The Teacher Who Turned a Teenager’s Life Upside Down

An Interview with a Former High School Teacher

By Thatiana Smith

This article is part of the Stage Raw/Unusual Suspects Youth Journalism Fellowship

 

High School goes by fast yet still can encompass the best and worst days of a young person’s life. Friends and family can make these four years much less stressful, but not everyone has the privilege of having an accepting family.

Great teachers can improve their student’s lives in unexpected ways. While it’s not a teacher’s job to become a student’s therapist, students often confide in a compassionate teacher; something that can be highly impactful in a student’s life. Mental health can improve, progress in school can skyrocket, and skills learned in extracurricular activities can develop.

An impactful teacher helps students become better citizens and people. For me, that teacher was Chris Markermorse, my former high school theater teacher. One of my many inspirations,  and the reason I’m the person I am today. In my sophomore year of High School, Markermorse’s fifth-period theater arts class threw my world upside down. He gave me opportunities to act in and direct plays, to write, and to learn about technical theater. I learned how to develop different kinds of stories for the stage.  Over the years, he has helped students find and shape their most authentic selves.

Markermorse was born and raised in Huntington Beach, California, alongside his music-loving family. He attendedGolden West College and University of California, Riverside where he studied theater. He started teaching theater in 1987. While he didn’t start out as a high school theater teacher, he was pushed to pursue a career in high school theater later in his career. Markermorse used the art form of theater as an outlet for young artists to express themselves and to find their own voices when everyone else was shutting them up. His support and confidence in his students allowed them to step outside their comfort zones. Markermorse retired from teaching theater at Poly High School in the spring of 2024.

I reconnected with Markermorse to interview him on a cold Wednesday morning in November. Here’s what he had to say about what he’s learned, the impact he’s had on his students, and the future of theater (interview edited for clarity):

Stage Raw: What has been the best lesson you’ve learned from becoming a teacher?

Chris Markermorse: I think the easiest answer is authenticity. What I bring into the theater is so me – the good and the bad. I certainly have weaknesses as a teacher, a performer and as an artist but I think the most important lesson is to remain authentic. I fall flat on my face when I try to be someone else or have been mandated to do something as a teacher that didn’t fit my philosophy, my beliefs or my training. Remaining authentic has been important: as a writer and as a musician. When I try to be other than that, I’m not as successful.

Being a teacher is so odd because you’re part of the community, whether you want to [be] or not. You’re suddenly thrust into the community you teach in, the larger educational community, I got thrust into the theater community. I had already been part of the theater community for a while, but the larger kind of national conversation.

SR: Have former students expressed to you the ways that you’ve impacted them?

CM: One of the best parts about being a theater teacher is that my students reconnect with me often. I get to interact with them in multiple ways: I’m invited to weddings, their children’s bar mitzvahs, their children’s christenings; it’s a blessing, really. What else can I call it? To be a part of that history with my students. Because my students are in the arts, I interact with them as audience members. Some of them I’ve collaborated with, and some I’m collaborating with now. Yeah, definitely, students reach back and include me in their lives in various ways.

SR: Have your students gone on to do the things you expected from them? 

CM: I have students that are actors, and I have students that are choreographers, and I have students doing it professionally. I have a student right now who’s both producing and performing cabarets in Chicago. I have a student who’s a choreographer and a dancer doing all this amazing cruise ship work. I have students producing drag shows, haunted houses, regular shows, and some are creating amazing films. I’m not sure that’s a direct relation to me.

I’ve had students that came from really desperate backgrounds, and they stumbled into the theater and loved it. I gave them multiple opportunities to try directing, writing, and acting,  all the stuff we do in the program. They’ve  moved on to college when they never thought they were going to go to college. Many of them were the first kids [in their families] to go to college and their parents never understand why they’re getting a theater degree. I’ve had lots of meetings with parents trying to explain what a career in theater looks like.

I certainly have been disappointed in my students because they failed themselves. They didn’t fail me. They were just not authentic about what they wanted or what their dreams were and were willing to sell out on that, and how could I not be disappointed in that? I’m disappointed for them, not in them.

SR: What do you think the future of theater looks like? 

CM: The problem with theater right now is that it’s too white, it’s too pegged to social class. Theater, as it’s going now, is gonna die. I love Shakespeare but it’s ridiculous to try and get kids to relate. A typical classroom of California kids doesn’t relate to a bunch of old, dead White people from the fifteen and sixteen hundreds. It’s just really hard.

We can’t live with stories for old White people like me. Part of the future of theater has to tell stories of the people who live now. Who inhabit our world and our culture now. I don’t think we serve it very well. We need to better serve that.

SR: How can we preserve theater’s integrity while also developing new ideas? 

CM: Surround yourself with people who will make that happen. This whole thing is so collaborative that you have to surround yourself with people who are living, existing, and having experiences in the culture now. If your team is not diverse and doesn’t have enough life experiences or cultural experiences, then your product is just going to stifle. Without that, theater is just going to die.