Mike’s hair is slick and spiked. He slides out of his front-row seat and sits cross-legged on the floor, nearly touching the stage. The house lights go out and footsteps cross the floorboards. Then the floodlights come on, glaring. After the first few raucous lines of the play, Mike quietly slips back into his seat in the row he shares with five other Southeast Asian teenagers.
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Their teacher, Janice Finney, had worried about bringing them. Senn’s Southeast Asian Satellite School in Uptown–for high school students having trouble in the regular schools–has only been open a month. Most of the 38 students have been in this country five years or less, and some have only just arrived. Wars burned up their childhoods, and few of them had much schooling before they came to the U.S. Some of those at the new school dropped out of other schools, some were kicked out. Some already have probation officers. Attention spans are short, and the classes have been hard to control. A quarter of the students often disappear long before a day is over.
At intermission they hurry into the lobby and light up cigarettes. Finney follows them out and asks whether they like the play. They nod and smile, and then laugh as they repeat some of the racier lines and gestures. They are all back in their seats before the second act begins.
Kim has been picking at a piece of glow-in-the-dark tape that’s stapled to a step in the aisle. He tears off a piece and holds it cupped in his hands so he can see its light. Suddenly he jumps up and asks about the bits of tape on various props. One of the actors shows how the tape lets him cross the stage in the dark without tripping. Kim asks excitedly whether he can have a piece of the tape. The actor pulls his head back and then laughs. “Sure,” he says, shrugging his shoulders. All six students turn and almost run toward the lobby, where someone cuts each of them a three-inch strip of tape.
