Sybil St. Claire -- Press

Assitej/usa
Assitej/usa Spotlight of Sybil St. Claire. A career theatre artist and arts educator Sybil St. Claire works as a Lecturer in the Theatre for Young Audiences graduate program at the University of Central Florida.
April 2007

Orlando Sentinel Review: Opal
Orlando Repertory's debut has humor and heart for all ages.
by Elizabeth Maupin, Sentinel Theatre Critic. October 14, 2003.

Curtain Up, Full Speed Ahead
When Ron Ziegler and Sybil St. Claire first opened the door to the old Civic Theatre, they discovered a mess.
by Elizabeth Maupin. October 11, 2003.

Another Stage in Life
For All Children's Theatre Director Sybil St. Claire, play acting is something more than kid's stuff.
by Margery Weinstein.

Exploring Landscapes of the Heart and Mind
Sybil St. Claire raises the bar again at Santa Fe with the earthy spirituality of The Diviners.
MOON Magazine, by Shamrock McShane.

It's Showtime!
Gainesville creates a few stars of its own with the All Children's Theatre.
Gainesville Today, by Jackie Rowe.

Youth In Action
The All Children's Theatre is more than just play acting.
Good Neighbor, by Marina Blomberg.

Life with the Invisible People
With a new play at her All Children's Theatre, Sybil St. Claire applies the discipline of an adult to the creativity of a child.
PACE Magazine, by Larry Keen.

Acting Like a Child
Gainesville's Sybil St. Claire gives youths lessons in theatre... and in life.
MOON Magazine, by Shamrock McShane.

Excerpt from: “Uncommon Collaborations: Unique Partnerships in TYA” by Ernie Nolan

Some of the most popular and memorable plays for young audiences bring to life surprising partnerships – enterprises shared by individuals from different worlds. Part of the fun in experiencing a play like The BFG is watching the friendship between Sophie, the human, and the Big Friendly Giant develop as they save the children of England from being eaten. And who can forget when Templeton, a cantankerous rat, finally agrees to join Charlotte’s plan to save Wilbur in the pig in Charlotte’s Web? Is there a dry eye in the house when Gertrude McFuzz, a bird, offeres to raise the new hatchling with Horton the elephant in Suessical?

While partnerships like these are occurring onstage, they’re also happening behind the scenes. Theatres, teaming with unexpected partners, are in the process of changing the way they reach their audiences. Here, we look at four TYA companies who have joined with some unconventional partners to extend each organizations mission beyond their building's walls and affect the future of how artists in the young audience field view partnering.

Orlando Repertory Theatre {The REP} in Florida is also creating new experiences for not only audiences, but for the next generation of TYA artists as well. Created in 2000 as a merger between the University of Central Florida {UCF} and the Civic Theatre of Central Florida, the REP offers a six-show season in addition to the opportunity for higher education students to receive a Masters of Fine Arts {M.F.A} in Theatre for Young Audiences from UCF. Housed literally inside the theatre, the graduate program is highly selective, taking only six to eight students per year. “There is a real intimacy in the program,” said Sybil St. Claire, UCF faculty member at the REP. “We are careful to select students who will not only thrive in, but contribute to an environment of generosity, compassion, and community.” The curriculum also changes along with the demands of the REP's season, building a bridge between educational and professional. “What we wanted to provide our students with was a state of the art theatre education filtered through the lens of TYA,” St. Claire said. “So, while they are learning about Chorpenning, Ward, and Zeder, they are also learning about Meisner, Linklater, and Bogart. On top of all this, we sprinkled in some fantastic electives like puppetry, and a course in creativity inspired by Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way.”

“Our grads are learning, in a total immersion environment, not only how a professional theatre is run in theory, but how to run a professional theatre in reality,” she said. During their coursework, M.F.A. students can expect to find themselves working in the costume and scene shops, selling tickets in the box office, working with the education department on field trips, spending time in the development office, engaging community involvement, and also teaching in the REP’s Youth Academy. “They try to fit our individualized goals with the needs of the theatre,” said Nick Bazo, a first-year student in the program. “For instance, this semester I learned how to write grants in our development office and next semester I’m assistant directing one of the professional productions. We also have the opportunity to audition for or teach in all of the REP’s productions/programs.”

Opportunities like these make the partnership stand out when compared to classroom only programs. “It’s designed to cultivate both the educator and the artist,” says St. Claire, “We went with an inclusive approach that embraced the whole TYA practitioner,” she said. “I have often described theatre for young audiences as more of a diversification than a specialization. Anyone who has spent any time in the field knows there are going to be days, if not years, wherein you are the playwright, the director, the grant writer, the set designer, the liaison to the board, the boo-boo kisser, and the toilet bowl cleaner.”

Students and administration both recognize the rewards of the partnership. “We view ourselves as part of the REP family,” Bazo said. “They are supportive of the TYA program and we of them. The combination creates a positive and real-world learning environment for us all.” The REP’s Executive Director, Paul Lartonoix, adds, “It’s about practical experience. In our partnership with the University, we’re looking for things that venture into the practical. When students come to The REP they see there is a marketing person, a budget person. This is definitely different from what happens on campus. Campus life is about the artistic. They don’t have to worry about ticket sales. Tickets sales are what keep us alive. It’s an important lesson to learn. Students see we have to pay the phone bill.”

Lartonoix is excited to share plans for the M.F.A. students to make an even bigger impact. “We’re in the planning stage of having an M.F.A. show series all on its own,” he said. “It would be a professional theatre handing over its black box. They could then focus on the kind of theatre that doesn’t have a name, the kind that would be hard to sell to the Orlando community. Eventually, these pieces would become part of the mainstage season.

It’s not only the students who continue to benefit from the partnership. “Sure, there’s a financial value,” Lartonoix said. “But our partnership with the university adds all kinds of positives. The M.F.A. faculty is in house. We wouldn’t have access to as many talented faculty and directors otherwise. The research and dramaturgical work we couldn’t afford as staff.” Also an advantage, the M.F.A. program blends students and faculty with formal TYA training with artists from The REP who often have different theatre backgrounds.

The symbiotic relationship between The REP and the M.F.A. program doesn’t only end with staff benefits. A program like the Writes of Spring Festival, a writing contest for K-12 students, is sponsored by The REP, but run by the M.F.A. students. Orlando area students are asked to submit poems, essays, and stories based on a topic. {This year’s is “What would you do if you were not afraid?”}. The winning submissions of various age levels are adapted for the stage with as little change to the original text as possible. The students who submit their work are then invited to see a performance of their writings at The REP. The M.F.A. students not only judge the contest but also produce, write, direct, and perform in it as well.

Lartonoix is also quick to point out though that there are two different institutions partnering and benefiting each other. “We are a professional theatre on our own, but with ties to the university. At first, people assumed that the university ran The REP. The university has its own offices and theatres on campus, a place of its own. The REP has its own staff. The identities are clear.” The personnel of The REP includes an education director, development director, technical director, a marketing director, other resident theatre staff, and two faculty members from the University of Central Florida, St. Claire, and Dr. Megan Alrutz {who is, in the spirit of full disclosure, a managing editor for TYA Today}.

But it isn’t all about business; The REP strives to inspire new connections between children, adults, parents, and educators through the shared experience of art and literature as theatre. Besides hosting the three-year M.F.A. program, The REP offers a professional season of plays, classes, camps, outreach, and performance opportunities for young people. And UCF’s M.F.A. students are involved in it all. “We’re growing, quickly. Our reputation is starting to get out there. We think we’re going to be a leader in Theatre for Young Audiences. The strength that comes with the university helps,” Lartonoix said.

Like the stories these theatres present on their stage, each of these collaborations is unique. Each collaborative effort blends art and education together affecting their audience beyond a single experience. These theatre and their partners hope to instill new ways for not only young people to think, but the TYA field as well. Taking inspiration from Oregon Children’s Theatre’s If, maybe we all need to ask ourselves:

Current Spotlight

Sybil St. Claire
Orlando, F lorida

A career theatre artist and arts educator Sybil St. Claire works as a Lecturer in the Theatre for Young Audiences graduate program at the University of Central Florida. She is an award winning union director, and an internationally produced and published playwright, Her experience runs the gamut from theatre for the deaf to utilizing theatre as a therapeutic modality with terminally ill pediatric patients, and children in foster care. Currently, her research is focused on the psychology of creativity. Though diverse, her work shares a common thread, that of empowering others to live their best life.

Sybil’s plays for young audiences, “Woolfie” and “Incantation” {Eldridge Publishing} recently enjoyed their 100^th production. With performances in almost every state in the union, as well as in Europe, Canada, and Central America her contributions to the field have been honored with an Outstanding Research and Creativity award from the University of Central Florida. Her monologue, “Wake me When it’s Over” was recently accepted into an as yet unnamed anthology of spiritual monologues for young actors {Meriwether Publishing} that will also feature the work of Durang, Shaw, Miller, and Sophocles. Her work may also be found in “Audition Monologues for Student Actors: Volume II.

Sybil’s latest creation “The Invisible People,” a new musical for young audiences, composed by Amado Babadillo, explores the imaginary and spiritual life of children. We spend the evening with 12 year old Katie who is torn between growing up and giving up the things of childhood {her beloved blankie and her invisible friends}. On her revelatory journey Katie confronts and finally embraces the different aspects of herself – the noble, the frightening, and the enchanting. Having enjoyed staged reading at two equity houses the show will be ready for publication in Spring 2008. “The Invisible People” is a true story... IF you believe in magic.

Past Spotlights

Theatres & Organizations
Active Arts Theatre for Young Audiences, Arizona Theatre Company, Black Hawk Children's Theatre, Children's Theatre of Charlotte, The Children’s Theatre of Cincinnati, The Children’s Theatre Company of Minneapolis, Children's Theatre Foundation of America, The Coterie Theatre, Dallas Children’s Theatre, Faustworks, Honolulu Theatre for Youth, Kansas University Theatre for Young People, Metro Theatre Company, Nashville Children's Theatre, The New Victory Theater, Orlando Repertory Theatre, Parson's Nose Productions, The Paper Bag Players, People's Light and Theatre Company, The Seem-To-Be Players and Walnut Street Theatre.

Events
Korean World Congress, One Theatre World, Children’s Theatre Foundation of America’s Medallion Award Winners, IPAY & the Cleveland International Showcase (2005) and the ASSITEJ World Congress in Montreal.

Artists
Ric Averill, Sandra Fenichel Asher, Laurie Brooks, Max Bush, Frumi Cohen, Jose Cruz Gonzales, Frank Higgins, James DeVita, Mary Hall Surface, Jon Madof, Harold Oaks and Elizabeth Wong.

Spotlight Archives

Recent spotlights are available here. More to come!

Getting kids and their parents to the same play is no easy task.
     Every audience member has seen small children dragged to the theater who wind up sleeping (or whining) through the second act. And every theater lover who is also a parent has seen the bland little shows that are often passed off as theater for kids.
     Orlando Repertory Theatre needn't worry. With Opal, its first production, the Rep has found a show that will beguile kids and grown-ups alike and -- even more important -- keep them coming back for more.
     That's crucial because the Rep, the successor to the old Civic Theatre of Central Florida, has inherited not only the Civic's 73 years of history with Orlando theatergoers but also some of the uncertainties the Civic provoked in its final few years. In the audience's eyes, Opal should dispel all that. It's an enchanting little musical, and even the childless will find plenty in it to gladden their eyes and ears and hearts.
     From the first, Opal is different: it's set not among fairies and goblins in fantastical times but in a roughhewn Oregon lumber camp in 1904. Playwright Robert Lindsey Nassif based his story on the real-life childhood diary of Opal Whiteley, in which Whiteley claimed to be not the child of a logging family but the lost daughter of Henri d'Orleans, a member of the deposed royal family of France.
     In Nassif's musical, which played off-Broadway in 1992, the girl who calls herself Francoise d'Orleans loses her birth parents in a shipwreck, and she's raised by a roughhewn lumber-camp woman who renames the girl Opal after her own dead child. Put to work, Opal doesn't know how to scrub floors, but she recognizes Bon Ami scouring powder because it's French. She adopts a pig as a pet and names it Peter Paul Rubens. And she goes about trying to bring back her lost parents, as they told her in a dream, by finding a way to "make Earth glad."

Opal, directed by Sybil St. Claire. Click to see more production stills.

     The Rep's production boasts a terrific cast, about half of whom are new to Orlando theater, as well as a nifty set by Tommy Mangieri, with two jutting platforms that pass for a ship but transform easily to the lumber camp's crude cabins. Virginia McKinney's costumes and John Pinckard's lighting design are equally nice, but the production has some technical problems, or at least it did at its gala opening last weekend. At times the sound crackled and snapped; one key actor's wireless mike didn't seem to be turned up high enough, and in the second act some of the lighting flickered.
     More problematic is director Sybil St. Claire's decision to hide the live four-piece orchestra (two synthesizers, drums and a bass) behind the scenery. The musicians wind up sounding prerecorded, and when the actors can't see musical director Glenn Longacre, they can't follow him: The lyrics of the ensemble numbers turn to mush.
     But even such problems don't stifle the exuberance of these actors, who find ways to bring out the quirky humor of the show. One of the show's trademarks is the way Opal names her new neighbors -- the Man That Wears Gray Neckties, the Girl That Has No Seeing, the Thought Girl With the Far-Away Look in Her Eyes. Those names could come across as precious, but in these actors' hands they're just matter-of-fact.
      Lance Noe, Allen McCoy, Mareeko Finney and Fredreka Irvine move into and out of small roles as the narrators and play the welcoming fir tree Opal calls Michelangelo: McCoy does a mean somersault, Finney and Irvine are a funny pair of snoops called the Gossip Sisters, and Noe makes a wonderful bumpkin.
     Heather Lee Charles is warm and sweet as the shy Thought Girl, and Erin Muroski brings dignity to the Girl That Has No Seeing, a part that could be sentimentalized to death. Sam Little finds wayward charm in Neckties, and Patti McGuire gets through the bluff exterior of the Mamma and finds the humanity underneath. Broadway veteran Shelly Burch makes a loving Sadie McKibben, the washerwoman who befriends Opal, and she has a gorgeous voice. (Too bad she's made up to look as if she's 75 years old).
     And 9-year-old Sophia Bairley, who alternates the role of Opal with Kaitlyn Harrow, is that rare child actor who can hold the stage all by herself. Her voice is clear and sweet, and she makes Opal come alive with such subtlety, humor and spunk that you can't take your eyes off her. A child with less talent might make this show cloying, but this one makes it true.
     In fact, you see that quality all through Opal -- an inventiveness that turns what might be contrived quirky and what might be saccharine sweet. The Rep's first production isn't perfect. But there's conviction behind it, and that conviction shows up as quick wit and high spirits on the stage. Theater for kids -- and grownups -- can't ask for much more than that.

When Ron Ziegler and Sybil St. Claire first opened the door to the old Civic Theatre, they discovered a mess.
     The roofs leaked. The phones were out of order. The air conditioning didn't work.
     "We looked at each other, and we said, 'Want to have lunch?' " St. Claire says. "We didn't know where to begin. We called it The Poseidon Adventure."
     Nowadays things are looking a little more shipshape at the old Civic, which has been dark for nearly three years. Tonight, the Loch Haven Park complex reopens as Orlando Repertory Theatre with a musical called Opal, the first of a six-show children's theater season at the Rep.
     "Opal was chosen to send a message -- that children's theater can be spiritual, that it can be dramatic, that it can touch everyone who's 5 to 55," says St. Claire, who is directing the true story of a girl who was shipwrecked off the Oregon coast. "If we do it well, people will call it children's theater for adults, because we will cultivate an adult audience."
     Children's theater was just part of the mission at the old Civic, but it has become the guiding force behind the Rep. Since the Civic closed, most of Orlando's other major theater companies have begun or stepped up their children's theater offerings, and the trend is big nationwide: The Children's Theatre Company of Minneapolis, one of the largest children's theaters in the country, won the coveted Tony Award for regional theater last June.
     St. Claire, the Rep's artistic director, and Ziegler, the managing director, have spent the past nine months re-creating a theater company from the remnants of what was the 73-year-old Civic Theatre of Central Florida, a longtime community, or amateur, theater that had remade itself into a professional theater when mismanagement and escalating debts forced it to close.
     More than a million dollars later, the Rep will open tonight with two of its three theaters and most of the rest of the complex remodeled and in working shape.
     Now in partnership with the University of Central Florida's theater department, the Rep will house a professional children's theater, an educational branch and part of the UCF Conservatory Theatre, including a master's program in youth theater and four shows a year from the UCF season.
     It's the professional children's theater, formally called Pegasus Children's Theatre after UCF's flying-horse symbol, that opens Opal to the public tonight. That opening is putting smiles on the faces of parents and children who frequented the old Civic.
     "We were so upset when they closed," says Peggy Chandler of Longwood, whose son Mark, 16, has taken classes there for seven years and now wants to continue with theater in college.
     "I'm very excited that it will be a family theater. There should be someplace you can always feel comfortable taking your kids -- or just taking your spouse."
     Ziegler and St. Claire hope to dispel the stereotype of theater for children as second-rate.
     "We had to fight the stigma of youth theater being bad and boring," says St. Claire, who ran her own small children's theater in Gainesville for many years."Nine times out of 10, children's theater has been presented by amateurs. So it was an amateur product." When St. Claire was hired, she was teaching at Gainesville's Santa Fe Community College. Ziegler was the associate director of the Des Moines Playhouse in Iowa, where he also headed the playhouse's children's theater program.
     "Ron and I both felt everything we had done in our entire lives had niched us into this job," St. Claire says. "I knew I would get it. It was just that right."

Life With the Invisible People.
With a new play at her All Children's Theatre, Sybil St. Claire applies the discipline of an adult to the creativity of a child.
PACE Magazine, by Larry Keen.

Marvaline Panky knows about Katie's blankie.
Don't tell The-Things-That-Go-Bump-In-The-Night, for they might kibitz with Amaryllis, the mute dancer. Poor Duncan, the droll dog, must stoically give credit to all, even Liverwurst Jones who lives in the compost heap.

Liverwurst Jones and Amaryllis, from 'The Invisible People,' written and directed by Sybil St. Claire. Click to see more production stills.

     The characters of The Invisible People seem as fantastic and fanciful as the Mad Hatter, Queen of Hearts and Cheshire Cat from Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures In Wonderland. Yet Carroll was an adult who wrote for 19th century children. Children of the 20th century guide Sybil St. Clairewhen she writes plays for the All Children's Theatre.
     "I get paid to hold on to childhood," St. Claire joked before detailing the high level of preparation, rehearsal and performance she demands from her youthful charges. "Some people think I am too hard on the children, but I am not," she added. "I set the bar high because children are limitless." The All Children's Theatre, now in residence at Santa Fe Community College, gives SFCC students opportunities to intern and learn more about a unique art form.
     The affiliation with Santa Fe is one more task. St. Claire needs a dual personality as the theater's founder and director. She must be "The Adult," the manager, fundraiser and chief executive. She develops curricula and teaches classes to advanced students and younger ones called "The Not Ready For Bedtime Players." She even puts on summer theater camps.
     The side St. Claire likes best is that of "The Kid." She doesn't simply relate to children. She becomes a child. In the guise of child she can suspend conformity, reject the routine, unleash her imagination and revel in the innocent goodness that is much lamented if not forgotten by grownups.

Katie and Amaryllis from 'The Invisible People,' written and directed by Sybil St. Claire. Click to see more production stills.

     She is more than a friend of children. She is their champion. "There is no theater going on in elementary school," she said, "but the children are ready to be in plays. They are not afraid to make fools of themselves, their creativity is at the top -- they are just not afraid.
     "I spend a half a semester in a college class getting college students to where 10-year-olds are at coming in to class." St. Claire, who teaches theater at Santa Fe, is a playwright whose work has recently been presented in Texas, Washington state, Canada, England and Gainesville. Plays for children, she said, resemble those for adults in that they have character development, plot progression, a beginning, middle and end. The difference is the freedom of expression allowed by unfettered imagination, and in distinctions between right and wrong that are untainted by the moral compromise of adults.
     In The Invisible People, Katie has a problem. Some people think she needs to grow up and give up childish things, especially her blankie and invisible friends. Katie has other ideas. She dances with magical, leopard-spotted shoes, appears as a contestant on "You Bet Your Adolescence" -- a show in which everyone loses -- and confronts her greatest fear, the dreaded Boogiemen. "The Boogiemen live in the closet and they represent the negative, dark side of Katie," St. Claire said. "She needs to confront them: her greed, deceit, cowardice and hate."
     Katie prevails as a healthy, happy human being. A similar metamorphosis occurs in the children who act out the plays. They build confidence by overcoming stage fright, personal doubts, and the challenge of learning lines and how to act.
     "I thank everyone who supported me," said a 5th grader from Hidden Oak Elementary School. "I hope to be a professional actress someday." "My favorite moments are the ones that make people laugh," said a 5th grade boy from Brentwood School. "I hope people have as much fun as I do on stage."

Katie and Sarge, with Spot, Liverwurst Jones, and Duncan, from 'The Invisible People,' written by Sybil St. Claire. Click to see more production stills.

The sixty or so children in the theater tend to be good students and involved in many activities. They're also kids. They like skateboarding, manatees, pet dogs, pet cats, climbing trees and hanging out at the mall. They are very attached to their demanding and understanding director."One reason why the theater is so special is I believe in young peoples' ideas," St. Claire said. "I give them the respect due them.
     "I think kids are interested in anything that empowers them and values their abilities," she said. "I don't think Americans like children. We don't pay teachers or put supplies in the classrooms. We don't want children in four-star restaurants. We are not raising them. We put them in day-care or school."
     There is method acting, and there is more than method to St. Claire's direction. One way she prepares children for a play is by "jamming," role-playing sessions involving herself and the children acting like their characters. "I know I have hit pay dirt when the characters start bossing me around," she said.
     She likes the kids to assert themselves, to exercise their free spirit and develop characterizations that seem natural to themselves and the audience. She applies the discipline of an adult to the creativity of a child. "I ask any group of three-year-olds who is an artist, and all of them raise their hands," St. Claire explains. "I ask a group of 13-year-olds and maybe I see one timid hand raised. What have we done to their creativity?"
     Playbills often have a director's statement that explains the history, philosophy and mission of the children's theater. The message may be a page in length. St. Claire sums up the theater in a line. "I think kids are important," she said.

Acting Like A Child
Gainesville's Sybil St. Claire gives youths lessons in theatre... and in life.
MOON Magazine, by Shamrock McShane.

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.

Sweet Polly's Lament, written by Sybil St. Claire. Click to read an excerpt from the script.

Sybil St. Claire has been that godsend for a generation of Gainesville area kids. In person, she is ingenious...and funny. "Please pardon my smoking," she says from a booth in Harry's, directing her smoke earthward with a wave of her hand. "I quit, I start, I quit... I start. Harry's is a bar; if people can't drink and smoke what's the point? Now all my Jewish guilt will pour out, and I'm not even Jewish. Guilt without sex, the Jews and the Catholics have it down to an art. I'm a recovering Catholic. I guess that explains it."
     What pours forth instead 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 community. 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.

Playground, written by Sybil St. Claire. Click to read an excerpt from the script.

     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 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 her. 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."
     Ironically, for Sybil to work her magic on kids, she must first demystify the theatre. Your job as an actor is not to make people look at you, but for you to look into yourself. One of Sybil's degrees in in Child Drama, which is not what we see on Saturday morning cartoons but rather a means to shape an impressionable life. 'Self-actualization' is what it's called in modern educationese, but Aristotle probably had it right when he coined it 'catharsis.'
     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 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.