CULVER CITY, Calif. — “This is my lucky ruler,” Ayla Moses said as she placed it on top of her script. Grabbing a pencil, she drew a straight line across the page and wrote the details of a new lighting cue.
Moses is a senior at Culver City High School’s Academy of Visual and Performing Arts, where she is part of the Career Technical Education or CTE program. Although she’s always loved theater, it was in middle school that she got her first taste of the technical side of things. Her dream now is to be a stage manager and as she places her headset over her pink hair at her table in the Kirk Douglas Theatre, she realized she is living it.
“Like a pinch me moment kind of,” she said of working on a show at the professional theater in downtown Culver City. “Dream come true is what I’ve been saying all along.”
Moses is working on her high school production of “The Laramie Project.” The backstage crew are her classmates. So are the members of the cast. And, yes, this theater is substantially smaller than the school’s massive state-of-the-art Robert Frost Auditorium. But this is a unique opportunity and one she is savoring every second of.
Through a partnership with Center Theatre Group and CCUSD’s Front and Center Theatre Collaborative, the students are working at Kirk Douglas alongside professional mentors, getting a taste of a career in the performing arts.
“For the first time I’ve had a mentor in stage management,” Moses said, beaming. “And to get to like experience seeing a professional crew do the thing I want to do for the rest of my life has been a big learning experience.”
Lux Amaya echoes that sentiment. Also a senior, she hopes to have a career in musical theater and said just being in this space has been an inspiration.
“At first it was like a little nerve-wracking,” she admitted, “but now it’s so amazing because they’ve been so welcoming to us and teaching us. It’s really thrilling. It makes me, like, know for sure that I want to go into this when I grow up.”
This is all music to Lee Margaret Hanson’s ears. As creative director of AVPA theater and CTE theater, she said this is exactly what the program was designed to do.
“My personal goal is that, upon graduating, they know and they feel in their hearts and with their skills that they belong,” she explained. “They belong in the industry. They deserve to be there. They know what to do.”
The high school’s theater program is a renowned one with a reputation for tackling difficult, even controversial material. Two years ago, they became the first high school in the country to perform David Henry Hwang’s “Yellow Face.”
“The Laramie Project” by Moisés Kaufman, being performed Nov. 2-5, is a groundbreaking play about the 1998 murder of Matthew Shepard, a gay University of Wyoming student. Often banned by high school drama departments, Hanson sees this is a vitally important work, especially in a year when over 400 anti-LGBTQ+ bills have been introduced across the country. It’s a disturbing trend, she said, that has a direct impact on members of the school community.
“That is really detrimental to our LGBTQ community, to those students, to those staff members,” she said. “So I think for us to say, ‘not us, not here, not now,’ we are not going to capitulate to that.”
Rather than see the material as controversial, she said she views it as progressive and inspirational.
“[It’s] a way to honor and make sense of something that sometimes just doesn’t make sense and to create opportunities for dialogue, and discussion, which I think, is something that definitely in the U.S. we need more of,” Hanson explained. “We’ve really gotten so detached from each other and angry with each other, that art and theater, I think, is the place where we come to feel and empathize and see things from a different perspective.”
She admits they could have reached a bigger audience in their normal space which has four times as many seats, but she’s thrilled to be at the Kirk Douglas, not just because of the professional partnership and not just because of it’s a more intimate setting for this intimate piece.
“Kirk Douglas is located in the heart of Culver City,” Hanson said. “It’s right across from City Hall. And I want this play to be about not only the high school community, but all of the Culver City community.”
Amaya admits she wasn’t familiar with the story of Matthew Shepard, who was murdered before she was born. And that upsets her. She feels this is the kind of event — one that spurred a national change in terms of hate crime legislation — that students should be learning about.
“With art we can start dialogue among people about stuff, you know that in society that sometimes it’s uncomfortable to talk about,” she said. “With the right approach to the material, you know, we can handle it. And it’s…you know, you have to learn about this stuff.”
“Knowing that we live in a world where hate crimes still do exist,” Moses added, “I think it’s really important for us to be sharing the message of Matthew Shepard.”
And with each cue she calls that’s what this budding stage manager doing — illuminating audiences about a tragedy from the not so distant past while also drawing a direct line to what she hopes will be her long future career in the theater.