Acting Like a Child:

Gainesville's Sybil St. Claire gives youth lessons in theatre... and in life

MOON Magazine, by Shamrock McShane

   For a dozen years ACT has been producing original work, the most prominent being Playground. Like other hot local playwrights, Sybil's work is being recognized around the country, with productions in Puerto Rico and in Texas, and others pending in Canada and England. Playground is Sybil's "Day in the Life," concerning that strange race she knows best, kids. We've been there. We know this. The Greeks must have felt something like this when they saw their myths being played out. It's your first kiss," Sybil explains, "and the the stuff that goes with it. It's being alive and having everything happen at once. It's crazy. " It's childhood. It's everything that blows you away before you can grow up.
I have written plays that are plot driven and tightly structured, " Sybil says, exhaling smoke from the side of her mouth like Bogart. Playground just isn't one of them." Which is to say Playground opens up not in. It takes place in the form of diary entries, played out against that great backdrop of shared childhood, the playground.

   There's no escaping the sense of time warp in Sybil's work. Eclectic and high energy though it is, time is still elongated in childhood. After all, when you're 10, a year is fully one-tenth of your life. Compare that to one of us old farts who's been around the block, what, 40, 50, 60 times. It gets old in a hurry.
But to be ten...that's the trick of Sybil St. Claire's art. In the beginning, creation is always news. That's why Mitch Stacy, then David Mamet traces his roots as a playwright from the Neighborhood Playhouse School of Theatre in New York and its great acting teacher Sanford Meisner all the way to Stanislavski, the Father of Naturalism. Old Stan, as Mamet is wont to call him, is credited with developing the system that begat Brando who begat DeNiro, and so on unto modern times.

   Our version of Old Stan here in Gainesville may well be Sybil St. Claire, whose school of acting is called The All Children's Theatre, and whose Playground opens for two weeks of performances at Santa Fe Community College next week. One thing about acting school: you don't graduate; you just become a student of life. The best schools, the best teachers are like that. What they teach is how to think, how to live. If you can turn what you've learned into art, the muses be praised. But life is meant for living and anybody who can give us a clue is a godsend.
     
   What pours forth is Sybil's personality, strong and vibrant. And you can see that it is the heart and soul of The All Children's Theatre and a body of work that places Sybil in the forefront of Gainesville's burgeoning playwriting a beat reporter for the Gainesville Sun, picked up on ACT some years back to report: "Sybil St. Claire knows better than anyone how the theatre works its magic on children." What Sybil knows, as did Old Stan, is pure theatre, as evidenced not just by her Ph.D., but by her proven methods, her discipline, her professionalism. If you are a true theatrician, there is a spirit that guides your work, a wholeness, and aesthetic.

     "My shows are usually double-cast," Sybil says. "So Playground has a cast of 18, which means an ensemble of 36." "Ensemble" is the operative term here. There are no stars. There aren't even any leads. "I try to avoid the term 'leads.' The kids are quick to catch on, but I have to hammer it home sometimes with the parents: we are not into star making, and we do not do the stage-parent routine."

     The ACT is all about theatre as an act of discovery. It works for both players and audience; it begins with the playwright. And so Sybil is constantly going on this timeless journey into childhood, and then returning with a script, a blueprint for building a play. "The first dozen plays I wrote were so bad I'm thinking of having them expunged," Sybil laughs. "But I had a big advantage over most playwrights in that I could mount them at ACT and see what was wrong with them. Now I have a half a dozen plays that are really worth their salt."

     It is a rare theatrician who can mount her own play. You have to see it with a director's vision - not just imagine it (which is hard enough) - but realize it. And yet that is the premise on which ACT is built; the idea of the play becomes real. The message to the young actor: it's not about being a star; its about the idea of the play. Now go explore it and find yourself.

     "I met Sybil St. Claire when I was eight and it changed my life. It's as simple as that," says Sarah Cailen, who then continued a life in the theatre at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, eventually founding her own company there after working at the world famous Arden Theatre. "I was just one of a number of kids from families that were, let's say, unconventional...well, weird, really. And suddenly here was this environment where I was treated with respect, where people worked together. We were just a bunch of kids getting together at Millhopper Montessori School, but right from the start Sybil would talk to us one on one, as actors, and we started to build self-esteem, we started to become like a family," says Cailen.

     For Brian Shoaf, ACT was "a chance to meet other people who liked the same kinds of things I did, people I was not likely to find on my own." Those "things" were stories, characters, the masks we all hide behind and what's behind the masks, topics not normally discussed in Little League or even on the playground. Shoaf's involvement led to a theatre scholarship to Carnegie Mellon. "Without ACT my life would have taken a completely different course," Shoaf says, "because somehow I would have had to discover the mystery of art on my own.. Whereas Sybil just opened the door and let us all walk right in. We didn't know what we were doing, that we were becoming friends, learning how to work together. There was no sense of competition, just a common goal." The idea of the play.

     Today ACT is in rehearsal six days a week, nine months a year, involving a main company and another in training. "When I bring my college age actors into projects with ACT," says Sidney Homan, world renowned Shakespeare scholar and fearless director of new plays, "it's always a meeting of equals; such is the quality of ACT's work."

      Sybil's playwriting career is a path traveled before by the Great Man himself, David Mamet, who started writing scripts for his acting students at Goddard College. Sybil says, "Truth is, I couldn't find any material for young audiences and actors that I felt wasn't dated or condescending. Necessity is the mother of invention. So she started writing her own plays. Now it's no longer just a local thing.

     "Sybil St. Claire's talent is no secret in the world of children's theatre," says Pam Pailes, Director of Education for the prestigious Harbor Playhouse in Corpus Christi, Texas. "We flew Sybil out here to work with our kids, but mostly it was a chance to do Playground and have the playwright in attendance that convinced out artistic staff. She's an extremely talented playwright, and for us children's theatre is a serious endeavor. We were delighted to treat her as any reputable theatre would an artist in residence."

     Sybil St. Claire's plays reaffirm the power of dreaming, where a little boy can conjure up all of Sherwood Forest, people it with his own oppressors and comrades, and come back from his adventures ready to battle reality, where you can befriend the Invisible People, even though you may end up a contestant on "You Bet Your Adolescence," the show where everybody is a loser, where tragedy meets comedy at the crossroads of melodrama, as in Sweet Polly's Lament. As we are told at the beginning of The Invisible People, "This is a true story..IF you believe in magic." It's easy when it's real.