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| Bruce Gevirtzman |
Find out how a High School English teacher reaches
beyond his classroom to schools throught Southern
California with three powerful plays.
Bruce Gevirtzman is a man who has known since age ten that
he was born to teach. He stands there; solid, like a small
bank vault, but his round, open face and direct gaze are like
an exclamation point that commands attention. Along
with his former student, 29-year-old Steve Cisneros,
Gevirtzman is co-creator of Phantom Projects, a teen
educational theatre group that is wowing Southern
California audiences, especially high schoolers, with four
stunningly hip plays about teen pregnancy, drugs and
alcohol, prejudice and tolerance, and his newest play about
self-image.
Gevirtzman has been teaching English at La Mirada High
School since 1973. In 1976, he began writing plays to be
performed by and for his students. At first, they focused on
general social and political issues, but it was not long before
his scripts started covering topics sensitive to teens. What
sparked him?
“Watching kids suffer. Their ignorance on these subjects was
baffling. In ‘86, I was coaching baseball and some of my
players were involved with drugs. I’d get really upset and go
on tirades in my class because it angered me that they
thought these drug dealers were friends of theirs. So I wrote a
one-act, 50-minute show, and we did it in all the classes every
day for three days. We did a couple of night performances,
too, and those raised about $2500, which we put into a fund
for anti-drug programs. Sometimes, I have former students
tell me later in their lives what an impact I had on them. That’s
nice, because you don’t always know at the time if you’re
getting through. I get a lot of letters from kids, too.”
He is also a self-styled “behaviorist.” He believes profoundly
that “everything comes down to a behavior. Not a feeling; not
a thought; but a behavior. Love is the way you treat
somebody, not how you feel about them.”
Does that mean that love is a conscious choice? Gevirtzman
pauses. “It is. If love is a behavior, if love is the way you treat
someone, then it is a conscious choice. I don’t think it matters
if you say you love someone, or if you feel like you love
someone; what matters is that choice. We’re the sum of our
choices. We make good ones and bad ones, but we always
make them.” This is the philosophy that vitalizes all three
Phantom Projects plays. Its empowering effect on teens and
parents alike is making the troupe a Southland sensation.
The catalyst for No Way To Treat A Lady (Gevirtzman’s script
advocating teen sexual abstinence) was the movie Kids. “I
came out of the theatre and staggered over to the snack bar.
One of my former students was working there, and she said,
‘You look like you just saw Kids.’ I said, ‘Yeah. I’m sure
glad it’s not really like that,’ and she said, 'Oh, it is.’ I talked to
her about it for a bit, went home, and a couple of days later I
had the script.”
This is heady stuff. Gevirtzman admits he’s a “moralist” who
gets “judgmental, but only about people’s actions and only
when they’re illegal or immoral.” It’s not the mindset one
imagines would appeal to the average rebellious teen. So how
does he do it? “I don’t step into their lives as some kind
of personal guru. I don’t always know if I’m reaching them.
Sometimes you don’t know for days or years. You walk out of
the class swearing you should have been something else, a
doctor or a lawyer or something, and those are the
moments when you have to remember the one kid who might
have gotten it that day. And this doesn’t mean a social or a
moral lesson; it could just mean how to write a better
paragraph, or make a better oral presentation or how to
understand a poem.”
“In an English class, we’re going to read, we’re going to write,
we’re going to speak, we’re going to use critical thinking. The
mechanics of this can only be developed through practice and
through interest. I always try to put the work into a context
they can use in their lives. In my senior class, all the literature
we use is from newspapers, magazines and student writing.
We have to make you practice. We have to make you
interested.”
And one way he's kept them interested is with his plays. The
icing on the cake is to have found his theatrical counterpart in
a former student. He and Cisneros work easily as a team,
each honoring the other's creative expression. Cisneros
refuses to take any co-writing credits for the scripts, although
he routinely tells Gevirtzman where cuts and rewrites are
needed. And, when asked if there’s a “boss” in this
relationship, Gevirtzman heartily blurts, “He’s the boss. I have
no problem with that.”
Arthur Miller is Gevirtzman’s favorite playwright; Death of A
Salesman, his favorite Miller play. He’s played Willy Loman in
one production and Howard in another. Would he ever
consider abandoning the classroom for the stage,
especially when Phantom Projects goes “all over the place,”
as it has begun to do? His smile chastens. The classroom
and the stage aren't separate places for this man. He works
with his audience every day. “You know what they say,”
he quips. “Don’t quit your day job.”
beyond his classroom to schools throught Southern
California with three powerful plays.
Bruce Gevirtzman is a man who has known since age ten that
he was born to teach. He stands there; solid, like a small
bank vault, but his round, open face and direct gaze are like
an exclamation point that commands attention. Along
with his former student, 29-year-old Steve Cisneros,
Gevirtzman is co-creator of Phantom Projects, a teen
educational theatre group that is wowing Southern
California audiences, especially high schoolers, with four
stunningly hip plays about teen pregnancy, drugs and
alcohol, prejudice and tolerance, and his newest play about
self-image.
Gevirtzman has been teaching English at La Mirada High
School since 1973. In 1976, he began writing plays to be
performed by and for his students. At first, they focused on
general social and political issues, but it was not long before
his scripts started covering topics sensitive to teens. What
sparked him?
“Watching kids suffer. Their ignorance on these subjects was
baffling. In ‘86, I was coaching baseball and some of my
players were involved with drugs. I’d get really upset and go
on tirades in my class because it angered me that they
thought these drug dealers were friends of theirs. So I wrote a
one-act, 50-minute show, and we did it in all the classes every
day for three days. We did a couple of night performances,
too, and those raised about $2500, which we put into a fund
for anti-drug programs. Sometimes, I have former students
tell me later in their lives what an impact I had on them. That’s
nice, because you don’t always know at the time if you’re
getting through. I get a lot of letters from kids, too.”
He is also a self-styled “behaviorist.” He believes profoundly
that “everything comes down to a behavior. Not a feeling; not
a thought; but a behavior. Love is the way you treat
somebody, not how you feel about them.”
Does that mean that love is a conscious choice? Gevirtzman
pauses. “It is. If love is a behavior, if love is the way you treat
someone, then it is a conscious choice. I don’t think it matters
if you say you love someone, or if you feel like you love
someone; what matters is that choice. We’re the sum of our
choices. We make good ones and bad ones, but we always
make them.” This is the philosophy that vitalizes all three
Phantom Projects plays. Its empowering effect on teens and
parents alike is making the troupe a Southland sensation.
The catalyst for No Way To Treat A Lady (Gevirtzman’s script
advocating teen sexual abstinence) was the movie Kids. “I
came out of the theatre and staggered over to the snack bar.
One of my former students was working there, and she said,
‘You look like you just saw Kids.’ I said, ‘Yeah. I’m sure
glad it’s not really like that,’ and she said, 'Oh, it is.’ I talked to
her about it for a bit, went home, and a couple of days later I
had the script.”
This is heady stuff. Gevirtzman admits he’s a “moralist” who
gets “judgmental, but only about people’s actions and only
when they’re illegal or immoral.” It’s not the mindset one
imagines would appeal to the average rebellious teen. So how
does he do it? “I don’t step into their lives as some kind
of personal guru. I don’t always know if I’m reaching them.
Sometimes you don’t know for days or years. You walk out of
the class swearing you should have been something else, a
doctor or a lawyer or something, and those are the
moments when you have to remember the one kid who might
have gotten it that day. And this doesn’t mean a social or a
moral lesson; it could just mean how to write a better
paragraph, or make a better oral presentation or how to
understand a poem.”
“In an English class, we’re going to read, we’re going to write,
we’re going to speak, we’re going to use critical thinking. The
mechanics of this can only be developed through practice and
through interest. I always try to put the work into a context
they can use in their lives. In my senior class, all the literature
we use is from newspapers, magazines and student writing.
We have to make you practice. We have to make you
interested.”
And one way he's kept them interested is with his plays. The
icing on the cake is to have found his theatrical counterpart in
a former student. He and Cisneros work easily as a team,
each honoring the other's creative expression. Cisneros
refuses to take any co-writing credits for the scripts, although
he routinely tells Gevirtzman where cuts and rewrites are
needed. And, when asked if there’s a “boss” in this
relationship, Gevirtzman heartily blurts, “He’s the boss. I have
no problem with that.”
Arthur Miller is Gevirtzman’s favorite playwright; Death of A
Salesman, his favorite Miller play. He’s played Willy Loman in
one production and Howard in another. Would he ever
consider abandoning the classroom for the stage,
especially when Phantom Projects goes “all over the place,”
as it has begun to do? His smile chastens. The classroom
and the stage aren't separate places for this man. He works
with his audience every day. “You know what they say,”
he quips. “Don’t quit your day job.”
| ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER May 18, 2007 Through Teen Eyes: Theater company treats youth issues with unblinking honesty. |
| Download a special Podcast interview with Bruce J. Gevirtzman from WrittenVoices.com about his new book! |