective writing, including poetry. This multi-mode approach fosters differentiated instruction in the classroom — teachers and teaching artists can select, adapt, expand, or otherwise customize specific activities to best meet the needs and abilities of their students.

Before starting units of study on a specific play, MTC teaching artists meet as a faculty with Shookhoff to discuss and analyze the workshop exercises,

strategizing about how best to implement or adapt them in different types of learning situations. Often the discussion prompts other ideas and approaches that may be better suited for a specific population.

In these ways, our Professional Development Workshops are incubators for the rich variety of teaching strategies that our talented teaching artists and the dedicated collaborating teachers implement in the classrooms. Through this process of curricular customization and differentiation, we are able to connect our diverse student populations deeply and powerfully with the plays they attend in our theatres.

Our teachers regularly confirm the effectiveness of our workshops in their written evaluations. For example, Gregory Holtz from East Side High School in Newark, enthused:

“I love these workshops. The only suggestion I could make would be to

have MORE of them.”

Classroom teachers, school administrators, and teaching artists participate in workshops built around Manhattan Theatre Club productions. This process strengthens their understanding of MTC’s instructional models and introduces them to innovative techniques for teaching dramatic literature.

Education Initiatives

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Students bring an adult of their choice to a Saturday morning workshop focusing on the MTC production they attend in the afternoon. These matinees promote family theatre-going and intergenerational dialogue.

Family Matinee

Education Initiatives

Despite its title, the Family Matinee program has from the outset welcomed groups from youth service agencies like the Family and Children’s Agency and from schools where dedicated teachers regularly assemble groups of adults and students in the required one-to-one or one-to-two ratio.

In the 2015–2016 season, Manhattan Theatre Club offered family matinees for Ripcord, Our Mother’s Brief Affair, and Prodigal Son, serving a total of 235 individuals. The pre-performance work-shops engaged participants in writing and acting exercises that focused on the themes of the plays, such as parent-child reconciliation, hiding from sorrow, and iso-lation and community. The exercises helped participants think more critically about the play they attended as well as connect more deeply with the material. Not only were the participants well-prepared to attend and process the per-formance, but the workshops fostered meaningful conversation among adults and young people.

Additionally, because of the geo-graphic and ethnic diversity of the pro-gram participants, Family Matinees offer the opportunity for members of disparate

communities to share meaningfully in the unique power of live theatre. Here is a sample of reflections from 2015-16 partici-pants:

“[The workshops are] always very thought-provoking and enhance the

show. Well-taught and well-run.

It was a lot of fun.”

“I just want to thank you for offering this program. My children

(ages 14, 16, 19, 21) have all gotten so much from the workshops over the

years. It is a great opportunity for us as a family, in different configurations, to connect with each other. We became

more than just mom and kids or siblings. We see each other differently and then see the production and share

that experience in a much

more full way.”

“It prompted a deep follow-up dis-cussion about human nature and the

characters’ actions in the play.”

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Education Initiatives

MTC Education has offered preparatory workshops for its Patrons and Subscribers ever since we began producing at the Biltmore (now Friedman) Theatre in 2004–05. Held near the beginning of each production’s run and using the same hands-on, activity-based instructional approach we use in our school programs and Family Matinees, the workshops are intended to call participants’ attention to key themes and ideas in the production they will subsequently attend.

Over the years hundreds of MTC

audience members have participated in these workshops. Our most loyal participants have been attending regularly for many seasons, finding that their involvement deeply enriches their experience of the production they attend after “studying” it in the workshop.

We have included some sample

responses from last year’s participants:

“Always, always vital to me to go to these workshops in order to best

understand the wisdom of the play. I never miss them because I won’t enjoy

the play as much without them.” — Fool for Love

“Added greatly to understanding the play. Wonderful to see how we were led to write almost exactly a scene

from the play.” — Fool for Love

“I especially liked that the entire group was involved

in a creative, positive way.” — Our Mother’s Brief Affair

“Brilliant! The activities in

constructing a play made everything much more relevant.”

— Our Mother’s Brief Affair “Thanks for these events — which

make the MTC experience deeper and richer.”

— The Father

Adult Education The Adult Education Program gives MTC audiences an opportunity to deepen their understanding of MTC productions through conversations with theatre professionals and outside experts, behind-the-scenes views of the production process, and hands-on theatre workshops.

Education Initiatives

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MTC continued to make equitable access to the Kaplan Program a primary focus. Building on the research from our 2014 Theatre Communications Group A-ha! Think It grant, MTC Education used a multi-pronged approach to both reach out to and provide professional develop-ment for young people from underserved communities.

For the fourth year, MTC partnered with Disney Theatrical and Roundabout Theatre to provide a three-hour best practices workshop to New York City– based college students interested in obtaining an internship in arts administration. Hands-on activities and a discussion with current interns helped illuminate key attributes of a successful résumé and cover letter, as well as effective interview techniques.

We also continued our outreach to students outside the metropolitan area: Assistant Education Director Amy Harris visited Morehouse College and Georgia State University both located in Atlanta. She was a guest lecturer at both institutions, articulating the advantages of administrative experience for those interested in careers on and off the stage.

Finally, we produced three short instructional videos on résumé and cover-letter writing and effective interview practices, thereby broadening our ability to provide advice and guidance to students and other applicants who may not have access to this type of support locally. Located on the Internship page on MTC’s website, the videos have been well received and were featured in an article in Backstage magazine. A link to the videos can be found here.

The effects of our outreach can be seen in the increase in applications; in summer 2015, 500 individuals applied for the ten available positions. In addition, the high-caliber of the overall program was lauded by Backstage, which chose the Kaplan program as one of the top ten arts administration–focused internships in the country; MTC was the sole New York City theatre on the list.

The Paul A. Kaplan Theatre Management Program

MTC’s internship program is a practicum for theatre management and artistic professions. Undergraduate and graduate students and early-career professionals are assigned to specific departments. To enrich their experience, interns participate in weekly seminars with MTC staff and members of our extended artistic “family.”

Education Initiatives

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New Next Year Stargate Theatre Sharon Sullivan Company

Thanks to an extraordinarily generous gift from MTC board member Sharon Sullivan and her husband, former board member Jeffrey Kindler, the future of the summer iteration of Stargate Theatre — our theatre-making program for court-involved youth (see page 15) — has been secured for the next ten years. Sullivan and Kindler have been invaluable champions of the project from its earliest inception; they brokered the collaboration between MTC Education and Vera Institute of Justice that resulted in Stargate’s launch in the summer of 2013. In recognition of the Kindlers’ deep and ongoing commitment to this program, beginning in Summer 2016, the Stargate summer cycle will be known as the Stargate Theatre Sharon Sullivan Company. We are still searching for significant additional funding so that we can continue to work with our company members during the school year and launch a comparable project for young women.

Best Practices for Stargate Theatre

A travel grant from the Theatre Communications Group will enable Stargate Project Administrator Wade Handy to visit several communities where theatre companies are undertaking projects with youth involved with the justice system. In an effort to learn about best practices in such areas as participant recruitment, organizational structure, and artistic process, Wade will observe the work of Barrington Stage in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, whose Playwrights Mentoring Project enables at-risk and court-involved youth to write original scripts, and Storycatchers in Chicago, which creates theatre pieces with incarcerated and recently released teenagers. Wade is now also making arrangements to visit companies in Boston, Los Angeles, and possibly London. Stargate’s already successful operation will no doubt be enriched by what he learns on his travels.

Diversity and the Paul A. Kaplan Theatre Management Program

MTC has recently undertaken successful steps to diversify its intern pool. We are gratified that an increasing number of students and early-career professionals from underrepresented communities have been enjoying the opportunity to learn and grow here. In an effort to support not only MTC interns but those in similar positions at other theatres around the city, MTC is joining forces with the Black Theatre Network, the Asian American Arts Alliance, New York Theatre Workshop, and several other individuals and entities to create the EDI Intern Circle. Meeting quarterly, with MTC board member and senior teaching artist Judy Tate as its moderator, the Circle’s membership — composed of interns from theatre companies all over the city — will make suggestions about relevant topics and speakers, which the Circle’s Steering Committee will seek to implement.

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Core Program • Write on the Edge

TheatreLink • Stargate Theatre Company

Write Now! • Professional Development

Family Matinee Program • Adult Education

The Paul A. Kaplan Theatre Management Program

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“The in-class work was a window of opportunity to be engaged in the emotional message of the play.”

— Core Program Student, The Young Women’s Leadership School

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“It was really nice to have a different perspective on theatre. An English teacher is one thing, but a real performer shows a different insight.”

— Core Program Student, Brooklyn Technical High School

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“Students saw the value of hard work and revision, and I believe many

also experienced a deeper appreciation for the power of words and

theatre more generally.”

— Teacher at Community School for Social Justice