June 5, 2002
Bertha Vos class shows dramatic flair
Students write, cast and produce play version of ‘Little Women’
By Carol South
Herald contributing writer
Sniffling into their
handkerchiefs, eloquently saying
farewell to Beth, their beloved
sister and friend, members of the
cast of “Little Women” staged a
touching finale.
For their version of the classic
tale of four sisters by Louisa
May Alcott, sixth-grade students
at Bertha Vos Elementary
Schools threw themselves into
the production. The students
wrote the script, designed
costumes and props and even
gave up their recess time for
more than a month so they could
rehearse.
They presented the play to
Bertha Vos students Thursday in
four performances, winding up
their school year together on a
dramatic note.
“Our whole entire class was
involved,” said Kristen
Vermetten, a sixth-grader who
wrote the first draft of the play.
“Our class is very dramatic and
we just work together very
well.”
Vern Wolfgram, the sixth-
grade teacher at Bertha Vos,
realized even before the school
year began that this group of
students was unusually creative.
To take advantage of this, he
encouraged them all year to
write and produce short plays or
skits as part of their Language
Arts or Social Studies assignments. The 32 students, he said,
ate it up.
“This group is real theatrical,”
Wolfgram said. “They just have
acting in their blood.”
When some students said they
wanted to produce Little
Women, vowing to do it on their
own time, Wolfgram quickly
agreed. The project quickly expanded to include the whole
class.
“It wasn’t like I told them to
do this, they begged me, they
wanted this,” noted Wolfgram, a
teacher at Bertha Vos for six
years. “Other than two rehearsals in class and then presenting
the play during class time, they
did it all on their own.”
Along the way, the students
overcame many challenges.
Vermetten and friend Grace
Reinhold scripted “Little
Women,” with Reinhold
polishing Vermetten’s first draft.
The duo had worked together
before on plays such as one
based on the book “Bud, Not
Buddy” by Christopher Paul
Curtis. This assignment was part
of a realistic fiction section that
had small groups of students
write and produce a play about a
book. The groups presented their
plays to staff, students and parents.
“We worked really well
together on ‘Bud, Not Buddy’
and wanted to try one more,”
Vermetten said.
Vermetten and Reinhold
researched Little Women by
watching the movie and reading
the book. They had a difficult
task of paring down this long
and complicated plot into the 30-minute timeframe Wolfgram
gave them.
“We would discuss which
scenes to include, which characters,” said Reinhold. “We took
the main parts and added a
few.”
After that, the
director/producer duo held
auditions and chose the cast,
which was an exercise in
diplomacy. It also required them
to have faith in both their
judgment and their actors - would a spark they saw in a
usually shy person during the
audition come out in the play?
They also had to motivate the
actors to learn their lines and
attend rehearsals, even as the
weather outside warmed and the
playground beckoned.
The writers and cast
persevered through hurt feelings,
playground defections and
temporary walk-offs, finally coalescing as a team.
“We had some fights but we
ended up pulling together in the
end, we just all came together
and did our very best,” Vermetten said.
Renee Rothgarber played a
poor mother in the play and
enjoyed the whole experience.
“I really liked that you got to
have fun with all your friends,”
Rothgarber said.
Wolfgram said he saw the students mature as a group through
producing plays.
“The cues about positioning,
voice quality, projection and
interacting with other characters,
those things I helped them with
the first time,” he said. “Then
they began coaching themselves.”
“I fully expect to see these kids
on stage at the high school level
and beyond,” he noted.