Expectations
Saturday, August 1st, 2009Because of what I got to do last weekend, I’ve been thinking quite a bit about expectations. What I got to do was run lights for the Missoula Children’s Theatre, one of my favorite annual activities. This was the fourth year in a row that our local Kiwanis Club hosted a visit from MCT, although my experience with the company dates back much farther, to the days in the early 1990s when I worked at a performing arts center in Illinois.
If you’re not familiar with MCT, you can learn a lot more by going to their Web site, but in a nutshell, here’s how it works: On Sunday night, a two-person MCT team arrives in your town with a complete children’s show — sets, makeup, costumes, scripts and scores — loaded into the back of a ridiculously small pickup truck. On Monday, they hold auditions for local kids, casting up to sixty or so of them in a musical production. The kids rehearse all week long, and on Saturday they put on two performances for the public. On Saturday night, after the second show, everything goes back into the pickup and the team is back on the road to the next town. No, the shows are not Shakespeare. They may not even qualify as truly top-notch children’s theatre. But they’re fun, cute, quick, entertaining little musicals. They are, in short, what they are: decent material produced decently, a blast for the cast, enjoyable for the audience, nice to see in any community and especially important in areas like ours, which are, to put it nicely, starving for the arts, theatre in particular.
The reason all of this makes me think of expectations is because of the reactions MCT invariably gets from the parents and grandparents and uncles and aunts of the cast members — and a few of the cast members themselves, come to think of it. They’re understandably skeptical about the whole approach. They look at this mob of five dozen unruly kids, ages six to eighteen, and think to themselves, “There is no way in the world they’ll be able to do it. Learn an entire show in a week? Dialogue? Songs? Dances? Entrances and exits? My kid’s never even been in a play before. He doesn’t know backstage from a back door. He’s going to learn all of this in five days? Uh-uh. No way. Not happening.” And then, the next thing you know, it’s Saturday afternoon at three o’ clock, the house lights dim, the music starts, and everything falls magically into place.
Kids are good at an awful lot of things, and above all, they’re amazingly good at meeting the expectations set for them. They have an uncanny, sometimes unsettling ability to rise or fall depending on just where we decide to set the bar. Set it low, and they’ll invariably sink to meet it. Set it high, and they’ll clear it just about every time.
Yes, I know that’s all a bit simplistic. We’re all familiar with the kids who melt down under the pressure of expectations raised too high, and those on the other end of the spectrum, the ones who inexplicably never reach the goals we’d like to see them achieve. But those extremes don’t change the fact that most kids, most of the time, will do exactly what we expect them to do, what we challenge them to do, no matter how difficult or even impossible it might look at the outset.
Inside that overloaded MCT pickup, along with all the sets and costumes, are a couple of things you can’t see: high expectations and confidence. MCT says to kids, “You can do this. You will do this. Don’t let anybody tell you that you can’t. You’ll work hard and we’ll help you and you’ll be great.”
And then, quite naturally, they are.
A proud Rumpelstiltskin cast after last Saturday’s shows. (Photo by Christi Ryan)