By
Taryn Plumb
GLOBE
CORRESPONDENT
MARCH
03, 2016
There’s
the skateboarder in the midst of an existential crisis. The classic
underachiever amidst a family of Harvard alums. The decidedly blasé
heir to a thriving family business. The perfectionist who will
exhaust herself until she achieves the flawless score of 1,600.
Together,
this motley assortment (along with several others) sits in their own
fiery circle of hell: an SAT exam room.
We
all know the pain of test-taking: the pressure, the pent-up anxiety,
the battle against the clock. Students from Lexington Christian
Academy have brought that stressful, weighty — some might go so far
as to say excruciating — experience to the stage with “Standardize
Me,” an original play inspired by the new SAT that’s set to debut
on Saturday.
Written
and staged by academy students under the guidance of theater director
Christopher Greco, the production has been performed four times, most
recently at the Massachusetts Educational Theater Guild’s High
School Festival preliminary round in Brookline on Feb. 27.
“It
kind of feels like a Saturday Night Live skit — it’s absurd and
it’s satire,” said Greco. “It raises questions about our
standardized tests — are they helpful, are they accurate? It shows
an inevitability in the need to be tested and the ability to
transcend being evaluated. It also brings out the theme of rising to
the challenge.”
With
14 actors, a moving, choreographed set of rolling desks, and frequent
references to the hell-traversing protagonists Virgil and Dante of
“The Divine Comedy,” the mockumentary fluctuates between the
fantastic and the comedic, the realistic and the tragic. Test-takers
with a range of backgrounds share their stories in a series of
vignettes interwoven with passages from the portion of the epic poem
by Dante Alighieri in which the author descends into the nine circles
of hell with the forewarning, “Abandon all hope, ye who enter
here.”
The
play was prompted, in part, by changes to the SAT that take effect
this testing season: obscure vocabulary words are disappearing, there
will be no extra penalties for wrong answers, and reading passages
will be more relevant to real life. Most notably, a mandatory essay
added in 2005 will now be optional, thus lowering the highest
achievable score (excluding the essay) to 1,600.
“While
it’s grounded in reality, it’s also a journey of the
imagination,” said senior Benjamin Rozonoyer, who plays four roles,
including a College Board supervisor, a concrete baron, a father of
an “average” girl from an overachieving family, and an “angelic”
messenger who relays test scores.
“I
like that it morphs the external and fantastic circumstances of the
test,” said the Waltham 18-year-old. “It’s a lively and
entertaining and fulfilling piece of work.”
Orchestral
music and two towers emblazoned with “800” set the scene;
characters include the serial test-taking tutor, a sparring boyfriend
and girlfriend, a middle child afflicted with seasonal affective
disorder who abhors math, the “inscrutable” supervisor who refers
to students as “untamable wild rams,” a well-meaning proctor, and
Dante and Virgil themselves.
The
impetus for the repository of characters was a real-life gaffe: The
accidental shredding of probation officers’ promotional exams —
before they could be graded — by the state trial court in 2015.
(Spoiler alert: Tests in the play are shredded and reduced to
confetti.)
Senior
Liam O’Toole initially proposed that cathartic destruction. “The
situation would be funny for the audience, while simultaneously
creating conflict and anguish for the characters onstage,” said the
18-year-old, from Arlington, who portrays a skateboarder with an
identity conflict who doubles as Dante. “I thought it had a lot of
comic potential.”
Meanwhile,
another of the characters, “Chad,” played by senior Emma
Bergstrom, was also modeled after actual events: She uses a fake ID
to sit in and take a test for someone else, much like “test taker
for hire” Sam Eshaghoff of Long Island, who was charged with fraud
and criminal impersonation in 2011 for allegedly taking the SAT and
ACT for paid clients.
“It
is an interesting role for me because in reality I am afraid of
cheating,” said Bergstrom, of Reading. “In real life I would
never say, ‘Sometimes you have to break the rules to do good.’”
Much
of “Standardize Me” formed through improvisation and tinkering,
allowing students to create a sort of common ground with their stage
presences.
“Like
my character, I stink at math,” said 17-year-old Ann Rees Berry of
the sneezy, wheezy arithmetic-hater who is equipped with an outdated,
hand-me-down calculator. “I think my vehement hatred of all things
numbers-related determined my casting.”
The
Maynard junior added of her love of theater: “By becoming someone
else, you’re better able to understand yourself, and that’s
always a fascinating experience.”
Meanwhile,
the play allowed both the students and members of the audience to
reflect on the impersonal nature of standardized testing.
“I
do not like that colleges put so much value in the four-digit numbers
we receive,” said Bergstrom. Having taken the SAT last year, she
recalled that it caused her “so much anxiety,” and “made me
feel horrible about myself when I should not have.”
Rees
Berry, for her part, will be taking the test this spring, but said
she doesn’t yet have a date lined up, and hasn’t begun to
prepare.
“A
lot of people have told us how accurate our play is, and said it was
a throwback to their own awful experiences either with the SAT or
other tests,” she said. “I guess the play’s warned me about how
terrible the test is, so now I’m expecting the absolute worst.
Hopefully it’ll be better than the experience portrayed in the play
– but I somehow doubt it.”
Original story link.
No comments:
Post a Comment