"You're only as loud as the noises you make."

Tonight I saw a play. I've seen a number of plays in my life. Community, high school, professional you name it... I've never had this reaction to a play before. Even my first show ever, Crazy For You, while it sparked a love of theater that exists today, it did not invoke this kind of stay up past bed time thought process that i am getting through right now.

I just saw My Children! My Africa! by Athol Fugard at the Wilma. The acting was great, but the script is what has captured my thoughts. It was a play about South Africa in 1984. It was about substandard racist education in a society that needed change. There were three characters; three opinons on how that change needed to come about. The teacher looked at education as the way for change. To teach students the language and the words they needed to create change. He makes this beautiful speech about the gift of language and oration. There's the black student who is angry and sees change occuring only by protest and force. There's the privleged white student who looks at change as happening by forming friendships and seeing things from the other perspective. She's naive and somewhat ignorant to the world around her. These characters resonated with me. Within them I saw so much of current philadelphia. The substandard education that essentially makes sure that our students will never rise to the place they can go. The teachers like myself who want to work within it because we keep the hope that education can be the great equalizer. Believing somehow that if our students learn the language of change that they can become the change they want to see. Knowing deep down that the lessons they are learning are not about them, and struggling to show them why they should know it. The naive people who don't truely understand what is going on, but know a change should occur. And in the student that believed that the substandard education and inequality could only be erased by protest and fighting I see so many of my students.

I want to bring them to see this show, I want to make them read it, to show them all the sides. To let them see and compare these students' lives to their own. I want to make the teachers i work with read it and discuss it. I want others to see the sides of an argument that people ignore in this city.

Never in the 12 years that I have been in love with the stage, and the 19 years I've been in love with the written word have I felt this... engulfed... by a play.

More after I buy the play tomorrow and read it over and over again.