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Working with Teenage Actors

or...  How Am I Going to Get Out of This Alive? 

By Edith Weiss 

Edith Weiss is the author of several published children’s plays, including six with Pioneer Drama Service.  A lot of Edith’s writing time goes into her stand-up comedy routine, which has taken her all over the country and on three overseas military tours.  Besides writing, she also acts and directs in both children’s and adult theatre. 

Undoubtedly, if you’re working with teenage actors, you’re going to have some rehearsals that get out of hand.  But what do you do when one or two kids are so unruly, loud and generally obnoxious that it infects the entire cast and threatens to ruin the show?  This is a toughie.  Too harsh, and it becomes fun for no one; too lenient, and you lose the kids who are really interested.  Either way, you run the risk that the show may be a disaster.

If it’s any consolation, I can assure you you’re not alone with these headaches.  I’ve sure had my share of them!

Once, I was teaching at a private school where being in the production was a requirement for all the 8th grade students.  I couldn’t kick anyone out, no matter what they did, and they knew it.  I leave it to your imagination as to how disruptive some of these young teens became!  Since I couldn’t keep them out of the show, I needed to find a different negative consequence for their poor behavior.  I went to the Headmaster and asked permission to use detention.  And then, for a couple of days, I “detended” like crazy.  This made them take the process more seriously.  I also made a couple of calls home.  Sometimes this helped, sometimes it didn’t, but at least it communicated to these students that I was in charge and aware of what was going on.

At a summer theater school where I directed, anyone paying got into the class.  Yes, even though I should have been obligated to cast everyone, one time — but only once — I did ask that a girl be given her money back and sent home.  Most of the time, however, I could control the situation by threatening to take away what they all wanted most:  stage time.  After all, that’s why they were spending their precious summer hours there.  I found that if I made my expectations very clear in the beginning — that if someone didn’t pay attention in rehearsals, didn’t show up or didn’t make enough of an effort to learn their lines, I would give some of their lines to someone else — their behavior would stay in line reasonably well.

However, at this same school, I had one class where this didn’t work.  This class was The Worst Class There Ever Was in the Entire Known and Unknown Universe.  Sixteen kids aged 11-14.  I think they were there because their parents would have paid any amount of money to get rid of them for a few hours.  And now I had them.  Every hyperactive, snotty, bouncing-off-the-ceiling, disrespectful one of them.  Yes, they were all like that.  They had become one super-sized malicious organism.  Okay, maybe I’m getting carried away here.  The point is, I couldn’t kick out the whole class and still have a job.  So here is what I did out of sheer desperation on the fourth day of a two-week class:  nothing.  I sat there quietly, looking down at the script.  I let them do whatever they wanted.  After about ten minutes, they started nudging each other and whispering.  After a few more minutes, someone asked, “What’s wrong?”  “Well,” I answered, “since no one listens to me and I’m getting paid anyway, I’ll let you do the show without a director.  You’re the ones up there — I won’t be embarrassed (which of course wasn’t true) if this show is a giant stinker.  You will.”  And I went back to my reading and totally ignored them.  They were abashed and stunned.  Within five minutes, they were taking direction.  For the rest of the two weeks, my method of discipline whenever they were getting out of control was to get very quiet and start reading a book I had brought.  Ladies and gentlemen, it worked.