Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird is a literary staple of classrooms and theatres around the country. While most Kalamazoo Central High School theatre students are working on a regular performance of the play, thirteen of them are doing a companion piece.
They took themes from the book and related them to their own lives in the form of forum theatre pieces.
“It’s writing a short play and then stopping it right at the point of the climax, of the height in conflict. Then coming out to the audience and saying, ‘How would you solve the problem that we just presented in this play?’" says guest director Kevin Dodd.
"And it gives the audience a chance to give ideas to the actors and potentially even to come on up themselves and to try out how they might solve the situation.”
Students from Topher Barrett’s theatre class will perform scenes from “The Mockingbird Project” Saturday at 3 p.m. as part of the Storytelling Festivalat the Kalamazoo Valley Museum. Dodd says many of the scenes from “The Mockingbird Project” are taken from the teens’ real life experiences with stereotyping and segregation.
"In my English class, one of my teachers he's kind of funny. And there's a lot of black people in class, so he tries to give us that vibe. There was one day he came into class and he was giving a demonstration. He was like 'just in case you're on your way to the corner store to grab a 40' - it was something like that. I mean, I found it offensive at first, I mean until I found out he was playing," says high schooler Quentin Little.
"Once you tell them you're Mexican, they're like 'Oh, you speak Spanish?' Or 'you play soccer?'" says Kylee Sherer.
Kalamazoo Central student Mykeia Hawkins says many people at her school sit with members of their own race.
"Caucasian people they'll stick together because I guess like - people say that they're scared, but they're just more comfortable with the people that they're with. Like I talk to everybody and so I'm just comfortable with a whole bunch of people," she says.
High schooler Aliya May says she thinks people of different cultures should interact with each other before judging one another.
Dodd says before starting the project, the students spent some time just getting to know each other.
“We had to trust each other enough so that we could open up and discuss some of these issues in their own lives," he says. "So that they could say, ‘Yeah, one time I experienced this moment where we were driving somewhere and we got out. And we were the only people of color at a gas station and it felt really uncomfortable.’ You know that was one of the early stories that came out once we built the trust within the group.”
Talking about race and discrimination isn’t easy, but student Katie Sykes says it’s necessary to make Kalamazoo a connected community.
“To me it’s like saying ‘your vote doesn’t count,’ when really all the votes count to make a difference. So I feel like if you don’t have your say in social justice, then you have no right to complain on how your community is, right? If you don’t vote for a president, you have no right to complain about who your president is. So that’s how I see it," she says.
“Don’t be afraid to have your own opinion and your own voice because that’s what makes a community a community—to not be afraid to be able interact with the people who you see every day.”
The project doesn’t stop at the forum workshop. With the help of an Education for the Arts grant and funding from the Arts Council of Greater Kalamazoo, the students have created a study guide for teachers as well as a research presentation.
Dodd says the goal is to help Kalamazoo Central theatre students connect with their communities and encourage more students to get involved in theatre.
