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<p>and (from another thread)
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<p>Interesting discussion. Sharing our experiences, DS was cast in his first adult play in the 5th grade - “To Kill a Mockingbird”. The first lines he ever spoke in real theater were:
“Hey Scout - how come your daddy defends n***ers?”
He learned early that roles he plays on stage are not reflective of our family values. </p>
<p>Fast forward to the spring of his junior year in HS. DS was now cast in an adult play based on the true-life murders of two Dartmouth professors about twelve years ago - murders committed by a couple of HS teenagers. DS had the ringleader role, with a lot of vulgarity and graphic violence depicted on stage. Had this been a movie, it certainly would have been rated “R”. After he had been cast, DS wanted to go the maximum security prison to meet the real-life murderer who he was going to portray on stage. I did put my foot down on that idea. 
FWIW, of the two teenage actors in that play, DS is now at NYU/Tisch, the other is at Julliard.</p>
<p>The summer between his junior and senior year, DS (now age 17) went to the Tisch Summer High School theater program in NYC, where the students (HS juniors entering their senior year) really stretched their acting chops. DS kept a blog on his experiences, and here are some quotes from him:</p>
<p><a href=“a”>quote</a> This morning I did a scene with another boy in which I bought drugs from him. Our professor, J***<strong><em>, told us that he wasn’t supporting drug use, and told us that he only tried pot once. Somebody asked him how it was and he told us that he was in a really bad play a while ago and during a long lunch break a young guy invited him over to his house where he had a huge stash of joints. I guess they smoked and J</em></strong>*** hated it. The young guy was H******* F***. HAHA!</p>
<p>(b) Our rehearsal with J*** (the director) tonight was really powerful. He gave us this packet with poems, quotes, and thoughts about war, and we broke off into groups and had to make three 10 second long skits about war. One in a war zone, one on the home front, and one that combined them. It was amazing how powerful some of the skits were, and they were only 10 second long. GOOD NIGHT! Sorry for all the serious subject matter. To end on a happy note, I just ate my weight in chips and salsa. </p>
<p>(c) Last night, we showed our skits/performance art pieces to the rest of the group. Everyone really liked ours, especially the director. The four of us were so proud, it wasn’t really a big deal but we were really committed to it and it felt so good to blow them all away.<br>
Our assignment was to create a 5 scene skit about our current wars, and the war at home. There was also a huge list of requirements of random things we had to have in it somewhere, like a family at dinner, a passionate kiss, a surprise entrance and so on. We started off with the family at dinner scene, and when we set it up, it kind of looked like the Last Supper, so we ran with the idea of biblical imagery. Every scene had some sort of allusion to the story of the last days of Christ. We had to have a slap in a scene, and the space was really intimate and a ‘stage slap’ would have looked so fake, so we were like “Lets just actually slap someone”, and then for our kiss scene, we thought of when Judas kisses Jesus to mark him as the one to arrest, so we thought “lets have two guys kiss”. We soon realized that we were incorporating a lot of shock art (art that makes the audience say: “did I really just see that”?) so we also ran with that idea. We had (girl student) smack (boy student #1) across the face SO hard, We “broke the frame” a lot (once I delivered lines from inside the audience). (Boy student #1) and I wrestled like 100 feet in the background of one scene through a doorway. (Boy Student #2) and (boy student #1) really did the ‘passionate kiss’. (Boy student #2) and I actually water-boarded (girl student) - we thought it was more sick to have two guys doing it to a girl, apparently it really hurts - and then in the last scene when the lights came up it was me being crucified in the classic Jesus little loin cloth number and dog tags, nothing else. All the scenes had to do with the war but I won’t write the whole script.
Everyone was really shocked we did all that, YES! Oh and I sang in one scene. J*** (the director) really liked it and the four of us were really happy afterward. The feeling we had afterward is what I want to feel forever! Sorry, none of this probably makes any sense. I know I’ve said it 29457 times, but you really do have to be here to appreciate any of this.</p>
<p>(d) Mom, now I know why you told me I had to come back for my senior year. This is the most fun/amazing/powerful thing ever! Today we had a long heart to heart and again had some emotional breakdowns. Then we rehearsed and performed at a
theater on Broadway. We KILLED it. The audience was dead silent, it was amazing. The power in that room was beyond words.
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<p>Thus, DS has had some exposure - thanks to theater - to issues and viewpoints much different than he would have had from our family and community. The most important thing we can do for our kids is to teach them the skills to make good decisions, then allow them to use those skills in real life. DW and I take comfort that DS shares these theater experiences with us. For that, we’re both thankful.</p>