October 29, 2003
TCCT soars with 'Cranes'
Traverse City Children/Teen Theater stages poignant play
By Carol South
Herald contributing writer
"Suddenly a tremendous flash of light cut across the sky, my grandmother was making tea."
Describing the atomic bomb attack on Hiroshima - moving from the horrific to the mundane - at the end of World War II, the character of Sadako Sasaki provides narrative context to the play "A Thousand Cranes."
The Traverse City Children/Teen Theater presented the play on Saturday at the Traverse Area District Library in the morning and at Horizon Books in the afternoon. The cast also gave their final performance of the play at Border's on Sunday.
"A Thousand Cranes" dramatizes the true story of Sadako, who ten years after the bombing died of leukemia at age 12. An active, athletic youngster until the disease began to take it's toll, Sadako, played by Kristin Schulte, laments:
"But how can I be sick from the bomb, it didn't scratch me."
Weakened by her disease, Sadako decides to fold 1,000 paper cranes using the Japanese art of origami. She draws on a Japanese tradition that the crane can live for 1,000 years and that a sick person folding 1,000 of them will be granted a wish and made well. In the play, Sadako makes it to 634 before dying. After her death, her friends step in to complete the task in her honor.
A memorial statue to the real-life Sadako is situated in the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park. The exhibit also includes some of the cranes she folded using medicine wrapping paper and other scraps.
Besides Schulte, "A Thousand Cranes" included three other actors. The production also featured dramatic costumes, sound effects, sets and choreography.
The other cast members portrayed a variety of Sadako's family members, friends and doctors. They switched among a series of stylized masks and vivid kimonos to show character changes. Old Town Playhouse veterans Kathy Verstraete created the costumes and masks and Kat Brown choreographed the play and designed the sets.
Tackling such a heavy and emotional topic is a new direction for the Traverse City Children/Teen Theater.
"Definitely my goal was to show that children's programming does not always have to be happy and fluffy," said Luis Araquistain, director of the Traverse City Children/Teen Theater. "We wanted to do a more dramatic production."
The production was the first presented as part of the Education Through Theater program, a new facet of the Children/Teen Theater spearheaded by Araquistain. Earlier this fall, he and his cast presented "A Thousand Cranes" to students in Suttons Bay, Kingsley, Buckley and at Traverse City West High School. Araquistain also gave curriculum suggestions to teachers at those schools to help them integrate the information into lesson plans.
"Our goal is to bring educational plays to schools to help teachers reinforce lessons and life skills in social studies, English, language arts and history," Araquistain said. "I know that there are innovative teachers who wanted to bring different ways of teaching these core subjects and for the most part they were very excited about the opportunity to bring the show in."
Audience members were not the only ones learning from this play. Araquistain encouraged his cast to research the historical context, the events at the end of World War II and their characters.
Wesley Mayer, 13, who portrayed Sadako's father and other characters in "A Thousand Cranes," noted that the research helped their acting. An eighth-grade homeschool student, Mayer already had an interest in the history of World War II.
"It helped us with emotions a lot and how things got along in the family," he said, adding the cast members used the Internet to gather information. "Like I found out that mother and father owned a barber shop so they might act differently."
"You're a little bit sad to begin with at the first practices but after a while you start to honor what the play is doing," noted Mayer about the play's emotional impact on the actors.