A new course is producing theater unlike anything else done before at Drew.

By Alex Dawson

Working with Newark high schoolers has been great for future theater teacher Brent Rivers C’11.

“What’s that smell??” A young girl named Ashley in fleece-piped UGGS and a black T-shirt that says “I Love My Hubby,” scrunched her nose. A red star made from glitter and cardboard dangled from her neck. “Something’s burning.” Not burning really, but you could smell the heat.

Her mentor, Lili Ashman C’10, pointed at the high ceiling. “Lights,” she said. Ashley tilted her head and looked up at the grid of hot spots and washes. “Oh, yeah,” she marveled, smiling big. Ashley is one of 10 students from Newark schools participating in a newly minted Drew theater program that pairs urban teenagers with 14 theater majors from the university. Classes meet in both locations, but after several snow days, this is the first time Ashley has been on campus. Tonight she and her Drew counterpart, Ashman, will perform an original scene under the bright lamps of the Thomas Kean Black Box.

The program is the brainchild of Associate Professor of Theatre Arts Chris Ceraso, dressed tonight in stagehand black, and Rodney Gilbert, a gregarious Drew adjunct who began the class with a lively lesson in taking direction disguised as Simon Says. Officially titled “The Community, the Individual and the Impact of Theatrical Art,” the course is loosely patterned after the 52nd Street Project, a New York City not-for-profit that matches disadvantaged Hell’s Kitchen kids with theater professionals. Its campus catalyst was a conversation during which President Bob Weisbuch asked Ceraso, who’s currently involved with the 52nd Street Project, if Drew could do something similar with Newark, and Ceraso thought they could. Ceraso approached Gilbert, who runs a drama program for Newark teens at the Newark Public Schools Marion Bolden Student Center, and the plan took shape. The fanciful two-person sketches, written by the visiting students with the prompting and guidance of the undergrads, rose from a series of improv exercises that imagined a “bad day” dialogue between the Newark student and a personified object. Four sketches featured cell phones, two Xbox remotes, one a taco, one a Bible, one a set of lamenting lungs. Of the nine skits performed, only the last reflected the harsher experience of inner-city life (the coughing lungs belong to a track star with no place to train but a polluted lot), with the other sketches highlighting the generational similarities between the two ostensibly distinct groups.

Drew students and high schoolers shuttled between campus and Newark.

“I think Cyrus [his Newark protégé] and I have a lot in common. I mean, I’ve spoken to my remote before,” says Brent Rivers, a Drew junior with a frizzy fringe of stand-up hair that encircles his face like a lion’s mane. And all the Drew students agreed that they, too, love their cell phones.

“I was shocked at the skill level these kids have,” says Rivers. And, indeed, the Newark kids were surprisingly loose and limber, moving freely about the stage despite the scripts in their hands, effectively evoking beds and tables, pews and park benches, with only a series of black plywood cubes.

And the scripts were good, filled with many memorable moments: a smoggy block is described as a place where “even the birds chirp horror music”; a girl with shaky faith belts out her doubt to a Bible, clapping and rocking as if in a gospel choir, “I got my own back, yeah-eh!”; a human flip phone sings its Lady Gaga ringtone a cappella.

Among the objectives of the program is showing Newark students that a place like Drew is available to them, and a great example of the program’s immediate success is Eeotree Thomas, who’s already been accepted to Drew. But certainly as real a result is the confidence boosting of Jerome Thompson, a baby-faced Newarker with a faux hawk. “I didn’t want to write a play because [I think] I’m a poor writer,” he says. “But I was proud of what I wrote because of the audience. Because they enjoyed it.” His skit was clever and, like all the others, enthusiastically met with laughter and applause. “The lights, the focus of this space, instead of daunting them, actually made them step up,” says Ceraso. “I was really impressed.”