Playwright's Perspective — School Pictures

From the playwright: Milo Cramer

I had a speech impediment as a child and couldn’t pronounce half the alphabet. “T,” “Th,” and “S” were daunting; “R” and “K” were impossible. Girl came out guwuwuhll – humiliating – cookie was something like dwudwy. 

I was often taken out of class and brought to the padded blue room at the end of the hall, where well-meaning ladies pointed at incomprehensible diagrams of the human throat. To make an “R” sound, they said: “Form a U-shape with your tongue at the back of the roof of your mouth and release forward as you exhale.” What? I was 6. They thought that something was wrong with me; I learned that something was wrong with me; nothing was wrong with me. 

If you asked me, then, as a frustrated and friendless kid, struggling to communicate with anyone beyond my parents, who understood me only via magic osmosis, what I wanted to be when I grew up, I would have said I wanted to be an agduh ow a poweh – an actor or a poet. I craved a facility with language that I really, really didn’t have. In a bittersweet twist, though, my mom tells me the day I first pronounced cookie “correctly” was like the saddest day in the world. I was 10 and I had finally assimilated, but it cost something – something special was lost. 

You can’t help but think about all that when you unexpectedly become a (kind of) teacher: what are we teaching? What are we scrubbing out? What’s “correct”? Who decides? How am I a “teacher” when something is obviously (still) wrong with me? Am I passing it down?

What got me talking, ultimately, was not diagrams or exercises, but my siblings (duhhh): Max (prince of shadows) and Phoebe (interdimensional detective), who played with me. Max taught me how to open packets of cafeteria silverware (he found me tugging desperately at the baggie) by poking the fork prongs through the plastic (so simple! so brilliant); Phoebe taught me how to duel (at midnight, in the kitchen, to the death, pillows only). During the pandemic, Max and Phoebe listened to 900 midnight drafts of this show; it wouldn’t exist without them.

You think about all that while teaching, too: what cannot be taught? What can only be modeled? What can only be cultivated? Via magic osmosis? Via community? Who is secretly struggling to open silverware and doesn’t want anyone to know and can’t concentrate on anything else? 

In the New York City school system today, the thing we’re modeling and cultivating is a vicious, sycophantic obsession with status, and a brutal, even deadly cruelty to those without it. This is not news, it’s obvious, and I am not above it. I can’t even see a way out. I personally have profited off our nasty education system and all I can offer as salve or penance in return is this goofy handful of songs I can barely sing. I don’t have kids because I’m too whimsical and broke, but gee I’d sure like to someday, and if I did I’d want them to be in spaces where they could work through speech impediments – and all the other horrors – with curiosity and love. Not sure how we get there when we relentlessly tell our children and each other, in ten thousand ways both insidious and explicit, in business and in academia and even in the arts: BE NORMAL, WIN, OR ELSE. 

Being “an actor or a poet,” turns out, is tricky. Do you know how many vocal cords there are? The phrase “vocal cords,” for me, always conjured an image of 100 fragile angel hairs, arrayed in a complex harp down our narrow necks. I was afraid if I sang the way I wanted to, i.e. cRaZiLy, I would “rip” one. A few workshops of this show were cut short because I was having intense anxiety and losing my voice, my dumb voice I’ve worked so hard to have, and our intrepid director Morgan brought on our emergency singing teacher Michael and suddenly I was back in the padded blue room at the end of the hall. Practicing sounds. I cried, actually cried, when Michael taught us that there aren’t 100 vocal cords: there are 2. And they’re not vertical and they don’t get plucked like a harp, they’re horizontal and they flutter like a butterfly in a flute. Think of it – all our sounds – just 2 little cords! Enough to write a punk song.