Metropolis actors get help from Clearbrook
When you're preparing a play about residents of a group home, who are the experts you turn to? Clearbrook clients, of course.
The warmth, relationships, speech patterns and laughs in the homes — impossible to pick up from reading a play — were important to director David Belew and the actors in “The Boys Next Door” at Metropolis Performing Arts Centre in Arlington Heights.
The final shows are 7 p.m. Saturday, Feb. 12, and 3 p.m. Sunday, Feb. 13.
And the play, a humorous and touching portrayal of the lives of four men who live in a group home, is appropriate for Metropolis's 10th anniversary.
Working with people living with disabilities is an important chunk of what the performing arts center does.
“Part of our mission is to make the arts accessible to every single person,” said Jim Jarvis, Metropolis executive director, and himself the father of a 4-year-old son with Down syndrome.
For eight years the center has operated “Flourish in the Footlights” with Arlington Pediatric Therapy. Some of the participants use wheelchairs and other are nonverbal, but in the end they put on a play.
More than 200 youngsters and adults with special needs will come through the program this year through a partnership with Northwest Special Recreation Association.
These are in addition to the shows and entertainment events staged at the theater and the large drama school.
Visiting Clearbrook residents enabled the “Boys” cast to present their characters as “real, not caricatures,” said Belew, adding depth to the performances.
“There's so much that happens that's physical,” said the director. “The way the people we met were so warm and so free physically in their contact with people. When we went to the workshop they would immediately come up and introduce themselves and give us hugs and pats on the shoulder.”
Belew and the actors visited group homes and a workshop and attended a holiday party.
“I was surprised when we visited the group homes it was really a family atmosphere,” he said. “You could tell they really supported each other, and there's camaraderie between the residents and the caretakers.”
It's important to get the play's humor right, he said.
“The audience has to feel comfortable that it's OK to laugh,” the director said.
“We're not laughing at people but at the situation that they find themselves in.”
Actor Andrew Pond walked into a group home and almost immediately met a man similar to his character, Arnold Wiggins.
“He asked my name, then recited the next three or four weeks of the Bears football schedule and what he liked to watch at what time on what day on television,” Pond said.
“He had the vocal inflection and habits that my character has written into it. He repeated himself a lot.”
The man giggled, then asked if he could laugh, then immediately started talking about something else.
“He reinforced my picture of how I had imagined Arnold to be,” Pond said. “I stole his laugh, and I'm not giving it back. It's a wonderful laugh. You hear that laugh and you think ‘It can't be real,' and yet it completely is. That's a detail we got by actually visiting.”
Fifteen Clearbrook residents attended the play Thursday night, adding their enthusiastic response to the feedback the production has received from relatives and caregivers of people with disabilities.
Barbara Gibson, a group home resident in Arlington Heights, told Clearbrook staff members the play was very good, and she wished she could see it again.
“It made us feel good to know that we could show the actors the things we do in our home,” she said. “The actors made us feel like they know what it is like to be handicapped.”
Bonnie O'Brien, Clearbrook vice president of marketing, wanted the cast to see her clients' personalities, not their disabilities. She thinks the actors got it.
The play is important because it “shows us that we can laugh at each other and with each other,” O'Brien said.
“Just because someone has a disability doesn't mean they don't have the same kind of funny moments that all of us have in life.”