The room is breathlessly hot by the time all 14 girls have quieted down and shut out the hard, ugly, exhausting stuff that harasses them outside here.
They are performers. Rachel May, a director. She begins a countdown.
"In six days, ladies," May says, "we have an audience."
Since Synchronicity Performance Group began its Playmaking for Girls program in 2002, it has put dozens of runaways, teen mothers, dropouts and abuse survivors on stage as performers. These girls will be there, with 200 people watching, on Saturday night.
There's still so much to do — a song and three poems to internalize, movement to block, props to gather. They have eight plays worth of lines to remember, each one written by young women in local detention centers.
Most of these girls have been there, and still live in group homes. Some are on probation. They don't get a lot of choices in life, but they chose to be here, in the room with the broken AC and pile of signed contracts, promising they'd stick around.
Their word of the night is "focus." In a vote, it beat out "achieve", "dedication" and "fun." They pair it with a gesture and a beat — three one-armed pushes forward while they chant "focus, focus, focus" and collapse into giggles.
With only six rehearsals before their one public performance, Synchronicity directors waste no time, but sacrifice no teaching moment. Theater games become exercises in eye contact and authority. To learn stage presence, each girl saunters or struts, takes in the room, stomps twice and announces her name. It's tricky — trust does not come easy to these girls, and "presence," May reminds them, is more about letting people in than performing.
"Do it again, a little bigger," May says. "I think your momma was in the 400th row and only the fifth row heard you."
Stomp-stomp. There she is.
Everyone applauds.
They pore over short plays about bad boyfriends, great girlfriends, supportive grandmothers, an evil witch, a pit bull named Spike and a white Persian cat named Fluffy. They're hard stories about loss, parenthood and juvenile justice, but they almost always have happy endings.
Each girl is in at least two plays, and she has to mold each character's identity, filling in the gaps left by teenage playwrights.
"How many times had Jerry and Charelene slept together?" playmaking program director Susie Spear Purcell asks the actors in "Life of Teenage Parents."
Did they use protection? Do they live together? Did they tell each other they loved each other?
The girls are silent, then a story floods out. They slept together three times, always with protection, except that last time. She waits tables, he works for U-Haul. They never said "I love you."
How did Charelene tell Jerry she was pregnant? How did he feel?
It's not in the script, but Tiesha Thornton, 19, has an answer: "When she called, I kind of figured what it was. I thought 'Wow, what am I gonna do? Do I go? Do I stay? This is my child.' "
The playwrights names are Alicia and Heather. Nobody here knows them. The program directors met them during a detention center workshop, but don't have their last names, and have no way to tell them their play was picked to be performed. But the young actors relate to characters they created, and for the first time, maybe, have a model for working out problems before they're really facing them.
A dropped line, an argument with another actor — they're easy compared to what goes on outside rehearsal. But a group of girls used to expecting little and getting less quickly warms to a room full of women who won't give up on them.
"The idea is so mind-boggling to them when we say, 'You messed up. You really messed up — and we can work through this,' " Purcell says.
And it is a fun week, even if that's not the official word. Participants get paid a little for their time, a week's worth of dinners, boundless support from teachers, applause from each other.
Then there's Saturday, and that scary, proud, curious audience.
"The public knows them as girls who have been incarcerated," says Maisha Fisher, an associate professor of education at Emory University, who co-authored an article about the program to be published next month in the journal English Education. "This is their chance to say, 'Let me tell you my side of the story, show the story.' They can reintroduce themselves as funny, intelligent, witty, creative."
That time on stage could change a girl's life. Bionca Wilson, 17, heard about the detention workshop while she was locked up for running away from her grandmother's house. She thought it was "another one of those jail things," stuff you do to get out of your room.
But she wrote a play, and performed another.
Outside the detention center, she joined the summer program. A play she had co-written in detention was chosen for the public performance.
"I learned to love people, to love my situation," she says.
She's back in Playmaking this year, back living with her grandma. It's better this time. There's a plan: graduate from high school next year, attend Howard University, then Emory, and work as a defense attorney, because "not everybody is guilty."
First, though, there are stage directions, costumes and lines. Everyone has to be off script by now. Just three days to go.
Focus. Focus. Focus.
——————————
Synchronicity Performance Group's Playmaking for Girls program includes an eight-week after-school program for Atlanta students, two-day Detention Center Workshops for girls in local youth detention centers and the one-week summer program, that ends with a public performance of short plays written during the Detention Center Workshops. Girls ages 14 to 19, many who recently lived in detention centers and currently live in group homes, also perform the show at a local youth detention center after six rehearsals.
Event details
Public performance at 6 p.m. June 20 at 7 Stages, 1105 Euclid Ave. N.E. in Atlanta.
Tickets are free, but limited. Call 404-484-8636 to reserve seats. Visit http://www.synchrotheatre.com for more information.
"Girls to Moms & Grandmoms," a poem written by participants in Synchronicity Performance Group's Playmaking for Girls program on their first night of rehearsal this week.
Teach your daughters to be strong
Walk with us
Love us
Never give up
Have our backs
Stop trying to be a friend and be a mother
Your shadows aren't mine
Your regrets aren't mine
Don't make me make up for your mistakes
Being a mother doesn't come with instructions
I'll forgive you some other time
You hurt
You need your space so do I
Just don't take
Everybody can have a child
but every woman is not a mother
I wish I could talk
I've heard your cries now hear mine
Just listen for once
Everyone makes mistakes
I understand
Let the past be the past
I forgive you
Our goals can be reached with a plan
I miss you
I love you
Thank you
You've been there for me
I'll appreciate it in the long run
But make sure to love yourself before you love me
You've been true for me
I go with you
You have my back
You're my ride or die
Accept me
Accept we
Accept us
I'm gay
I am who I am
Take me as I am
Teach your daughters to be strong
Walk with us
Love us
Never give up
Have our backs
NEVER give up
Teach your daughters to be strong
Walk with us
Love us
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