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The Jelly Bean Theater Company,
which recently performed at Lindenhurst High School,
has a metaphoric and meaningful name.
According to its founder, Bertram A. Holmes, a Hauppauge resident, who was originally an entertainer but went on to spend most of his 30-year career advocating human rights,his nonprofit troupe’s name reflects its message.
Holmes often introduces his school-age audiences to what they’re about to see by telling them, as they all know, that jelly beans come in many different colors. “They’re all various shapes, sizes and flavors,” he adds. Then Holmes emphasizes at the conclusion: “Yes, let’s relate this to humans like jelly beans, we’re all different colors, sizes, shapes, and we each have unique personalities.”
The children they are treated to a production tailored for their age group featuring a diverse troupe of performers, several in their teens, who often improvise on the stage and contribute material for the show. Using skits and vignettes, they dramatize situations thatare entertaining but pointed, underscoring cultural awarenessand aiming at the need for better understanding, racial harmony and sensitivity.The original sketches also touch on issues of bias, hate crime and school violence. Question-and-answer sessions follow the presentation if time permits.
Of the four presentations available from the theater company, Lindenhurst audiences of ninth-through 12th-graders saw the one that offers the most mature outlook.The school hosted five performances over a two-day period, reaching about 2,000 students.
Peer leadership and health teacher E.A. “Sam” Moxon, who arranged for the shows, said that starting with ninth-grade classes, “we will do follow-up exercises designed to fostersensitivity and diversity and equality.” Moxon, a Lindenhurst teacher for 31 years, added that as part of their classwork, her students are given a questionnaire on their feelings and experiences, if any, with issues of bias and trust.
Daniel Giordano, principal of the high school, said he approved bringing in the Jelly Bean troupe because he received “some very good recommendations.” He said in conjunction, social studies classes have been working with World of Difference, an organization that provides three-day clinics “on how we all live together and blend multicultural differences.” Holmes, who is now in his 60s, began his career as a child actor on radio dramas and eventually appeared in Broadway shows. Among them was an all African-American adaptation of Shakespeare’s “Macbeth”, directed by Orson Welles in the early 1940s. Holmes played Macduff as a child. Later, he became a human-rights activist and formed the Long Island Black American Day Committee. In the late 1980s, he chaired the Suffolk Regional Human Rights Advisory Council of the New York State Division of Human Rights and served former Gov. Mario Cuomo’s advisory board. Holmes sums up his theater company’s goal in a letter to schools dealing with the possibility of campus threats.“The epidemic of violence is matched only by the epidemic of bias and recent incidents show that the two are intrinsically intertwined,” he wrote. “Our mission is clear: Stop the hate, stop the violence.”
What they saw seemed to elicit favorable responses from students. “The show was true because it showed how people act around other people,” William Connor, 15, said, “and how problems are resolved without violence.” Katarzyna Zielinska, 16, noted that she felt the presentation reflected people’s lives. “I think they should respect all people the same way,” the 10th-grader said, “regardless of what color and where you are from.” Kevin Enzman, 14, a ninth-grader, echoed her, saying the sketches depicted real life, “because people stereotype people before they even know them and judge them just because of their background.”
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