The Case of the Missing Librarian:
Templeton’s Family Playwriting Project Tackles a Timely Issue in Bloomington, IN.
Templeton Elementary kids and parents write a play about the effects of the budget cuts on their lives. Each semester, a lively, passionate, creative process evolves in the Templeton gym on Tuesday evenings for the past seven years. Members of the Family Playwriting Project– students, parents, and occasionally teachers — co-create an innovative production – from script-writing, costumes, set design, to music, lighting, and of course the acting itself. The Project is the brainchild of former Bloomington Playwrites Project Education Director Breshaun Joyner. This will be her last production, as her job was cut last December due to budget cuts.
“The Case of the Missing Librarian” hits especially close to home. Responding to the loss of their own school librarian, Mrs. Hall, the Templeton students in the Family Playwriting Project have written a play about the effects of the state budget cuts on their own school, their education, and their lives. Using the themes of four fairy tales, the members of the Project are putting on a compelling production. Characters in the play ask important questions, like “Mrs. Bookend (the librarian), what’s a budget cut?,” “Where did all the money go?” and “What’s more complicated than losing your librarian?” When burglars steal the librarian, curious things begin to happen, most notably, the children lose their ability to speak. Rather, they are speaking, but no sound is coming out. At this point, the play becomes a silent play, until the end, when the children find their voices again as they march to Indianapolis in protest.
The events of the play offer these children the opportunity to respond to the decisions that have been made for them, and invite audience members to interrogate these questions for themselves, and hopefully shine a fresh young perspective on the recent decisions of the Monroe County Public School Board.
The Family Playwriting Project is a collaborative venture from start to finish. During their first meeting each semester, students and families brainstorm ideas about the theme of their play. Students make suggestions about characters, scenes and plot developments, and no idea is too crazy for Joyner. She dutifully records everything and does what she can to include it in the script, when she puts it together later. Past characters, all dreamed up in the imaginations of Family Playwrights kids have included a fountain, an ear, a slug, and a superhero marionette named “Booger Boy” who solved problems with large gobs of snot.
The unique process empowers the students and teaches them how to put ideas together to form a story. Within a few weeks, their crazy patchwork of ideas is strung together by Joyner to form a script and they are onstage acting.
While this discussion spins among the grown-ups in a variety of grown-up forums in Monroe County (as in many other communities), The Case of the Missing Librarian gives audiences the opportunity to hear from the population most deeply affected by the budget cuts: our children. As one character says upon learning about the axing of her school librarian, “ We’ll do anything! Write a petition, have a bake sale…..write a play!” By the end, the characters in the members of the play do find their voices to speak up about what is important to them; the student actors hope the members of our community, and of the Monroe County School Board, are watching, and listening.
· The Case of the Missing Librarian! The final Family Playwrights presentation
· 6:00 p.m., Apr. 15, 2010, Templeton Elementary School Cafeteria
· Cost: Free, donations appreciated
· Who can come: Anyone
· Press is welcome to come to event!
· For questions, contact Breshaun Joyner at breshaunj@hotmail.com
