Look to the Children

Youth Journalism, TeenTix, and What They Mean for a Civilized Future
By Steven Leigh Morris

… “Teach your children well
“Their father’s hell did slowly go by
“Feed them on your dreams
“The one they pick’s the one you’ll know by”

—Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young

If you told me that the theater is dying, I wouldn’t believe you. Not just because I’m a stubborn cuss, but because this art form dating back millennia is, simply put, an evocation of what it means to be human. As lofty as that may sound, it’s also the reason it won’t be bludgeoned, suffocated or ignored into irrelevance. It may no longer, in the near-term, strut its stuff in ornate edifices like the Mark Taper Forum or the Actors’ Theatre of Louisville or the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, all of which are reeling for reasons that are beyond the scope of this essay. The theater will likely continue to do fine on Broadway and in warehouses and salons and high school multi-purpose rooms and in international festivals across Central and South America, and Europe, and in fringe festivals across every corner of wherever people are capable of gathering.

Here’s my theory: Among the reasons that America’s institutional theaters are collapsing is that they started to imitate, on their stages and in their philosophy, the tribalism in the larger culture, rather than serving as a mediator among tribes, which is the theater’s earliest and most enduring purpose. Look to Sophocles. Euripides. Aeschylus. They were on to something.

Our theaters’ collapse may not be the fault of artistic leadership. Perhaps they couldn’t help themselves. Perhaps it’s because they’re all graduates of the same three theater programs, where they all took the same sensitivity workshops and formed a world view that’s so woefully insular and monochromatic that they’re simply incapable of absorbing an alternative view, let alone permitting it on their stages. Perhaps that’s why their audiences and megadonors lost interest in what they were presenting. Perhaps. That’s what audience told Stage Raw last year in our survey.

There’s a truism that the theater reflects the culture where it resides. And as our culture became more partisan and divisive and more commercial than spiritual, so did our theater. As the culture splintered, so did our theater.  On one level, it makes good sense. Well, maybe not good sense, but sense nonetheless. Yet on the other hand, the point of great plays and great theater is to crawl inside the hearts and minds of people we may find repulsive, to depict with authenticity those people who belong to other tribes — not necessarily to like them or to agree with them, but to better understand them. It’s called empathy. It’s where civilization begins, along with language that cuts sharp and jagged splices that may cause intellectual, even emotional, lesions. The healing of those lesions is a kind of rebirth that falls within the parameters of what the arts can accomplish. That’s what theater does when it’s at its best. So much the better if it comes couched in jokes and songs.

That can’t happen when theater and its language are restrained for the purpose of protecting people who might take offense. That’s not theater. That’s just a protection racket.

No kid is going to learn anything if confined to their room, for their own protection, even with TikTok. The theater is the art form that takes us to new and potentially dangerous places, in order to better understand and evoke what it means to be alive, and what it means to be part of that lineage that is being human.

Because being human is what’s under siege in 2024. The humanities. Enrollment in the California State University has plummeted to levels not seen since the 1960s, when the system was created by Governor Pat Brown. Taking the biggest hit is, of course, the arts and humanities. Computer science and criminal justice are fine majors, but, to get biblical for a moment, what profits a man to gain the world and lose his soul?

Meanwhile,  PEN America reports that books banned in America’s schools last year were over 3,300 — a 33% increase over the prior year — ostensibly to protect our children. The humanities are not going anywhere, but they may have to suffer the effect of a pillow being thrust on their noses. They’ll wriggle free. They always do. You can’t always tell who’s brandishing the pillow, though sometimes it’s obvious. Other times it’s less obvious. It could be anybody.

The arts are part of a rescue mission for all this, or can be, if they want, when they want. For the time being, look to those fringe festivals and warehouses where the economic pressures aren’t so, well, suffocating. Besides, if the government takes TikTok away, where else are the kids going to turn? They’ll figure this out. They usually do.

Look to the children. The teenagers. They grew up in this vicious, clown-show era, this lost civilization. They see it and see through it. They are anxious and depressed. They already feel what older generations can’t even imagine. In their bones, they know something. They’re both addicted to and pushing back against social media. Sorting it out. And some of them, not all, remain curious. They know there’s a pillow out there, blocking their view, stifling their breath, and they’re looking for ways around it, beyond it.

If you think that teens have no interest in theater or journalism (two fields currently under siege that are occasionally dedicated to truth-telling), that belief is contradicted by this year’s applications for the Youth Journalism Fellowship, a partnership of this platform and the Unusual Suspects Theatre Company (whose mission includes youth outreach).

We’ll be doing two three-month programs, one starting at the end of March, and the next starting at the end of September.

Each of the teen-fellows will be assigned a professional mentor from Stage Raw, who will guide their writings, which will be posted on this site. Both the mentors and the fellows will be paid for their contributions. The program includes three in-person workshops, held at the South Pasadena offices of The Unusual Suspects. Aside from journalistic ethics and the discipline of working with an editing team, the topics of these workshops will also include the elements of short reviews, feature articles, interviews, personal essays and podcasts — each have distinct structures and guardrails.

In Stage Raw’s 10-year history, this will be the third time we’ve organized a youth journalism program. The first was underwritten by philanthropist Z. Clark Branson (the originating funder of the Boston Court Performing Arts Center, and of Stage Raw); the second was in partnership with the Wallis Center for the Performing Arts — then Covid hit, and all went quiet for a few years. At present, two current Stage Raw contributors (Socks Whitmore and Julyza Commodore) came through former Stage Raw youth journalism programs. Another, Ezra Bitterman, went on to study journalism at the University of Missouri, ranked in the top 5% of journalism programs in the U.S., and the highest ranked program in Missouri. Ezra’s interest in journalism, he says, was inspired by Stage Raw’s inaugural youth journalism program.

Seven fellows have been selected for the Spring 2024 program: Sophia Audelo, Nola Bowie, Jack Grotenstein, Ysa Madrigal, Ava Naditch, Ella Rodriquez, and Juliet Tachera. Several are currently students at the Los Angeles County High School for the Arts. We’re so happy they’re joining us for a spell. I hope it will be a spell, in all senses of that word. These are the young people who will be our ambassadors to their generation.

This program cannot be separated from a youth audience program that’s vital to the Los Angeles region: TeenTix LA. (Full disclosure: I serve on the advisory board for TeenTix LA.) It’s modeled on and created in partnership with TeenTix Seattle.

This is a program that invites teens to sign up for a pass. With that pass, they are admitted for $5 to arts events programmed by partner organizations.

Audiences are weaned on exposure to the arts at a young age. That’s what TeenTix LA does. It reaches into communities where these children might not know anything about the visual or performing arts, and all the soul-stirring benefits they can bestow.

 

Here’s testimony from Theo D, a 16-year-old intern at TeenTix LA:

 “When everything seemed hopeless, I found a glimmer of light. While an amazing team of doctors deserve credit for saving my life, my mental health was saved by a different miracle: TeenTix LA, a non profit that aims to break the barriers keeping LA teens out of the arts community and empower them to engage with it on their own terms.”

If, in combination with TeenTix LA, our youth journalism ambassadors can also reach all the Theos out there, discussing what they’ve all seen in our own arts institutions, large and small, then we are passing the torch of civilization to a new generation. We are throwing out a lifeline.

There’s a predisposition that none of this matters. That if the theater dies, it’s because it willed itself to die by its own constricted behaviors, and there’s some truth to that. But it’s not the whole truth. If the theater died just for these reasons, I wouldn’t care. I’d say, so be it.

Because the theater is about much more than Stephen Sondheim revivals or dramas about family dysfunction. Its empathy opens cages. It provokes humane impulses in a world that’s growing increasingly dehumanizing. If we can’t offer up a world that includes some degree of empathy, why bother? And that’s what the arts offer and teach. This is not trivial. This is not icing, an indulgence. Looking out the window at fascism on the march, at the ignorance, lies and hypocrisies and disinformation that feed it, it seems to me that this is as urgent as poverty and accessible health care. This is as urgent as the meaning of life itself, of what gives life value, of what makes life worth living.

If you’re a theater company and have not partnered with TeenTix L.A., why not? What are you waiting for? Are you concerned that those $5 passes might curtail your box office revenue? Seriously? First, you can control how many teen-tickets you allocate. Second, how many of you rely on box office as your primary financial pillar? According to what you told Stage Raw in last year’s survey, not many.

If you’re a patron or a foundation, what are you waiting for? If you think that getting kids into the arts when the public school systems have abandoned those programs, if you think that such an investment is superfluous, consider yourself an instrument of our cultural decline. There’s simply no excuse for this kind of neglect. The stakes are far too high.

Look to the children. Look out for the children. They’re the only future we have.