Roots & Branches: Creating Intergenerational Theatre (review)

In Roots&Branches: Creating Intergenerational Theater Arthur Strimling argues that when young and old performers use personal stories as the basis for plays, it makes powerful theatre. Writing for both professionals and amateurs, Strimling presents effective models for the creation of intergenerational theatre programs. His practical techniques and philosophy serve as a blueprint that will guide future work in this creative form of drama.

After graduating from Columbia University, Arthur Strimling worked under the direction of Joseph Chaikin for ten years. They created workshops and productions based on actors' lives and experiences using ensemble techniques. Later, Strimling developed his techniques with the Talking Band, an avant-garde group of the 1970s, which toured internationally. Strimling's theatre work was then influenced by author and documentarian Barbara Myerhoff, whose work with seniors helped a generation of social workers, gerontologists, and artists appreciate that "reminiscence is a major developmental task, essential in the process of aging well and dying well" (10). She encouraged Strimling to listen to seniors' stories.

Inspired, Strimling created an intergen-erational storytelling project in New York with kids from poor neighborhoods and Jewish senior citizens. The seniors told their memoirs to the youngsters; before long, they formed close relationships. The "unbreakable links between young and old" fueled the program (24). Though successful, Strimling felt the life-story interviews were too limited and that the project's impact would be stronger if they were performed. Soon he began to adapt the seniors' stories for the stage.

Roots&Branches, the book, explores the work of the company of the same name that Strimling formed in 1996 with a group of elder actors (the "roots") and college-age actors from NYU's Tisch School of the Arts (the "branches"). Through his work with these performers, Strimling developed the creative process that the program continues to employ. During a nine-month series of meetings, the company experiments with storytelling, improvisation, and discussion exercises based on the members' lives. Tape-recorded sketches are transcribed and eventually shaped and developed into a script. The final product of this process is a fully mounted production that tours primarily to New York locations. The company's polished performances balance lighthearted explorations of humanity with serious issues ranging from death, aging, and loneliness to immigration, beauty, and fairy tales.

The book highlights the company's most notable work, Playing Lear, producedin 2002. Here the company wove the actors' personal narratives, life events, and opinions into scenes using Shakespeare's text as a springboard for a new exploration of aging and values. For example, in King Lear, as Lear divides up his kingdom, he insists that he must keep a retinue of a hundred knights in order to retain his sense of identity. In Playing Lear, Roots&Branches performers ask, "What is your 100 knights? What is it that if you lost it, you would no longer recognize yourself; would no longer be yourself?" (126). At the end of the play, both the characters and the generations come together, paralleling the magical transformation that happens in the Roots&Branches company.

Strimling wrote the book as a guide, but he urges directors to adapt his methods to their own needs, casts, and audiences. He suggests ways to locate interested agencies and provides guidelines for conducting the first meetings. He offers techniques for workshops, steps to use in creating a script, and a recommended process for rehearsals. Tips help readers avoid troublesome problems because, as Strimling acknowledges, intergenerational theatre challenges directors to accommodate two groups of performers with different needs and skills. Even scheduling is difficult because seniors usually prefer to rehearse and perform during the day when young actors are in school or at work. Strimling urges readers to leap over the barriers because the experience provides so many rewards to participants, audiences, and communities.

Roots&Branches: Creating Intergenerational Theater is a valuable resource that combines the love of storytelling with intergenerational insight. It will be useful to practitioners in theatre, education, therapy, social work, and allied areas. Its ideas apply...