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middle photo by Michael
Jacobson-Hardy
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by By Alex Hanson, Valley News
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Several years ago, David Craig heard a report on the radio about his native Toronto that took him by surprise.
Toronto is thought to be the wealthiest city in Canada and Canada is considered a wealthy country, Craig said. But the report told him that 25 percent of the city's homeless were children under the age of 12.
“I knew that we had a problem with homelessness in Toronto, but I didn't know that it affected so many kids,” he said.
Craig set out to do something about it, but he's not a philanthropist, a social worker or a politician. Craig is in his 30th season of theater for young audiences in Toronto, where he is co-founder and artistic director of Roseneath Theatre.
The result of his work was Danny, King of the Basement, a play about a boy whose single mother is constantly fending off homelessness. After performances throughout Canada, Danny, King of the Basement is making its way to American theaters, including at stop Tuesday night at Dartmouth's Hopkins Center for the Arts.
The production kicks off “Class Divide,” the Hopkins Center's three-year examination, through the performing arts, of social and economic class.
In addition to Danny, this year's schedule includes a performance in February of Hurricane, playwright Anne Galjour's prescient 1994 one-woman show about her native coastal Louisiana. Galjour is also interviewing Upper Valley residents for a play the Hopkins Center has commissioned her to write about class and culture in the Twin States.
In a country that has already struggled with race, disability and equal rights for women -- both in its laws and in the arts -- class represents “one of the last discussions,” said Margaret Lawrence, the Hop's director of programming. “I do think it's one of the most important conversations nationally that we can have,” she said.
The Class Divide initiative is an unusual one for the Hopkins Center -- or any performing-arts center. The Hopkins Center had never tried to involve the community in a sustained examination of a particular theme.
“This is the first time we've committed to do something over multiple years,” Lawrence said, adding that the next three years are going to be “a learning experience for us as an institution.” The Hop is applying for grants and planning future events. “The challenge is going to be in what we sift out and can pull off.”
The belief in social and economic mobility is strong in America, and the subject of class, so well established as a battleground in other industrialized nations, doesn't often come up. It's difficult to talk about, and the Hopkins Center is approaching it with some trepidation.
“You can't open this topic without opening a lot of questions about the Hopkins Center, about Dartmouth College, about privilege,” Lawrence said.
There is no shortage of class-related issues in America to mull over. Economic growth has widened the gap between rich and poor and rising costs have put a strain on the middle class, which has seen its wages fail to keep pace with inflation. Hurricanes Katrina and Rita exposed Americans to pockets of poverty on the Gulf Coast that had been widely ignored before disaster struck, and that in many cases are still waiting for relief. Although the Clinton administration ended “welfare as we know it,” the nation has yet to settle on what sort of assistance it should provide for its poorest citizens, and what sort of contribution it should require of its wealthiest.
Class is already a subject of public discussion in higher education. A study released in 2004 from the Higher Education Research Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles, found that from 1985 to 2000, the percentage of incoming students from high-income families at the nation's most selective universities rose from 46 to 55 percent, while the percentages from low-income families remained unchanged at 9 to 13 percent and the number from middle-income families fell from 41 to 33 percent. Other studies have found that, despite increasing levels of financial aid, the number of students from low-income backgrounds attending top-flight colleges remains stubbornly low.
“Class is a topic that in the past has been addressed on university campuses less often (and less directly) than race and nationality,” Dartmouth Provost Barry Scherr said in an e-mail interview. “Yet it certainly is important … and so we want to bring the issue to the forefront.”
Scherr attended a meeting last fall of university arts center directors at the University of Maryland. The consensus among the assembled administrators was that class was a subject they should examine, he said.
If successful, the Hop's project will lead to broader consideration of class both at Dartmouth and in the Upper Valley, and to the creation of new classes at Dartmouth, Lawrence said. It is likely to act as a guide for other university performing arts centers. And the Hop plans to use the initiative to build its audience, including among lower-income Upper Valley residents who might be daunted by ticket prices.
Guiding the Class Divide project is a campus advisory board and also a taskforce of Hop employees who are studying the performing arts center's accessibility to people of all incomes. Plans call for the establishment of a community advisory committee.
It's hard to gauge the effect Class Divide might have. A lot of people have seen Danny, King of the Basement, but a play doesn't change policy, Craig said. “I'm not sure actually that’s the way theater works,” he said.
Art can have an impact. Craig cited the novels of Charles Dickens, which paved the way for Britain's Child Labor Act, which ended the practice of employing young children in mines. Upton Sinclair's novel The Jungle detailed the horrors of Chicago’s slaughterhouses and led to the passage in 1906 of the Pure Food and Drugs Act and the establishment of the Food and Drug Administration.
But those are exceptions to the rule. “If a piece of art was trying to change your mind, it would be agitprop, it would be propaganda and we'd probably be suspicious,” Craig said.
British playwright Tom Stoppard talks about the political nature of his own plays. “He thinks that what happens is that it creates an atmosphere, a climate in which change can occur,” Craig said.
However the Class Divide initiative turns out, the Hopkins Center's idea is “very provocative,” Craig said, “because you are a country that doesn't believe it has classes.”
“What I'm hoping Dartmouth is going to do is discuss a more dramatic, human value, which is … ‘Are poor people less than?' ” Craig said.
Craig's question comes from his own experience.
After he heard the report about homeless children, “I didn't know what I could do. I didn't think anyone would come to this story,” he said. “I thought, a poor kid, how sad.”
But in the course of his interviews he met a boy at a homeless shelter. The boy was 12 or 13 and had four brothers. All five siblings were born addicted to crack cocaine and each had a different father. Craig said he asked the boy what it was like to be so poor.
“He looked at me in total astonishment and said, ‘I'm not poor.' ” Craig pressed him. “If you’re not poor who is? ‘The kids who live on the street.' ” The boy said he didn’t think he was poor because he had a roof over his head and went to school every day.
“That might have been show, but it sure as hell impressed me,” Craig said. That boy, who seemed so unsinkable, became the model for the hero of Danny, King of the Basement.
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For Anne Galjour, class can be hard to separate from culture.
Galjour grew up in Cut Off, La., a tiny bayou town, and left for San Francisco, where she still lives, as soon as she'd finished college.
“Oh, I worked so hard to get rid of that Cajun accent,” she said. But at the same time, “when I moved away was when I really appreciated how rich my culture is,” she added.
Sitting in the Zahm Courtyard just outside the Hopkins Center during a visit here in August, Galjour pulled out a black-and-white composition notebook to write down a phrase she'd heard earlier in a long day of meetings and interviews.
“Use it up, wear it out, make it do or do without.”
It's an old Yankee rhyme, equal parts pride, stubbornness and acknowledgment of poverty, a key to the New England mindset. Galjour had heard it for the first time that day and she was fascinated by it.
“This place was able to discover its culture for a long time because of isolation,” Galjour said.
Galjour talked to Len Cadwallader, head of Vital Communities; novelist Ernest Hebert, who has written extensively about class in New Hampshire, and filmmaker and Tunbridge resident John O'Brien. She also talked to a group of residents of Romano Circle, a subsidized housing development in West Lebanon.
“That was really remarkable,” Galjour said. “I met folks who may not have financial resources or (who) have limited financial resources, but have a richness in how they care for their families. They're rich in other ways. They're extremely resourceful people, and you have to be.”
Galjour will present in-progress readings of her work as she develops it. Although her play won't be performed in full until 2008 -- she has many more interviews planned for February and subsequent visits to the Upper Valley -- she's already come up with a measure for success.
“I hope that whatever the theater work is going to be that people are going to hear themselves, see themselves on the stage.”
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