By Davida Singer
The early sixties classic film, “The Blackboard Jungle,” with its gritty portrayal of urban public schools, served as model for “The Book Bag”, a new drama by Christopher Colt, opening this week at Collective Unconscious.
The updated play involves a beginning teacher, and his struggle “to wade through the waters” of a difficult and alienating system and cross-cultural boundaries.
“The difficulty of urban schools today is that they’re very segregated,” says Colt, who’s been teaching theater in Manhattan for the past ten years. “Most schools are almost 100% African American or Latino, and full of teachers who are white. The plot centers on a teacher trying to help a boy find his lost book bag. But the teacher quickly finds himself in conflicts of authority and bureaucracy.”
Now 42, Colt began his professional career as an actor appearing in the New York Shakespeare Festival, and has been penning plays since he was a theater student at Julliard. His play, “Dennis Gets A Life” also ran at Collective Unconscious, in 2000 and 2001, and he collaborated with his brother on the musical, “Tripitica’s Puppet Box” at Tribeca Lab. His work is mostly autobiographical, and “The Book Bag” is no exception.
“My passion and dedication are for the theater,” Colt explains. “I’m somewhat ambivalent about teaching, though I like it. I’m kind of easy going, and as a teacher it’s part of the difficulty I’ve had. This particular teacher in the play, like me, is a product of the middle class and excellent schools. To then enter the environment of public schools isn’t easy. A lot of kids don’t want to focus on race, but culturally there’s a problem. They often respond only to a tough, street approach because it’s familiar to them. It’s often more about style than curriculum. The character in “Book Bag”, Mr. P, got his Masters in English, but he’s not sure about teaching, about whether he’s really doing the right thing.”
According to the author, although his earlier work was strongly influenced by the dream sequences in “Angels in America,” the new piece is stylistically more concrete and to the point, due in part to a friend’s lament about never seeing “straightforward plays” anymore.
The show stars Drama Desk winner, Stuart Rudin, and three of Colt’s own students are in the cast. J. C. Islander,”a real theater man,” formerly with Charas, who worked with the writer on last year’s workshop version of the piece, directs.
“I really enjoy the process of what’s going to happen next, working through to get the vibe right,” notes Colt. “ My hope is to further the dialogue about the challenges of teaching today. Maybe this can bring light to some of what goes on. For me, the most interesting character is Mr. K, an older teacher who’s been putting decades into a system that doesn’t highly reward him.
“There’s some “Blackboard” flavor here, but the movie was more lurid and over the top. I didn’t feel I needed to be sensationalistic about it. I wanted this to be really just how it is. That should be enough.”
