An exploration of human connections and life changes. Works of growth, communication, self-image, and loss. We all learn as we grow and sometimes the

process can be difficult, yet in the face of those challenges we earn experiences that help us to define who we are.

TRANSITION A Collection of Original Student Works

A publication of the

Palo Alto Children’s Theatre

Cover art photographed by instructor.

Students Meera Bucklin and Bonita Homm work on a sidewalk chalk mural as part of the “Not In

Our Schools” week, at Gunn High School.

This publication is a production of the

PALO ALTO CHILDREN’S THEATRE

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and the

TEEN ARTS COUNCIL

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in cooperation with the

National Endowment for the Arts

as part of

THE BIG READ program

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April 2014

Instructor’s Note:In early March 2014, as part of a National Endowment for the Arts program known as the Big Read, a selection of students from Gunn High School volunteered to step forward and participate in a unique workshop experience.

The Big Read program exists to bolster the reading of literature for recreation and appreciation of the art form within communities across the United States. This year’s selection by the Teen Arts Council of Palo Alto, CA was the novel “Old School” by local author Tobias Wolff.

The novel follows a young man at an elite boarding school in New England as he strives to win literary notoriety among his peers as well as the coveted prize of a private audience with a famous author. As his story unfolds we see certain people gain great importance and influence in his life while others wither. After an act of academic dishonesty turns his life on its heels he is forced to refocus and discover his true self, and his true artistic voice.

The challenge put before the students of Gunn High School was to read the book and then develop their own creative responses to the themes, characters, or ideas that resonated with them. Apart from being original and personal, these works would be written with the intention that they be publicly performed in a visual medium.

This publication is a collection of those works: Personally inspired, carefully rendered, and drawn from elements of the student’s own lives. These stories follow the themes of growth, self-discovery, self-awareness, and the personal trials that accompany these transitions from one stage of life to the next.

My sincere thanks to all the participants.

-Daniel Joyce

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Students Hart Rosenburg and Ryeri Lim work on the staging for the work “Time to Stop That Now”

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6:30 a.m. is a curious time. It’s not at all like the books say, and the movies rarely show this as but a rapid introductory sequence. A whistling

prelude that establishes the importance of the day.

But the people I see are not bleary-eyed or bustling; they linger in soft blue chairs, all only mildly asleep, as if their dimming notches have been pulled quietly down. I see more wide eyes than pale eyelids; and far more people are connected or plugged in elsewhere. Right now, make no mistake, I too am plugged in. It is not somehow more wholesome to communicate to the future through ink than it is to do so in the present with futuristic fingers.

It’s quiet under the sea.

INTERLUDE: I hate the fact that I’m drinking right now what is probably blood coffee and writing with ink that may have poisoned the skin of children without options and that I’m checking the time––6:36––on a machine assembled by honorary machines who are also called people sometimes. I am wretched, and I so want to tear the clothes from my back with sore fingers that share the stinging pain of thousands of underpaid women. My entire existence is so rotten and I do not want to rot with the mildly asleep fishes.

6:41. The sun is young and cold. It shivers and stretches over my page.

NOTE: An interlude is a measure of time during which background music––the themesetter, the moodmaker––comes into the primary spotlight.

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Poetry In Motionby Alyssa See-Tho

As a reader, we live many lives We fall, we love, we take, and we let go We aspire, inspire, and ultimately…live Who’s to say we were not what they were? !As a reader, we think many thoughts We question and praise and rumble and craze, Our thoughts share and combine with the characters like wind slicing through fields of wonder We settle and sigh Who’s to say we are not what they are? !As a reader, we feel many things Love, loss, hope and pain Laughter and that radiance that flies off of another and enters your heart, tying, connecting, feeling We soon all become one and yet we are all each our own Who’s to say we will not be what they will? !As a person, we are We breathe, we feel, we laugh, we love, and most of all, We live We live our own story, THIS chance, THIS life, and it is all ours We sing with our voices: the voices in our heads, the voices in our hearts, the ways of life, beliefs and values around which our being revolves We make not a sound and yet the pulse of the earth moves with us, our songs and our hopes, our mistakes and second chances, our echoes We dream We don’t just have one or two or three or four They live and breathe beside us If our flame goes out, so will its flame If you have a dream And I have a dream Who’s someone else to say we can’t achieve it?

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Author’s Note: When we read, we experience so many different things and, because of this, often feel as though the life we have in reality is so limited and we feel so trapped. Who says that

real life and the lives that characters live are so different? We can bring what we feel and experience in stories to our own lives now, learning from characters and the story itself. Be

inspired by what you read, not discouraged! We have THIS life, OUR story and it is time to turn the page and achieve OUR dream.

-Alyssa See-Tho

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Annoyed, I wandered out. I’d already examined them, but my fingers went again to the

two candelabras to each side of the restaurant’s entrance. They reached my shoulders in height; they were dark rough metal, the kind you

would never scratch your fingernails against. Each supported about forty slim white candles, some bright and half not, scentless. Wax linger-drops hung down in what

seemed to imply neglect, until I got close––and saw that the metal candelabras stood on stone mounts absolutely painted in candle essence, completely dripped over in opalescent

tongues and tails. They were stunning because they were authentic, and because they were manifests of passed time. A blond woman stood by the candelabras. The wrinkles around her eyes indicated both laughter and loss, or perhaps I only recognized them as such after she told me so. For she was checking the wick of each unlit candle, and then she was holding out a match and saying, “Would you like to light one?” The woman, who’d found a satisfactory wick, lit a candle herself. She looked at me––not straight on, somehow––and said, “It’s for someone you’ve lost.” A gray-haired man came up behind her, touched her shoulder, asked a question I do not remember. But I recall she smiled so brightly, so soulfully at him that my mind translates it into a laugh. She said it again: “It’s for someone you’ve lost. When she added, “It comes from an old Catholic tradition,” I immediately travelled back to a Catholic church I’d visited in Quebec, and a thought I’d entertained that morning travelled back to me, that is, why do people choose to restrict themselves, choose binding small-confining regimes, rulebooks, lifestyles, is it so their souls are not dropped into Chaos, is it so that they remember to value hope, is it so there are expectations and boundaries to surpass, to

outdistance, to win. I worship because within me there is a well both overflowing and parched.

I took the match and I lit a candle for the one I almost lost. The woman had moved past me by the time I had a light going.

“Thank you,” I said to her back. “You’re welcome,” she replied, not looking round, moving

away.

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Time to Stop That Now by Hart Rosenburg

Setting: (JORDAN stands alone in the center of a circle of light, checking the texts on her phone. A bench and column are nearby, perhaps they manage to look like part of a school quad. The NARRATOR stands directly behind her, and will follow her around the stage keeping a few feet of distance between they and JORDAN. JORDAN is wearing a short blue skirt and blue top, the NARRATOR wears similar pieces, but in a nondescript grey. The sounds of a bustling school quad filter in.) !NARRATOR: For the first time in over a week we finally make plans to meet at the usual place. I’d been texting you but for some reason you kept saying you were busy. Yeah, that makes sense. You’re going off to college soon. Of course that’s why, nothings wrong. !STUDENT: (enters from SRC and stands near the edge of the light.) Hey, How are you? !(JORDAN doesn’t answer. She is lost in her own thoughts. STUDENT shrugs and exits back the way they came.)!NARRATOR: I’m fine there’s nothing wrong. It’s going to be fine. Are you angry with me? You must be, after what I did...yes, she has to be. I was bad. I did bad, I deserve to be punished. Whatever comes my way, I have to sit and take it. (Puts away phone and crosses arms.) I have to receive punishment. Maybe then I’ll finally be able to forgive myself. Will we be able to move past it, how am I supposed to know? I love her I love her and I’m grateful for this extra time with her, isn’t that enough?

!(TAYLOR enters from USR, heads C towards JORDAN. JORDAN looks up and smiles. Her spotlight expands, the two hug. They break away and smile.) NARRATOR: We meet with smiles in the usual place, you grabbing my hand, or did you? I don’t know, I don’t know anymore. But you either led or we automatically followed each other to a place not far away. A spot with no memories. I’m sure you smiled at me, you must have. !(The girls sit down on the bench. JORDAN sits stiffly, shoulders hunched, with her palms on either side of her hips, allowing more weight to fall there. TAYLOR crosses her legs and places hands in lap.) !NARRATOR: Your hair flutters and I shiver. JORDAN: So what’s up? NARRATOR: A dead weight in my center, I know I know this is not good. Don’t ask how. (JORDAN looks over at NARRATOR, as if they are having a conversation. Looks back at TAYLOR) It’s in the impish set of your lips mixed with cold eyes that refuse to focus on mine, looking without really seeing. I am starting to sweat inside my sweater while the tops of my thighs, bare because of the skirt now burn.TAYLOR: We need to talk. (Her voice is a bizarre jaunty deadpan)NARRATOR: Inside my chest those stones are back, the ones that never really disappear, swelling to gargantuan proportions. Don’t want to hear, don’t want to listen, but everything

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suddenly feels empty in anticipation. (JORDAN hunches over, tucks head in. TAYLOR leans forward.)TAYLOR: Look, sometimes the way you act just really gets to me. Like with Frida, what was up with that? Why are you such a recluse? (TAYLOR is calm, cool and collected.) JORDAN: I...I don’t mean to be. (Pause) I mean...it’s just...hard sometimes, you know? (Hesitantly reaches out hands.)NARRATOR: I am slow and broken, trying to explain to you but somehow nothing really gets through this tongue of mine. JORDAN: So what am I supposed to do? I should change?TAYLOR: No, no Jord, that’s not what I mean. You are really great. It’s just right now I can’t handle it.!(Pause. TAYLOR pulls JORDAN into a hug. JORDAN breathes deeply. They hold on for a few seconds and then break away, smiling.) !NARRATOR: We meander to the first topic of your grievances with what I do. (Resumeprevious sitting positions.) For how long we stay there on that bench spinning in that circle I don’t know. Long enough to feel paranoid over sunburn, to watch the shadows of the tree stretch to my feet. Black shoes meet black ground. That look you’d given me weeks ago comes to mind. Annoyance and disgust in your features, I’d felt like a broken toy. (JORDAN alternately swirls her feet on the ground.) The tanbark rustles and crunches along with the swirling motions of my feet.JORDAN: Where do we go from here? (The girls stand and TAYLOR exits. The circle of light contracts again.) !NARRATOR:The two of us part smiling. The next day in school you only wave. Don’t look at me in the hallways. Why? Why is there worms and mud in my stomach? (JORDAN hunches over,

stares off at the ground. Pushes a fist to her mouth.) Keep my head level, don’t draw attention. I am a stone. Don’t talk to people, that’s bad. At brunch one day I collapse where we eat, you’re only ten maybe twenty feet away. (JORDAN collapses into the column, remaining upright with an effort.) Don’t even glance my way. I stay there for god knows how long in that cold shadow of the cement column, heart thudding about a foot lower than normal. Eventually I have to run away when a boy asks me if I’m alright. STUDENT: (enters pool of light and cautiously approaches.) Are you okay?!(JORDAN looks up at STUDENT and runs off SL. STUDENT stares after her before exiting SR.) !NARRATOR. I can’t take it. Later I go and apologize to him.JORDAN: (re-enters and stands in the center of the light.) Really, it was too kind of him. !NARRATOR: After maybe a week I have to go up to you and ask. I need some clarification. Walking up to you is hard, my legs tremble and hardly feel a part of my body. There is a hyper awareness my every molecule, from the creases in my shirt to the hairs on my neck. As usual you are in the center of things. !(TAYLOR enters from USL and the light expands to accommodate her. The girls face each other: JORDAN is stiff and defensive, TAYLOR relaxed.)!JORDAN: Can we talk?NARRATOR: (Standing directly behind JORDAN.) I guess that was my voice.TAYLOR: Sure.!(A pause.) !JORDAN: Are we broken up?NARRATOR: You have a tiny smile on your face

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that I’m unable to read. Tilting your head the answer is… TAYLOR: For now. Do you think you’ll want to become friends again after a while?!(A longer pause.) !JORDAN: I think I’m done with friends for now. (TAYLOR nods, turns, and exits. Light remains open. JORDAN crouches and puts head in hands. NARRATOR walks around behind her, throwing a fit.) NARRATOR: (Angrily) That’s it. I’m done, I’mTOGETHER: DONE (Loudly)NARRATOR: I say. I’m sick of thisJORDAN: why does this always happen? NARRATOR: what is WRONG with me already? No, stop. TOGETHER: Stop!NARRATOR: I refuse to change anymore for people. I won’t JORDAN: I won’t TOGETHER: I won’t. Screw acceptance. I don’t need that I don’t need anyone I tell you. Leave me alone already, I need to sulk for a while.!(NARRATOR X’s USL and exits. VOICE OFF STAGE: Inventory: two legs, two arms, two eyes. Physically able and mentally stable. (JORDAN lifts her head up and looks at the ceiling.)NARRATOR: (approaches JORDAN at C and tugs at her arm.) Hey, hey you. It’s time to stop that now. Let’s go play. !(The two walk DSC, jump off and walk up the aisle holding hands)

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The departing portals in Mexico are much less peopled, even at three in the afternoon, but somehow still more harried. The attendants processing us are just as beautiful as their American counterparts––perhaps more so, or perhaps in the last half-week I have acclimated to their creasy skin, set serious jaws, comb-marked hair, and steady eyes. Yet I stare and struggle to find one similarity.

It becomes even more wondrous how an individual holds a grudge against many, for their singularities.

Then again, it’s difficult to forget the mad evil of some natures. I spoke to three Marcos on this trip, and only one of them offered to kiss me.

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Where You’ve Beenby Katherine Shark

Day 1, 128 lbs. I watch you across the class as you speak to a girl. She looks lovely next to you, all long slender legs and fragile bones and glossy hair. You were smiling at her just the way I wished you’d smile at me, as if she was the most important, interesting person in the room, as if there was no one else you’d rather be with. She laughs, and I can see her thin stomach and tiny hands. My hands on the desk look like an apes’, my legs are short and chunky, my stomach pudgy. I look grotesque. I throw away my lunch. !Day 30, 116 lbs. I’ve a habit now. I count the calories of everything I eat, over and over. I weigh myself daily. 116 lbs. 100 calorie apple. 0 calorie coffee. 116 lbs. 100 calorie apple. 0 calorie coffee. You made a joke about the people in your english class, and I thought you were the most beautiful boy I’d seen when you laughed. I’d always loved green eyes, but now yours are my favorite color, the color of the grey-blue sea at the edges. !Day 62, 110 lbs. My friend told me that I’d lost a lot of weight recently. My father told me I looked like death warmed over. Another boy told me I looked skinny. “Really?” I said. “Oh, not in a bad way,” he added hastily. You didn’t say anything. I check myself in every mirror I see, the span of my thighs (oh god, they touch) the fat over my stomach, the way my ribs barely show when I stretch. I compare myself to every girl I see. Do her thighs touch? Do her collarbones show? How slender is her waist? Do you look at her and think she’s prettier than me? I don’t eat breakfast and I don’t eat lunch. Hot black coffee hits my stomach like a knife, like swallowing jet fuel, gasoline that bursts into flame when you talk to me, smile at me. You set me afire even when you’re not there, as I run over your words, your face. I can hear your voice, your laugh, see you push back your hair, smiling like the sun on earth. Curling up into a ball helps alleviate the hunger, and I pretend that dreaming of you is better than food.

“Attack” photographed by Ryeri Lim

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Day 85, 105 lbs. I eat a few bites of dinner when I’m forced too. I went three days without eating and only lost a pound. Why am I not losing weight? The mirror and the scales taunt me, I am still just as fat as I always was. You must be disgusted with me. I despise my body, I despise myself. But I love you, the light you gain when you talk of soccer or running or the ranch in Colorado where you go every year, the way you glow with passion and life. I could listen to you forever, try to know you inside and out. I want to know more, I want to learn everything about you. I wonder if you light up like that when someone mentions me, if you think about me when I’m not there. !Day 150, 99.1 lbs. The only thing more joyous than seeing this number on the scale is you. I almost fainted walking up the stairs to math with you, I couldn’t make it up the whole flight without stopping from exhaustion, I paused and suddenly the world spun and I was on the ground, I felt my eyes roll back and your hand on my shoulder, “Are you ok?! Do you need to go to the nurse?!”. I’d faint a thousand times over if it meant that you’d put your hand on me like that again, delicately, like I’d break, as if I was some precious, fragile thing. !Day 187, 101 lbs. They took me to the hospital. “Anorexia,” they say. “You’re going to die if you don’t stop. Your heart will fail, your bones are weak, you are deteriorating. Eat.” No, they don’t understand. This is my friend, it will save me, it will bring me happiness, if I get a little thinner, maybe then I can be your girl, your angel, light, small, thin, skinny, perfect. I’ll be happy. Food will make me fat, food is scary, food is the enemy. I am hooked up to a heart monitor, and they won’t let me out of bed. The monitor is placed just below my collarbone, where you’d touched me once, but it’s a cold piece of plastic that smells of medical adhesive, not your warm, smooth hand. It doesn’t compare.

“Recovery” Photographed by Ryeri Lim

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Day 188, x lbs. There are no scales here. I remember when I said my hands were cold and you looked at them. “Let me see,” you said, and I put out my hands hesitantly. You held then gently, as if you were about to kiss the scarred knuckles and translucent skin. “Fuck, they’re freezing!” you exclaimed, then let them go, but I never forgot the soft, dry touch of your fingers on mine. The doctor held my hands the same way, his short fingers damp from hand sanitizer. He checked for circulation and did the same to my feet. I wish you’d hold my hands again, I wish you’d hold me. I am scared. I want to get out of here. !Day 189, x lbs. I think of you, of your scent, like almond milk but sweeter. I am so attuned to you, I can always tell when it’s you by the scent, without even opening my eyes. The hospital smells of antiseptic and Purell and the food they keep giving me. They say I need to gain weight, that I need more food to repair my heart. Nothing can fix my heart. It isn’t even broken the way they say it is, it’s not weak from starvation, it’s cracked by love. I love you and they say I was dying. It did not feel like dying, it felt like needles in my heart and razors in my stomach and coffee on the back of my tongue. Day 189, x lbs. A friend visited. She said that you asked where I was, that you were “surprised” when she told you I was in the hospital. I spend all day trying to visualize your face. !Day 190, x lbs. They gave me an orange to eat, and I peeled it slowly, remembering how you peeled it all in a single spiral and pretended the peel was a slinky, how you rubbed it against my cheek and laughed at me. “It’s perfume!”. I spend all my time remembering every moment with you, running them through my mind and making a map of every place you’d touched me, every subject we’d talked about, thinking, he was here and here and here and here. !Day 194, x lbs. They released me today with a packet of instructions for my parents on how to supervise my eating. “Lots of food,” the doctors said. “To help her body heal.” They don’t say how to help my mind heal. The doctor pats me on the head and smiles. “I’m glad you came here.” he said. “You could have died. You’re worth more than that. Good luck.” I never realized his eyes are the same color as yours, except his eyes look at me and see potential and value. Your eyes don’t see me at all. !Day 195, x lbs. I texted you, saying I was home from the hospital. You sent me an email- “I hope you’re feeling better. I miss you”. I look up “miss” in the dictionary, to be sure I didn’t misinterpret your meaning. I read it five times, just to be sure. Part of me wants to keep the email and memorize it, but I resist and delete it.

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Day 205, 117 lbs. They told me my weight and I cried and cried. I’m drowning in self-hatred, god, how could I be so pathetic and greedy? You once told me a woman should never eat as much as a man. You’d been joking, but I’d believed you. I think how I had eaten up every word you said. I had been so starved for your love I devoured every crumb of attention you gave me, even the poisonous ones; I savored even the smallest of your smiles and glances, hoping they could sustain me. Eventually I take a deep breath. The next meal is tough, but I make it through. !Day 220, 120 lbs. I’m back at school and the sky is blue, blue, blue. I can’t quite remember the color of your eyes, but I don’t mind. The sky is far prettier. !Day 223, 122 lbs. My thighs touch at the top again, and I am beginning to get used to the feel of them brushing each other as I walk. I no longer want to cry over it. My friend held my hands to attach a bracelet today. I didn’t think of you when she touched them, though. I thought instead of the things I can make with my hands, art and music and beauty and life. They are no longer my clumsy old ape fingers or my weak thin tendons, they’re smooth and graceful and powerful. They are strong now. !Day 230, 125 lbs. You spoke to a slim, slender girl today. I ignored it and looked back down at my math problems. I’m not better yet, not by a long shot. But I’ve let go of you, and that’s a start.

“Riches” photographed by Ryeri Lim

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Takeoff: Like making a decision, the ground is beneath me and then it is not. The plane tilts and levels and suddenly we are the lights that we have accidentally wished on, or the sight that children point out in the schoolyard, and everyone always looks. Earth as I knew it dissolves into cloud, and the man sitting next to me (in the aisle seat) catches himself straining to stare out the window in wonder. 7:21 a.m. The sun is shy again.

Everyone always looks.

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Credits and ThanksAll Transition pieces by Ryeri Lim !Additional photos and layout: Daniel Joyce !Workshop facilitator: Daniel Joyce !

Palo Alto Children’s Theatre Staff !Theatre Intern: Rebecca Krieger Production Assistants: Wyatt Alvis, Cory Hall, Spencer Orbegozo Technical Director: David Gotlieb Production Manager: Lane Pianta Assistant Production Manager: Nora Kaminsky Box Office Manager: Richard Curtis Costume Supervisor: Jennifer Gonsalves Director of Education: Christopher Luciani Coordinator of Theatre Operations: Marieke Gaboury Artistic Director: Judge Luckey

Thanks to all the workshop participants: Alexandra Estrade Nia Gardner Ryeri Lim Jessica Luo Hart Rosenberg Alyssa See-Tho Katherine Shark Sivan Spector !Special Thanks to: Lane Pianta Tarn Wilson and Jim Shelby !as well as: Tobias Wolff William H. Gunn High School The Palo Alto Teen Arts Council The Palo Alto Children’s Theatre The Big Read Program and the National Endowment for the Arts

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“What an astonishing thing a book is. It's a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you're inside

the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing

is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof

that humans are capable of working magic.”

- Carl Sagan, Cosmos

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