A Class Act

Photograph by Pam Murray

With her 13th birthday approaching, the title character in Rachel Rosetti’s Birthday to Remember worries that her divorced parents will be too busy to help her mark the big day. Then her Italian grandmother comes to town, builds close ties to Rachel, and even helps her father decide to cancel a busi-ness trip so he can celebrate his daughter’s special day. The play, performed by Looking Glass Theatre, in Providence, R.I., is one of several short productions in the group’s repertoire that uses humor to promote self-awareness and a love of learning in elementary- and middle-school students.

“I like kids to know it’s OK to fight and argue if it comes from the right place,” says Diane Postoian, the group’s executive director. “What they see in films is we go from love to ‘I’m going to blow your brains out,’ and there is nothing in between. I give them all the life stuff in between.”

For the past 40 years, the troupe has spent two-thirds of each year performing for approximately 70,000 public- and private-school students in New England.

In addition to Rachel Rosetti, the group has written and performed shows on how to handle bullying and how to interpret advertising that promotes negative behavior among girls and boys. Other plays are adapted from school reading lists, including Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing, by Judy Blume. Several shows have small parts for students, who rehearse for an hour with the actors before the performance.

A little more than half of the group’s $280,000 budget comes from performance fees, and the rest from grants from the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts, foundations, and corporations.

Here, a student actor playing a cabdriver ferries Rachel Rosetti’s grandmother from the airport to Rachel’s home.