I saw the show two years ago and thought it one of the most moving and inspiring things I'd ever seen. (With gratitude, I've been starting each day with coffee in a City at Peace mug ever since.)This year it seemed a little more formulaic - I suppose you never notice a formula the first time you see something - but it's a good formula. In a series of skits, based on actual experiences of participants (but nobody plays her/himself) we see the enormous challenges which kids of today face - fighting parents, coming out as gay, a mother who works you to death but never has a kind word, unwanted pregnancy, sexual molestation by a family member, involvement in the drug trade. As these scenes unfold, the situation gets worse and worse, and one approaches a moment of hopelessness. At the nadir today, the whole stage was covered with bodies of students, who at one point sat up and sang, several of them crying, that there seemed to be nobody there for them, that they "want to scream but have no voice, want to dream but have no choice." And then young people - friends, boyfriends, siblings, cousins - help each other out, and hope is restored, chastened but the more real for the seriousness with which the problems have been described. The skits end not with happy endings but with hope that it's not ended already.
The production two years ago was called "R. I. P. Revolution In Progress," and was narrated by five very cool young people who were like urban guerillas, or a band of superhero friends from a cartoon. This year's production, "Dream This," is a bit less exciting as it's framed by a single young woman's account of her research on her generation for an essay on the American dream which she must write to get a scholarship to go to college and study journalism. The frame works well enough - she goes through various drafts, starting with clichés then collapsing into a kind of stunned silence before realizing that these young people must have a dream of some kind to keep going in such adversity. Yet while she concludes that she's going to be a journalist to help everyone, not just for herself, it feels the only hope is individual escape, rather than transformation of dysfunctional communities through solidarity (though of course this was the upshot of the skits).
It was still a very good show, and I feel now, as before, that our college would be much the richer for having some of these kids as students. I know I'd learn a lot from them!
