April Gareri is a grandmother who has been to every rehearsal and every performance of New Haven’s Alliance Theater company for the past, oh, 11 years. And not only as a spectator and admirer of the theater arts.
She has painted and moved sets, worked the light box, managed children behind the stage. (The Alliance Theater usually has lots of kids in its productions, as it’s dedicated to young people’s theater.) She has also handled the box office, helping with costumes, and there’s probably a bake sale thrown in there as well.
Gareri, pictured with an aspiring actress, her four-year old granddaughter Madeline Diaz (nearest to her), said she thinks theater is one of the best ways for kids and grown-ups to bond. So does the Alliance Theater. That’s one reason it is one of the 11 original organizations selected by the PACK (Parents and Communities for Kids) program five years ago to promote parental involvement in their children’s education earning at New Haven’s many cultural institutions.
Make that parental and grandparental.
Through PACK, Gareri is not only giving her granddaughter an early education in the theater. She is pursuing her own.
Saturday afternoon, in the lower level of the splendid Wilson Branch library in the Hill, Gareri was helping Alliance Theater founders and directors Carol Penney and Ellen Maust (pictured with her) in a rehearsal of the theater’s latest offering, Seussical, Jr. The musical, based on you guessed it (!), will be performed at the Jewish Community Center this coming weekend. (Click here for info and directions.)
In it will be aspiring actors from all over the city including Darius Miller, a 17-year old from Co-op High School and Donijah Collier from Nathan Hale. Miller, who has Alliance productions of the Nutcracker, the Emperor’s Nightingale, and Robin Hood (playing both King John and a skinny Friar Tuck) under his acting belt, began coming to Aliance when he was Donijah’s age.
Darius and other kids can no longer go to The Hill Cooperative Youth Services, a Hill after-school center that closed. So one of its teachers and now Alliance board member, Edie Jackson, brought Darius and his parents over. It’s been love of the footlights ever since. Donijah had just come back pumped up from a genuine audition for an upcoming play, nothing less than the world premier of Athol Fugard’s new drama called Coming Home, being staged at the Long Wharf this season.
The kids’ rehearsal was going well — in no small part because many of the kids learned and performed it in July and August with Alliance’s five-week summer theater camp. Maust was conducting. Gareri pitched in with sound cues and help with the little ones’ star turns in the bathrooms.
Through the PACK program, Alliance not only spreads the joy and fun and teamwork- building of theater. It promotes literacy as well. During the Seussical rehearsals, for example, parents bringing their kids are given copies of various Dr. Seuss books to take home, so the kids can do “research” on their roles. That is, read!
Alliance was the the resident theater company at the University of New Haven for 20 years. Now it is itinerant, gathering kids as it goes and performing in libraries and at schools across Greater New Haven. Carol Penney would dearly love to have the city re-open the Hill Cooperative Youth Services building on Carlisle Street, which is sitting empty.
She said that over the last few years Alliance would hold dinners at Roberto Clemente Middle School to involve and get the ideas of the new families, especially those brought into the productions and summer camp through PACK. “Darius’s family would cook the best fried chicken for each dinner.”
Gareri herself grew in the relationship of her grandchildren to the theater. “I came to love it through them,” she said, and then admitted she even had a small role in the adult company’s recent production of William Inge’s Picnic.
What’s next for the company? Something new — a new and permanent space, if possible, that building on Carlisle, said Penney. And something old, the commitment to the neighborhoods in New Haven where theater can have the most impact.
“Look,” Penney said, “among our first performances were at Dixwell and Shelton,” she said, “and for 20 years our main stage company held the rights to perform Langston Hughes‘ famous Black Nativity at holiday time. We are dedicated to bringing theater opportunities to families in underserved areas and to having an impact here.”
This past Saturday, as the company rehearsed their Horton and other Seussicalesque animal finger jive, it was.
Carol Penney, in her capacity as a teacher of drama in the New Haven Public Schools, has been a Fellow of the Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute several times. For example, she wrote the following curriculum unit in a seminar on poetry that Paul Fry (now William Lampson Professor of English) led:
<a href="http://www.yale.edu/ynhti/curriculum/units/1994/2/94.02.05.x.html">http://www.yale.edu/ynhti/curriculum/units/1994/2/94.02.05.x.html</a>