The deep impact of high school drama teachers

The pianist, Jim Shelby, was in his seat on the stage and two dozen aspirants sat nervously in the audience waiting to be called up to impress the director, George Ward, who sat in the center of row two. The actors graduated between 1965 and 1975 and they have come from as far as Connecticut to honor that most beloved and influential of academic species — the high school drama teacher. There are, of course, child actors whose talents are recognized, as they are shepherded through children’s theaters and private lessons and into conservatories run by American Conservatory Theater and Berkeley Repertory Theater. [...] the masses are generally introduced to the stage as teenagers who sign up for drama as an elective in a big public school. “It is high school drama teachers that give us our first inklings and first glimpses of what we want to do in theater,” says Bill Ontiveros, who got his start as “Count Dracula,” at Woodside in 1972. and later founded Pioneer Square Theater in Seattle, where he has been a stage actor and director for 30 years. Many with talent are funneled from their high schools into the after-school program at A.C.T. Among these are Beth Behrs who graduated from Tamalpais High in 2004 and is the star of “2 Broke Girls,” and Chelsea Peretti, who graduated from the College Preparatory School in Oakland in 1996, became a writer for “Saturday Night Live,” and is one of the stars on “Brooklyn Nine-Nine.” The top name among teachers is Rawley T. Farnsworth, the retired drama teacher at Skyline High School in Oakland, who got a moving tribute on worldwide TV from Tom Hanks as he claimed an Academy Award for Best Actor in 1993. Pond, once a member of the company at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, had been Student Body President at Woodside, but that’s not the norm for the drama crowd. Instead he added an unpaid hour to his workday, by sitting at his desk so students could talk about plays, act out favorite roles or practice their speeches. [...] Ward is left to his memory, which includes every cast member, every role and every scene, line and lyric from every high school play he directed, and there were 55 or 60of them. “I needed to provide my mom and her friends better entertainment and George took on the job with great relish,” says Voakes, 60, a children’s books designer in London. Paul Voakes, a journalism professor at the University of Colorado, flew out from Boulder to play the lead role of Simon, 45 years after he had done it in high school. In those days, school plays were staged in the multi-use room, with the audience seated on metal folding chairs on a flat linoleum floor. Lots of people can say lines well but it is the business that really makes a difference with a great stage actor and George Ward is the master of the business.