From the Mouths of Babes
Students of the W.C. Reid Center for the Creative Arts, in Asheville, North Carolina, have written and will perform in a play called Daddy, Where Are You. The play focuses on how kids—especially boys—handle life with absent fathers:
‘”We have anywhere from 125 to 230 kids come through the Reid Center every week,” [W. LaVone] Griffin [director of the Center] said. “I noticed that when it was time to pick the kids up or go on field trips, it was always the women who picked them up. We have families and men around, but it is predominately single-parent mothers.”
As Griffin grew closer to the children, he found that many of the fathers were out of the picture. “They would tell me, ‘Oh, he’s gone,’ or ‘He’s in jail’ or ‘He doesn’t care about me anyway.’” Griffin wanted to give the children a chance to tell their stories, so he and director Michael Hayes came up with “Daddy, Where Are You?” a play written by children who have lost their fathers through death, divorce or incarceration.
“The majority of the kids in the play are missing a father for one reason or another,” Hayes said. “We took stories from each of the cast members and ideas from the children at the center to come up with the play.”‘
Read more →
Asheville Citizen Times
Full disclosure: my wife and mother-in-law are both drama teachers. So I’m biased. Drama has a way of drawing students into the open, and encouraging them to share themselves in a way that, in any other situation, would never happen. For some reason, it’s safe(r) to let your walls down. From what I’ve seen, it’s very therapeutic.
What better way for these kids to deal with their pain and frustration than to share it with others?
Daddy, Where Are You? will be showing this weekend at the W.C. Reid Center for the Creative Arts (828-350-2048).
November 13th, 2006 at 7:13 pm
Hi Jared. Interesting article. It would be even more interesting to hear from the fathers, wouldn’t it? Rarely do we hear their side. Often the mothers push the men out of the children’s lives, purposely or unknowingly. It doesn’t help that 40% of all births in America are to unmarried women. Each of those men are at the mercy of the mother if they want to see their child. One of these days we’ll solve this tragedy. Thank you for drawing attention to it.
Teri Stoddard
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