One problem we come across far too often with having students run our shows (school events and/or outside events) is not so much the students themselves, but their parents. Right?
Parents don’t understand the level of commitment, such as the need to be there for both the rehearsal and the performance. Once you are involved in a rehearsal, you are then the only person who knows how to do your job and when to do your job. So, you can’t not turn up for the performance, because curtains won’t get flown, lights won’t get turned on and so on. Conversely, if you haven’t been at the rehearsal you won’t know what to do during the performance.
I can’t count the number of times during the tech week for a school play that parents have informed me that their student must be home by 8:00pm or 9:00pm, when the rehearsals are usually expected to go until 10:00pm. Rehearsals are not only expected to go until 10:00pm (in every high school theatre I’ve ever been involved with), but parents are informed about this ahead of time in the information packet that they are given when their child is cast or put on the crew. Nonetheless, the reasons that parents want their children home are because of homework, a test the next day, or just a general curfew.
Unfortunately, parents don’t have the big picture. What parents don’t realize is that inevitably during tech week there is some big exam scheduled. This is a very common ‘Murphy’s Law” phenomenon – it happened when I was in high school and it happens every time I work on a high school production now. Some parents simply worry about how tired their child will get, staying up until past 10:00 at night for a week and having to get up to be at school the next morning. But, what parents also don’t see is that there are 40 to 80 other students in the same boat – they think it is just their child who is affected. What they also don’t see is the educational and real life experience their children are having. I don’t know of any good high school theatre that doesn’t run their productions without professional expectations. Parents also don’t realize that once the curtain goes up on opening night that it is primarily teenagers who run the show in its entirety. Parents also don’t look at the big picture and see that tech week happens just once or twice a year (sometimes three) – they are fretting about one or two weeks out of 52.
There are some ways around this – and you have to approach it on a case-by-case basis with each parent. During one high school show that I worked on I had one mother who wanted her Stage Manager daughter to leave by 9:00pm every night. Never mind that this student was in charge of running the entire show(!) and that rehearsals went on until 10:00pm. This mother came in one day early on in tech week and was helping serve dinner during the break. So I brought her into the theatre and put her on headset. She listened for about 45 minutes entranced. She had had no idea the level of ‘grown up’ responsibility that her daughter had, nor her level of competence and confidence. I never heard a peep out of that parent for the rest of the run of the show. Another set of parents in another high school theatre were concerned about the hours that their son would have to commit to in order to run the followspot for a show. So we invited them into the theatre and gave them the ‘grand tour’ and their son demonstrated to them, and his younger brother, how he was up in the catwalks running the followspot. That young boy has now graduated from college with a degree in theatre production and has gone on to get his masters and is now gainfully employed in the industry. Also his younger brother participated in every school production thereafter.
Another way to gain student and parent commitment – at least for crewing school and outside events - is if your district can pay your students. This not only makes the students even more committed to their calls, but perhaps more importantly validates their time spent not doing homework, or getting less sleep, to their parents. However some school districts don’t want to deal with hiring people under 18, because of the added expenses and paperwork and additional insurance required to hire minors, so this may be a moot point in your school district. (However, you can – and I have – hire a student the day they turn 18…just sayin’.)
