Step Up, New York!

Thursday night, Debra, Eunice and I went to the Step Up Women’s Network 6th Annual Spring Drama Performance. Not exactly the stuff of Broadway, but maybe more meaningful and poignant in its own very distinct way.

Step Up Women’s Network is a national nonprofit membership organization dedicated to strengthening community services for women and girls. One of Step Up’s initiatives is an after-school drama program that empowers underserved young women to tell their own stories through theatre. Three teams of girls from schools in East Harlem and the Bronx spent the last few months dedicating time each week to this program and the plays they performed Thursday night were the result of that hard work.

The girls identify key themes in their lives and then begin exploring questions related to those themes through poetry and prose – all of this material ultimately forms the foundation of what becomes the final script of their performance. They write every word and they perform each line and each scene with real-world grit and determination.

These girls all ranged in age between 12 and 17 years, and the most sobering realization as I watched these tableaux unfold on stage was that they know more about life than any girl their age should ever have to know or worry about. The performance themes ranged from the expected (the ups and down of teenage friendship, acceptance, tolerance and boys) to the insightful (identity – who are we really?) to the tragic (teenage pregnancy, abuse, and racism). So many of the conversations were so adult (sometimes disturbingly so), I constantly had to remind myself that these were just teenagers.

When I was 13, my biggest concerns were figuring out how to curl my hair so it would feather just so, how I could save enough money to buy the coveted Club Monaco signature sweatshirt, who to invite to my birthday sleepover, and did the boy I had a crush on even know I was alive (likely not). I was blissfully unaware of pretty much ALL of the issues that these inner city girls face every day of their lives… which makes me wonder if these girls are aware that other girls grow up in entirely different worlds. And given a choice, which world would they actually choose? The only one they know with the friends and family they love, or the one that might remove, or at least delay, the adult-type pressures?