Dancing on Thin Ice at Barrington Stage

12:00AM / Thursday, December 27, 2001Print Story | Email Story

Playwright Mentoring Project goes on tour in January â€œWe play games that make us think up wild and crazy things ... we discover and discuss our innermost desires and problems ... itâ€™s kinda like group counseling, without the counseling ... we discover how funny our lives can be.â€ The seven high school students in Barrington Stage Companyâ€™s Playwright Mentoring Program have been working for 11 months to create a play out of their own stories. Dancing on Thin Ice goes on tour in January. Chocolate chip orange cookie bars, a hand-knitted scarf, an electric guitar and an amp (soon to have a microphone), accompanied the actors to a script reading in late December. Abby Childs, Eli Dvorchik, Vanessa Kobran, Tess Krasinski, Michelle Merola, Adam Schoenfarber and James Wilkinson had almost a complete script to run through, ordering scenes and making corrections. Sometimes, they play characters developed during improvisations. Sometimes, they play themselves. The scenes are often removed one step from reality, dramatized. Some come straight from the actors. They navigate through classmates giving cheap-shot insults; adults who patronize, and adults who do not; siblings returning from college; a feeling of warmth and safety among a group of people getting high; two old friends on a bus who discover one has HIV ... The actors in the Playwright Mentoring Program have created these scenes through improvisations and theater games. â€œWe wanted to have fun, be comfortable,â€ said BSC Artistic Director Julianne Boyd. â€œItâ€™s a safe place.â€ The group meets every Thursday (including Christmas week), usually for two hours. Peer mentors Deborah Lin-Perry and Gary Soldati said the program began with four students. â€œNo one was talking, not to each other,â€ Perry said. Some kids didnâ€™t talk for the first six weeks. â€œThey wouldnâ€™t look up. Now you canâ€™t shut them up. ... They need to be heard sometimes, to let off steam. We donâ€™t have solutions, but we listen.â€ â€œJulie [Boyd]â€™s great at reading the group,â€ she added, and knowing when to delve, and when to play games. Sometimes, when the group is having a down day, she lets them just play. â€œSometimes you get at great things that way,â€ Perry said. Soldati said it is how amazing how brave these kids are. â€œThe trust they have in themselves and each other, to take a chance ... itâ€™s hard to think of them as kids sometimes. They have been through so much.â€ Itâ€™s amazing the growth he has seen in them since the program began, he said. The actors agreed that they can see in each other how they are changing. Perry added that in the beginning, opening up was easier for her. She had done things like this in the past. When it came to writing it down â€” that was hard: she can tell the story, but it is another thing to analyze it. The actors sometimes play each other in improvisations. They pull away from their own stories that way. They see someone else in their scenes â€” reverse roles, watch themselves in a scene, even play opposite themselves. BSC hopes next year to continue with the program, Boyd, Soldati and Perry said. They hope to start new playwright mentoring groups in Great Barrington and Pittsfield, each group with an artistic mentor and two peer mentors and six to eight actors. It is hard to get to know the students if the group is larger, Boyd said. And the mentors do not want the group so large that people feel they are always performing. Perry said they are hoping that the actors from this group will lead others, or maybe create a new work next year. The Playwright Mentoring Program began in summer 2000, Boyd explained, when BSC staged Full Bloom. There were lots of teenagers in the audience, she said, and some excited â€˜talk-back discussionsâ€™ after performances. Boyd became aware of teenagersâ€™ need to tell stories, she said. BSC then staged Suburbia that summer with the Railroad Street Youth Project. This gave 18- to 20-year-old actors a chance to have a say, Boyd said, but did not really include high school actors. Boyd went back to Amanda Root at Railroad Street, and she spoke with Robert Law, community relations and performing arts coordinator at Mt. Everett High School, to look for ideas and interested high school students. Boyd asked playwrights Suzanne Bradbeer and Mark St. Germain to advise her new program. Both had written about issues that affect high school students, she said, and both had a sense of humor. Gary Soldati and Deborah-Lin Perry, actors from from Suburbia, also joined the cast. Boyd did not know at first how it would all fit together, she said, but Soldati and Perry became mentors. When the actors began to develop scenes from improvisations and tell their own stories, Gabe Patel, a third mentor, began to collect them into a script. The actors comment freely on it before and after it is written. Dancing on Thin Ice will include music the performers have written. It is a one-and-a-half-hour show with a talk-back session afterward. They are also getting ready for tours to schools and organizations, and will prepare a 45-minute performance for these shows. They are now meeting Saturdays as well, and hope to be ready by the third week in January, Boyd said. The group will also offer public performances, but has not yet set the dates. The program recently won a $10,000 grant from National Endowment for the Arts, and another $10,000 from the Helena Rubenstein Foundation, which will help put the tour on the road. The funds will help them to set up a truck to carry sets and lights. Sarah Phykitt of Cheshire, a student at UMass-Amherst, is designing the set. She has envisioned a combination of folding scrims like Japanese screens, tables that turn into hospital beds, and a portable block of lockers, she said.

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McCann Recognizes Superintendent Award Recipient

By Tammy DanielsiBerkshires Staff
05:32PM / Tuesday, December 23, 2025

Landon LeClair and Superintendent James Brosnan with Landon's parents Eric and Susan LeClair, who is a teacher at McCann.

NORTH ADAMS, Mass. — The Superintendent's Award has been presented to Landon LeClair, a senior in McCann Technical School's advanced manufacturing course.

The presentation was made last Thursday by Superintendent Jame Brosnan after Principal Justin Kratz read from teachers' letters extolling LeClair's school work, leadership and dedication.

"He's become somewhat legendary at the Fall State Leadership Conference for trying to be a leader at his dinner table, getting an entire plate of cookies for him and all his friends," read Kratz to chuckles from the School Committee. "Landon was always a dedicated student and a quiet leader who cared about mastering the content."

LeClair was also recognized for his participation on the school's golf team and for mentoring younger teammates.

"Landon jumped in tutoring the student so thoroughly that the freshman was able to demonstrate proficiency on an assessment despite the missed class time for golf matches," read Kratz.

The principal noted that the school also received feedback from LeClair's co-op employer, who rated him with all fours.

"This week, we sent Landon to our other machine shop to help load and run parts in the CNC mill," his employer wrote to the school. LeClair was so competent the supervisor advised the central shop might not get him back.

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