Actress Joan Alison Polner is working her 19th Century tail off. She is bounding from one side of the stage to the other, pausing briefly to change her own scenery (using a slide projector) or to change costume and makeup in front of her audience.
At the end of her show, Polner, a.k.a. Laura Ingalls Wilder, is breathless and exhilarated. She earns a generous round of applause from her audience, a sweaty, fidgety but ultimately appreciative crew of grade schoolers sprawled on the gym floor at Whittier School in Downers Grove.
It’s not Broadway, but it’s a living for probably hundreds of Chicago-area performers like Polner, who have found that playing to the small fry pays the rent. Most schools offer regular school assemblies, often with some educational subplot, that are typically paid for with funds raised by the PTA or Home-School Association.
The competition and the caliber of performers are so great that regular jobs are tough to get, including Polner’s gig with Historical Perspectives of Naperville.
Polner of Chicago says she went through 10 hours of auditions to acquire the part of Wilder, which she performs as a one-woman production several times a week at different schools.
One of her colleagues, who portrays Olympic athlete Wilma Rudolph, loves performing for children but realizes the school circuit has precious few talent agents lurking in the back rows.
“That has always been one of my concerns,” says actress Nicole Pillow. “I do all this work and hear great comments, but the people who could make a difference to my career don’t see it.”
School assembly programs have become bread-and-butter gigs for a wide-ranging assortment of talented performers. You have your Abraham Lincolns and Benjamin Franklins, of course, but you also have storytellers, jugglers, a professional rope jumper, folk singers, magicians, science shows, mobile exotic zoos, puppets, dancers and an eclectic assortment of educational performers who defy description.
Folk singer Lee Murdock of Kaneville turned to school assemblies, park districts and senior centers when the nightclub scene dried up for live performers about 10 years ago. School programs now account for about a third of his business, he says, while his other audiences have outgrown nightclubs and now find him in small auditoriums.
Like many successful performers on the school circuit, Murdock has both a mission and an angle. He hopes to teach children an appreciation of American history and folk music, but because there are plenty of people doing the same thing, his particular emphasis is on the Great Lakes and ship lore.
He was a natural for the school circuit, because he never sang popular music, even during his coffeehouse days.
“My audiences would want `Margaritaville,’ ” he recalls, “and I would sing a song from the Civil War. I developed a program of folk songs for elementary schools, and because I had a fascination with the Great Lakes I decided to focus on that and was pretty lucky there weren’t too many people working on Great Lakes music.”
Joan Schaeffer of Naperville had a background in teaching, sales and theater when she founded Historical Perspectives seven years ago. Her goals were to educate children about notable women while employing herself as an actress and script writer.
“I wanted to make a living in theater while being at home with our kids, who were quite young at the time,” she says. “This still enables me to go downtown and audition for commercials and industrial films when I have time.”
Historical Perspectives now performs 1,200 shows a school year in three metropolitan areas, including Minneapolis and Boston. At least one of the company’s performers has gone on to greater fame. Former Niles resident Carmella Mulvihill started in Chicago and moved to the Boston division a couple of years ago. She is appearing in the new movie “The Crucible” with Winona Ryder.
Historical Perspectives business has grown steadily, Schaeffer says, because “the Chicago area is just saturated with activities or programs for schools. It has gotten even more so in the past three or four years. The size of the city and the fact that people here value cultural assemblies and that PTAs actively raise funds for them are all factors. Even people from out of state come here (to perform) because it’s such a large market.”
The array of performers can be confusing for schools, which typically delegate their selection to a parent committee.
Sandy Pacyna, who is new to the volunteer job at Highlands School in Naperville, says she first finds out from the school what dates will work. Then she and the committee members sort through the pile of brochures and information about potential performances and give a tentative schedule to the assistant principal, who has final approval.
The goal is to bring in assembly shows that tie in with what children are studying, she says. During the school’s multicultural month, for example, the Home-School Association hires ethnic dancers. Before a Jump Rope for Heart fundraiser, the children saw a jump rope expert. Recently they heard a children’s author talk about writing and publishing.
Volunteer booking agents get a big help from a twice-annual extravaganza called O’Brien Showcase. The non-profit organization presents a trade show featuring live performances and booths that offer schools, libraries and park districts the chance to see what the shows would be like.
Of the approximately 125 performers who exhibit at the show, about 15 are selected to offer a seven-minute performance, says Diane Bolos, one of the volunteers who present the showcase. “They are all auditioned, juried and rotated from year to year,” she says. “We also look for the quality of the program and (determine whether) they are reliable. They all need letters of recommendation.”
Performance costs vary from a few hundred dollars per show to more than $800, with many performers keying their price to the number of children in the audience.
“We try to bring in programs that kids wouldn’t ordinarily get in school,” says Barb Bruckner, who has been coordinating assembly programs at Belle Aire School in Downers Grove for a couple of years.
Belle Aire children this year loved the loud explosions in “Close Encounters of the Chemical Kind” and were mesmerized by a dual synthesizer that created rhythmic sounds interspersed with information about Mozart. In May they’ll interact with Lights, Camera, Action, a group that brings a TV station to school and lets each grade level videotape a different segment.
“We like it when the kids get to do a little participating,” Bruckner says. “We want them to enjoy it, but what they are learning is more important. We try to stay away from magic shows and puppeteers and self-esteem stuff.”
Assemblies are a terrific learning tool, believes David Beard, principal of Reskin School in Glendale Heights. “If you think back to your own school days, you probably remember the assemblies. It helps the learning process. We try to offer one once a month, relating them to the curriculum as much as possible.”
Suburban children are fortunate to live in a mecca for performers such as Pillow, who has been acting professionally for three years. She moved to Chicago to study at Columbia College and because she believed the city offered more opportunities than her native Minnesota.
“When Historical Perspectives said they would cast me, it was like a gift from God,” Pillow says. “I have always loved kids, and when an opportunity came to motivate them through my talents as an actress, I couldn’t pass it up.”
A bonus: It’s during the daytime, when many struggling performers find themselves working as waitresses or messengers. Pillow also was recently in an ETA Arts Foundation of Chicago production called “The Trial of One, Short-sighted Black Woman vs. Mammy Louise and Safreeta Mae.”
“Not all actresses can say they sustain a daytime income through acting,” Pillow says. “But I also have to make an effort to do professional work outside of this show, to put myself in the mainstream of theater so people know I’m out there. One of my next major goals is to develop a career in film.”
Most of Historical Perspective’s actresses perform about 200 shows a year, according to director Ron Wachholtz of Naperville. “We give them about three days of work a week for us, which leaves them two days free to do industrials and commercials, and they are finished early enough in the afternoon to do shows at night if they choose.”
Performers like Polner and Pillow may dream of bigger things, but they may never find a more effusive audience than school children.
“If they like you, they really show it,” Pillow says. “They line up to give me hugs, they follow me down the hall, they wait for autographs. They don’t know to control their emotions, it just goes through their whole body. I get such a personal satisfaction from seeing their faces light up.”
