When Deonte Haywood arrived at Simeon Career Academy in the fall, the 14-year-old felt “shy about his height.” And he worried about finding his place among the many towering students who came to the basketball powerhouse with dreams of becoming the next Derrick Rose.
But Deonte found his crowd when a school counselor just happened to enroll him in a drama class. That class was tasked with putting on Simeon’s first full-length play in perhaps decades.
Despite his small stature, Deonte filled the stage as a Southern preacher in a fitted blue suit. He saw it as much more than a chance to be in the spotlight in a play by the famed August Wilson.
“It really gave me a chance to express myself,” he said. “I became friends with everybody and our bond grew stronger.”
At a lot of high schools, the annual play is a staple and the experience is profound. For some students, it sparks dreams of being a professional thespian. For others, like Deonte, it is a safe place where students learn to work together and get to be part of something bigger than themselves.
Most Chicago public high schools have some type of arts performance for families to attend. But only 37 of the district’s 115 high schools reported offering a theatrical production last year, according to an annual survey done by Ingenuity Chicago, an organization that advocates for equity in arts education across Chicago Public Schools.
Principal Tamarah Ellis cannot remember a play for as long as she’s been at Simeon. That includes when she went to Simeon as a student in the 1980s and taught there in the early 2000s. But when she took the helm last year, and the drama teacher asked her about putting on a play, she quickly decided she wanted to make it happen.
“I was adamant,” she said. “We need to give the kids something to celebrate. We have a lot of students that watch movies and they dream of having that opportunity. So, what better place to start rather than high school?”
Ellis doesn’t know why Simeon went without a play for so many years. The school is a career and technical academy known for its sports, especially basketball. It is likely that past principals focused on spending their limited discretionary funds on those programs.
Drama teacher David Hossler said it wasn’t until last year that he saw “a way forward to do a project like this.” At the time, he’d been teaching at Simeon for three years and it was his first teaching job.
Then, two things happened. He heard the Educational Theatre Foundation, which works to expand access to theater in schools, was offering $10,000 grants. And he got Ellis’ support to offer an upper-level drama class capable of putting on a play.
The school won the grant, and they used it to hire a director and buy materials so Simeon’s carpentry program could build the set. They also paid adults to help with the music and production design.
Hossler decided the school would do Wilson’s “The Piano Lesson.” To Hossler, the lauded African American playwright is the “most important playwright ever born on American soil.”
He also thought that students would get into the story, which includes a ghost and is about whether to hold onto the past or let go of it.
To direct, the school chose Justice Ford, an award-winning young actress who got her own start acting in a CPS elementary school rendition of “Fiddler on the Roof.” Ford sees directing at Simeon as an important way to give back.
“I am here trying to plant seeds, showing our Black babies that there are options,” she said. “Expression is our birthright, so that’s what I am doing here.”
But the job was not easy. Even though the students were enrolled in an upper-level drama class, most of them had never been in a play before. And, because Simeon had not done plays, many had not even seen one.
The students-turned-actors practiced daily for most of the school year. At home, they went over their lines, recruiting their moms to help. And even on dress rehearsal day, there were stumbles and stops.
“It’s been a pretty serious, hard process, because I never did a play before,” said senior Semaj Jackson. “But we’re getting through it.”
She said that the actors sometimes made mistakes during rehearsals and started laughing for “like 10 minutes.” But on the day of the play, they got it together. At least to the audience’s eye, they made it through, scene by scene.
Semaj’s mother, Yentl Brumfield, was impressed. She couldn’t believe that her daughter had the lead role and spent three hours walking in heels — something she’d never seen her daughter do before.
“I really think this is opening her up as a young woman,” Brumfield said. “She doesn’t really talk too much … she stays to herself.”
Rio Barfield also said she was happy to see her quiet son, Joshua, getting out of his comfort zone in the play.
Watching the play got Barfield and other mothers reminiscing about the plays they saw while they were in high school and how much the experience mattered to them. For Barfield, it was “A Raisin in the Sun,” Lorraine Hansberry’s acclaimed story about a Black family from Chicago’s South Side, at Corliss High School.
“Sadly, the arts are being taken out of a lot of schools,” she said. “But the arts are definitely important for the kids to find that creativity, give them a chance to express themselves and just overall brighten their horizons.”