Anatolia Links Up With U.S. Schools In Manhattan Theatre Club Project
For the third straight year an Anatolia English class has participated in the Manhattan Theatre Club’s TheatreLink Program, which brings together schools in America and abroad in the experience of reading, writing, and performing plays. Each school links up with two others, and this year Anatolia partnered with schools in Nashville, Tennessee and Ashland, Oregon. The project climaxed in the second week of May with videoconferenced performances watched and presented in Anatolia’s Raphael Hall. The TheaterLink Program, now in its 11th year, is supported in part by the Stavros S. Niarchos Foundation, at whose initiative Anatolia was first invited to become the Program’s only international site.
Students in theater or English classes at the three schools communicated via the Internet and through videoconferencing with each other and with MTC’s teaching artist, actor Joe White, in New York. The three schools read a contemporary play, Brian Friel’s Translations, and wrote short plays based on its themes. Then, in a three-cornered exchange, the plays were performed live by partner schools and watched by the writers from as many as ten time zones away.
The heart of TheatreLink is cultural exchange through the universal language of theater. All of the Anatolia students are Greek, though proficient in English. “Our play was set in Thessaloniki in the era of the Young Turks,” says supervising Anatolia English teacher Holly Marshall. “When our students saw what they had written brought to life by a group of student actors on the American West Coast, complete with a traditional (and in this case, subversive) Karagiozi puppet play, their excitement was palpable. Likewise, it was obvious that the students from Nashville got a kick out of seeing an Appalachian mountain home re-created on a Greek stage with Greek actors doing their best to mimic Southern accents.” Live conversations between student writers and actors and with a second audience at the Manhattan Theater Club in New York followed the performances and were as enlightening and entertaining as the dramas themselves.
