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Getting his ducks in a row

It's all very dramatic at a St. Petersburg middle school, where a cranky man in black inspires his students to find their inner barnyard animal - and their best selves.

By JOHN BARRY
Published April 30, 2006

[Times photos: Willie J. Allen Jr.]

You’ve got to feel it, that is, if you want to be on Graham Howard’s stage. The performing arts department chairman at John Hopkins Middle School in St. Petersburg works passionately with his students to make HONK!, a musical version of The Ugly Duckling. Within the safe confines of his stage, these theater students will be asked to explore their boundaries and breach their own limits.

	Choreographer Tim Topper coaches Catiana Bello, 13, as she rehearses her dance parts in HONK! Catiana plays the ugly duckling.
	Howard presides over a rehearsal. For his productions, students are also in charge of lighting, sets, sound and other technical aspects.
	Graham Howard applauds his drama students after their performance of HONK! on a Friday evening at John Hopkins Middle School. A former semipro soccer player, he was teaching language arts at another school when he volunteered to help with a few drama productions and found his true calling.

ST. PETERSBURG

Drama students at John Hopkins Middle School put together a musical comedy about ducks. They rehearsed for weeks. Each day someone turned in a gripping performance: Pain. Joy. Rage. Hysteria. Slapstick glee. Abject despair. Each day someone acted, danced and sang to the edge of sanity. Each day someone crawled home half alive.

That was just the director. The kids did some acting, too.

The making of HONK! was not so much about lines and lyrics and dance steps. At an age when every word, gesture and breath of air is critiqued and damned, about 30 children were dared to play foolish, to play loud, to play pompous, to abandon every instinct for self-preservation, to venture outside their paralyzing purgatory.

To get a 12-year-old boy or girl to do that, you must light a bomb, one that will erase fear, eradicate self-consciousness and make new space for self-discovery. It takes a big bomb. That bomb would be someone who wears black, who is prone to fits of madness and who speaks in a foreign accent.

But it all started with:

"BE A DUCK!"

Scene 1: The Inner Duck

Graham Howard paces the stage as sixth-, seventh- and eighth-graders huddle on the floor around him. He struts like a military commander about to go into battle with soldiers who have their helmets on backward. He wears a black shirt, black jeans and black boots. He has a ponytail. He has a British accent. He keeps his back straight and his hands behind him. He scowls.

He tells them to act like animals. By "act," he means "be." Be a duck. Be a chicken. Imagine the life form. Imagine pecking corn in the barnyard. Imagine hiding from the cat, dreading the farmer's ax. Reach down, he tells them, and find your very duck soul.

"Ladies and gentlemen. We just went through 31 pages of script. It felt like 101. I don't see characters. I don't see interesting stage characters. I see people dropping out of character. It's not a pretty sight. Ladies and gentlemen, we are going to take this up 10 notches. I am not going home tonight to nightmares. I am not going home to sleeplessness.

"Who are you? What are you? Didn't I tell all of you to get characters? You are onstage. Not me. I see boring stage pictures. I see people standing around. Boring! I want bigger actions! Find something to do. Touch someone. You're birds. Who is your character? Where was your duck born? Who are your duck's parents? What was he doing an hour ago? Is he like one of The Odd Couple? Is he fussy? Get a character."

Scene 2: How Dare You?

Almost everyone remembers a teacher like Graham Howard. One who opened the world up, made them feel passionate about something. One who scared the wits out of them. One they go back to see.

"Have you heard the How Dare You speech yet?" asks a former recipient, Alana Clapp, 18, a senior at the Pinellas County Center for the Arts. Next year, she plans to major in theater management, largely due to Howard's guidance. Howard puts the entire technical apparatus of every play - its curtains, sets, lighting and sound - in the hands of students.

The How Dare You speech: The magnificent malignity of it hinges on the word "dare." Each letter represents one of the descending circles of Dante's Inferno. The "d" is the first circle. It sounds guttural. Howard's voice drops another register with each letter. The final "e," the seventh circle, sounds like a strangled gargle. For a middle school student, the descent from "d" to "e" feels like 10 years.

"How da-a-a-are you chew gum on my stage?"

"How da-a-a-are you come on this stage without knowing your lines?"

The point is to believe that the stage is a holy place. It must be respected, revered. As well as everyone on it. It is a place of safety. God help those who violate it.

"How da-a-a-are you desecrate my stage?"

For Alana and others, the speech was part of the mystique. Just like the black clothes. She didn't know that Howard has a Hawaiian shirt at home. That he wears black because he once overheard two kids say it made them nervous.

Each class of eighth-graders tortures sixth-graders with Mr. Howard stories. "Every sixth-grader fears him," says Allison West, another of Howard's proteges, now a junior at St. Petersburg High. "We'd spread rumors. We'd point him out in the hallway and we'd say, 'Oohh, wait till you get in his class!' "

They'd tell the wide-eyed little ones that Mr. Howard isn't really British. His accent is fake. He's really from Akron, Ohio. He lives in a strange house.

In the eighth grade, Alana heard that he actually lived near her. She wasn't sure which house. She went looking. "He was somewhere on the other side of the neighborhood. I went over there and walked up to the first house and knocked."

Mr. Howard opened the door. She stood, speechless. To her amazement, he resembled actual flesh and blood. A husband and father of three. He also looked very surprised.

Scene 3: Hunter, Hunted

Howard's first stage experience was singing in Gilbert & Sullivan musicals at a boys school in England. He had to play girl parts. He didn't think much of the theater until his school began productions with an all-girls school nearby. Then he liked it a lot.

Reverence took more time to acquire. He went on to play semipro soccer. He came to the States and played for the St. Pete Kickers. He studied literature and psychology. He loved spy novels. Twenty years ago, he was teaching language arts at another school when he volunteered to help out with a few productions. He had found his career and his sanctuary.

"There's a theater game we play called 'Hunter, Hunted,' " he says. "The students sit in a circle, with two in the middle. We blindfold them. The hunter and the hunted have to find each other. They can't see; they don't know what's happening. If they reach the edge of the circle, someone touches them so they know where they are.

"In the early games, I'm looking for someone to charge through the circle. There's always someone who does that. I want it to happen so I can stop it. I want to show the students that's not going to happen. The stage is a place of safety. Without self-control, you can't be on it. This is the one place where they are safe. They are safe to take creative risks."

Scene 4: Laugh at the Audience

Howard has come to rehearsal with laryngitis. He can only whisper. But the whispering lasts only the first three minutes. Then he's red-faced, yelling at full volume.

"Raise your hands if you think you've given me 110 percent! This is show time, folks. Right now I can't hear you.

"I can feel it, I can sense it, I can see it in your eyes. So can the audience. You don't feel safe. It's safe! It's safe!" (He stamps his feet.) "There are people on this stage who don't believe they belong.

"Jump up and down!

"Roll on the floor!

"Laugh at the audience!

"Laugh at them!"

(The cast laughs at a nearly empty auditorium.)

"It's safe! Don't have nightmares about this! It's safe!"

Scene 5: The Bulging Vein

Howard comes the next day cranky and sick. His voice is still hoarse. The cast of HONK! feels about as safe as Marie Antoinette did as she stumbled up the steps to the guillotine.

Minutes before rehearsal, some pitiable fool got on a cell phone and ordered from Domino's. Pizza! On the stage!

"How da-a-a-are you order food! I don't have time for pizzas and sodas and a one-hour dinner break! It's not my fault there aren't any snacks. Fault the school! Get everybody out here! Whoever ordered that pizza better cancel. Get everybody out here! Places!"

The children slog through their parts like a foreign legion crossing the Sahara, the mirage of pepperoni pizza evaporating before them. Ducks, chickens and geese look like bored, sullen children. The feathers fly.

"You are not coming from anywhere! You are not going anywhere! You have no reason to be onstage! I want to see something called acting! What a novel concept!

"Come back, swans! Both of you! You don't know where you are or who you are! Do something! Get physically involved! If I'd said to walk across the stage in as boring a manner as possible, you've managed it!

"You, frog! You get a haircut! I mean it! I'm telling you, I'll cut it or I'll gel it. No buts about it. The audience is paying to see your face. It's one of my pet peeves, in case you haven't figured that out.

"Off! Off! I'm going to cut your lines! Your parts will go up in smoke! I will do whatever it takes to make this show work. Surgery is sometimes a necessity. I shouldn't be here. I should be home in bed. I'm here because I care. I want students to be as upset as I am. It means you care. I want people who care and are as passionate about the stage as I am.

"We're all in this together. Every single last one of us is in this together. I'm going to push you to get these areas up. I will push, and I will cut lines to get someone else up.

"The time has come! I'm not nice, even in the best of times. Somebody tell the others what I'm like."

There's a nervous pause. He glares. The children huddle. Would anyone dare speak? A small voice among the kids pipes up:

"Mean."

Then another voice:

"Impatient. Grumpy. Loud."

Howard nods affirmatively. Then he asks, "What am I like when the show is done?"

Another child's voice: "Leaping around like a giddy schoolboy."

After rehearsal, Howard looks flushed, drained. He just turned 52 and says he feels old. He swears this is his last big musical. Every production is the same, he says. "I think they wait to see the vein bulge. The students say to themselves, 'There it is! The vein is bulging! We've gone far enough! He's going to have his stroke!' "

Scene 6: The Teacher

There are times when Howard goes home from a bad rehearsal and lies awake forming an apology. It's not easy, because all his instincts compel him to instill and demand passion, what he calls "a desire welling up."

He's aware of his flaws. "I know I am far from perfect," he says. "I don't want to be taken for a friend. They don't want a teacher for a friend. They want you to respect them while they're in that process of finding out what it's like to be an adult. The quickest way to lose them is to ridicule them.''

When that happens, he says, he goes home and finds a way to say he's sorry.

Just before Easter, the last full rehearsal week before opening night, Howard changes his tactics.

"I want them to start laughing again," he says, out of earshot. "We've pushed them pretty hard. I don't want to make it drudgery. I don't want them buying T-shirts that say, 'We survived HONK!, but only just.'

"This is like a family. It's everybody in a community working together. This is their first experience with community. I tell them they are a cast, not a class. Once you're in a cast, you're in a family, and families take care of each other.

"They've become rigid. They're frustrated. The critiques have gone too far. I want to take some of that off them. I'm not sure how I'm going to do it."

Then Howard does it, by simply teaching. By staying onstage through every scene. He leaps with the frogs. He shouts gleefully, "Frog faces! Keep your frog faces for me!" He makes his eyes bug out, looking very much like a frog with a ponytail. He mugs for the kids. He pantomimes. He dances. He chases the geese. He gets them to roll on the floor. He makes them laugh.

Amid the mayhem, Howard pulls children aside individually. He leans over and whispers: "I just want to thank you. You're looking really good today. Thank you."

The energy soars. The stage rocks. Finally, the frogs leap as frogs do, the ducks waddle as ducks do. It's a bravura teaching performance. The kids look pumped and ready. They look like they might even stay ready, maybe for a whole extra day.

Howard has reached a rare approximation of mellow. The vein has receded. "We all have to take a break and put everything back in perspective," he says, philosophically.

The perspective would be:

"That this is, after all, a middle school play."

Epilogue

"Listen to your heartbeat."

Opening night curtain time was just hours away. Howard had settled the cast on the floor around him. He asked for silence, then asked them to listen to their hearts.

Each of them did what he said. "Now, listen to the music." He meant the music inside them. Howard waited a few more moments, then said, "Listen to the words."

The children remained quiet. He was speaking gently, rhythmically. His words were hypnotic. "Now," he said, "visualize yourselves onstage. Visualize success."

Then they went out onstage, the curtain rose, and they quacked up a storm. It may have been the costumes and live music, or the raw electricity of an auditorium packed with wildly applauding parents, but the children finally did what he had been begging them to do all along. They connected with their characters. Each duck and chicken said, "Look at me!" They stepped outside themselves.

It could not have ended any other way. After all, no matter how many times the story is told, the ugly duckling always turns into a swan.

Howard watched while leaning on a wall in the back of the theater, chin in hand.

John Barry can be reached at (727) 892-2258 or jbarry@sptimes.com.

[Last modified April 28, 2006, 11:29:51]