Last Monday, I was gifted the opportunity to sit down with Andrew Child, a rising sophomore and Theatre Major at Brandeis University and an already successful Artistic Director.
Child has been ahead of his time since before his high school days, when he and his older sister, Juliana, took part in musicals at Cardinal Spellman High School in the roles that necessitated relatively young looking children. The first time I saw the Children, as friends of the Child family refer to them, was in the Prologue scene of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. I was a freshman in high school and Andrew and Juliana, the two elder of the Child children were students from Capachione School of Performing Arts. I distinctly remember observing their acting chops as they eagerly listened to the Narrator of the show impart the story unto them. Since the very beginning of their involvement in Spellman Drama, the Children have played an integral role in arts leadership at the school. They picked up where their mother, Mrs. Sheila McCormack Child, Class of 1984, left off. She was inducted into the Spellman Drama Hall of Fame in 2002 and has been a shining example for both her children and the rest of the Spellman Drama students of one who strengthens the theatre community with their volunteered time. You might say that a strong passion for leadership and excellence run in the family.
It is from this supportive and artistically-minded family that Andrew Child has emerged. In his freshman year at Spellman, he landed himself a solo in Godspell‘s “Tower of Babble,” as well as in “On the Willows.” Child was consistently cast in more and more principal roles, leading up to his role as Bert in Mary Poppins in his senior year. He too sang in Spellman’s liturgical choir throughout his four years from which he graced his fellow students with his beautifully polished vocals. From his position as a member of God Squad, the senior ministry in charge of leading retreats for the students and serving as altar servers in the monthly Masses, Child assisted his fellow students in worship and emulated the ideal attributes Spellman students are best known for: generosity, kindness, respectfulness, and a wonderful sense of humor.
Besides all of these visible (and audible, if you will) positions of performance leadership, Child, approaching his senior year of high school and planning for the next steps of his education, decided to apply for what he thought would be a $200 scholarship to college, but which turned out to be infinitely more ideologically valuable to his growth, not only as an artist, but as a socially conscious world citizen.
Listed on a webpage offering a myriad of college scholarships was the opportunity to submit a short play about the disability experience in America. Instead of monetary compensation for the finalists, however, round-trip airfare and an all-inclusive trip to Washington D.C. to have their plays workshopped and performed at The John F. Kennedy Center for Performing Arts was offered. VSA, The International Organization on Arts and Disability, Child informed me, is “one of the oldest institutions that established a connection between the disabilities community and the artistic community,” and they, in association with the Kennedy Center, would supply the playwrights with an “amalgamation of” professional directors and “actors who were able-bodied and able-minded and people who identified as having different disabilities.”
Child submitted his play entitled On the Isle of Lotus Eaters about a man with alzheimer’s. The play consists of two characters: the man and his home health-care provider, with whom he speaks (and argues) through an intercom. The premise is that once citizens in this society reach the age of 45, they all must move into a community center together. “The idea is that the community ages with you,” Child told me. Once the last member of the community dies, the next batch of 45 year olds move in. The danger of this system and the real issue Child is getting at with this work is that “when we isolate the people who are different, when we isolate the 45 year old, how the rest of the world suffers from how he never got to impart knowledge to anyone, he never got to have the meaningful connections with other people. While it was about an aunt I have who suffers from alzheimer’s, … it was also about the disability experience in the way that in classrooms and workplaces and shows that we work on are strengthened by having different perspectives of people who identify with having disabilities.”
Beyond being granted the opportunity to work with these poised, professional people of theatre and having them analyze and bring his words to life , Child says this was “an experience I’ll always be thankful for” because “it opened my eyes to making theatre accessible.” Anita Hollander, the lead actress in his play is the Artists with Disabilities Chair of the Screen Actors Guild and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists. She shared with Child her perspective as an actor with one leg and the disadvantage actors with all different kinds of disabilities are subject to, not because of a lack of their own acting ability, but because of the lack of casting opportunities provided them because of their perceived inability. This weekend in DC was an extremely formative experience in Child’s life and is what strongly influenced the direction that he and Gavin Damore are taking with their community arts initiative, Artists from Suburbia. But more on that later.
The day after Child returned from his incredible experience in DC was the first day of his senior year of high school and coincidentally the day auditions were to be held for the play Pygmalion, which Child was set to direct. Normally Spellman would put on a play in the fall, a musical in the winter, and a spring show in (you guessed it) the spring. But this year, Child told me, “If a student didn’t step up to do it, the school wouldn’t have done a straight play.” Go-getter that he is, Child was not going to let that happen. Before going gung-ho into this, however, he took a consensus of a couple of his friends to see if they would be interested and comfortable with having a fellow student direct them. Once he got affirmative responses, he conferred with the school principal, Mr. Kelly, and went forth from there. The play was a difficult one: two and a half hours in length and a melodrama at that! However, the cast and crew tenaciously accepted the challenge before them and the show ended up being nominated to be performed at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival! In the spring, Child continued to build his directing portfolio and took up Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew which too met success. From having Lotus Eaters and Pygmalion occur in such an encapsulated two month period to directing two separate plays in his senior year, Child realized the path he wanted to take with theatre. He was ready to create something new.
Fast-forward to the summer after senior year. Child has graduated from Spellman. He has found out that he is not to begin at Brandeis until the spring semester. What to do with the next seven months? Theatre of course! In July and August of 2015, Child enlisted long-time friend and fellow Spellman alumn Gavin Damore in laying the groundwork for what was to become Artists from Suburbia. Child acquired a grant from the East Bridgewater Cultural Council and the two put up a puppeted version of David Wood’s adaptation of The Witches by Roald Dahl in November of 2015. The show was nominated for three of 2015’s BroadwayWorld Boston Awards, of which Child earned runner-up for Best Direction. In this past week, the nominations for the 20th Eastern Massachusetts Association of Community Theatres Awards were announced and Child is up for Best Sound Design for The Witches.
Why has this play garnered such success? One of the answers is Child’s thoughtful intention behind it. As Artist from Suburbia’s official Artistic Director, Child shared with me: “One of my favorite things about Artists from Suburbia is that I feel like we really have a chance to do the types of theatre that aren’t being done in our area. There’s a huge radius around us who do musicals and Shakespeare and some popular, mainstream plays that everyone’s heard of and I think it’s really exciting to do pieces saying ‘Okay, what audience members, what artists are being left out of that.’ And I think children are being totally left out of that and families with young children are also being left out of that.” While The Witches has the type of dark, bizarre humor signature to Dahl, it is indeed a play for younger audiences.
This summer, Artists held An Evening of Original One Act Plays. The playwrights submitted their work in January and the process of workshopping with the three chosen pieces began in June. This is where I was lucky enough to hop on to the initiative as assistant director to director Corinne Mason of The Werewolves, written by Alex Moon. The other two plays were the Moon. and She. , directed by Erica Simpson, who Child appreciatively comments, “has a flair for the avante garde,” and The Daffodil Girls, which Child himself directed. The audition process for the three plays, Child disclosed to me, was a bit more successful than it had been with The Witches.
When I asked why that was, Child replied with a couple key factors: it was a better time of the year (high school and college students were free from the confines of school), less of a time commitment was being asked of participants, and “the project genuinely interested more people.” Child pointed out, “when you looked us up then, stuff came up. There were newspaper articles. There were people in the audience smiling at us.” This legitimacy of online presence, as well as in tangible print, helped theatre members in the area discover and want to be a part of this initiative.
Child also gives credit to Damore’s PR skills in reigning in the type of people that would give life to Artist’s mission: “Gavin’s doing a good job of putting out what we want to be putting out and an accurate representation of who we are and what we are and what we want to be. And I think that people could tell that this was something they wanted to be a part of or this was something that they wanted nothing to do with.”
Moving forward, Child and Damore plan to keep Artists focused in the summer months and to expand into three separate projects to draw upon audience interest. There will be another Evening of One Acts (with “tweaks and changes” based on cast and crew feedback), another production for young audiences (“maybe something that goes along with something school children will be reading”), and a full workshopping of the play of a local playwright. Child detailed for me the plan for this final project of “not doing a full production…but doing – Ethan [Child’s younger brother] termed it the ‘boom-boom-boom’- where the idea would be that we would have a playwright come in, write a full-length play, workshop it with the actors and a director for two to three weeks and then present it to an audience, get feedback from the audience, have the audience talk to the director and the actors and the playwright, rework it for three weeks, present it for an audience and then another two or three weeks and then present it a third time so the audience is actually getting a chance to give feedback which, even in professional theatre: that’s the ideal. That’s what you want. Even in professional theatre that’s very rare, to actually do that.”
This idea of truly utilizing audience feedback and the opportunity to work and rework a play is one Child draws from his experience with VSA. Additionally he emphatically stated: “with Artists from Suburbia, when we say these shows are accessible, we really mean accessible”, not only for audience members coming to enjoy the shows, but for whosoever may want to join the cast of crew of any production. Next year, Child excitedly informed me, “the One Acts will be captioned and (hopefully) sign-language interpreted…Inclusivity, representation, being aware of every little thing like that is something we’re trying to purport and be. It matters.” This eye for detail and untiring, heartfelt effort to follow through on his word are attributes that have already gotten Child far. This Artistic Director has big plans and he is using all of the resources available to him, from his fantastic family to the engaged and enthusiastic theatre community forming around him, to make them a reality. The goal laid out in the Artists’ mission statement , Child reminds me, is “to make serendipitous, beautiful pieces of theatre happen, pulling all kinds of people and artists together.”
As Child approaches his sophomore year of college there is nothing but a bright future ahead of him. He looks forward to continuing to act at Brandeis and to soon have the opportunity to direct.
Child presently works as a drama teacher at Arts for Youth in Bridgewater and is directing Troilus and Cressida at Dragonfly Theatre, which is set to go up on August 19th until the 28th. I highly recommend attending and seeing the work of this delightfully driven human being.
The Professional People Appreciator 