Inside "4th Graders"

It isn’t every day in the world of theater that juice boxes get thrown around as metaphors for life. Productions centering around the suicides of school-aged children don’t usually incite lighthearted laughter from audiences. Plays rarely aspire to the realm of unadulterated metatheatre that consists of adult actors portraying elementary school children portraying themselves in another play. Condensing all of these unconventionalities into one show certainly makes “The 4th Graders Present an Unnamed Love-Suicide,” which played at Zero Church Street Theater through Saturday, a theatrical eccentric. Such was the challenge that director Marcus Stern, the actors, and the production team of the ART/ MXAT Institute for Advanced Theater Training undertook in staging “4th Graders”: to develop the show in a way that did justice to the plurality of themes and staging demands.

Written by Sean Graney, a Radcliffe fellow and founding director of The Hypocrites Theater Company in Chicago, “4th Graders” takes its form as a suicide note translated into a theatrical production. It centers around a group of fourth graders presenting a play written by their classmate Johnny before he committed suicide. Their performance represents the chain of events that caused Johnny to kill himself, with many of the fourth graders characters portraying themselves in Johnny’s play.

Contrary to the morbidity of its title, “4th Graders” has more than its fair share of comedic moments. Purposeful malapropisms and comic, childish dialogue abound and flow throughout the play, taking the edge off of its more somber subject matter. It’s a very striking juxtaposition at times that requires both subtlety in acting and purpose in direction. It’s also one of the reasons Stern selected this play to be performed by his second-year graduate students.

“[‘4th Graders’] reflects a general aesthetic I have which is a combination of pushed realism, a little bit of surrealism, and some goofier sillier humor,” Stern says. “I tend to be drawn to things that are both funny, silly, and heartbreaking simultaneously.” The plurality of the play never felt unnatural or contrived, as evidenced by the play’s quick transition from heartwarming moments of childish playfulness to the suicide of the closing scene.

Stern gives all the praise on this front to the playwright. “The balance of charm and heartbreak is sculpted into the text in such a strong and smart way,” Stern says. “It’s a wonderful combination of great sophistication and seemingly surface simplicity.”

The unique nature of “4th Graders” called for many important staging and production decisions. Stern and the ART team ultimately decided on an intimate, black box-esque setting that placed the audience close to the action of the play. Scenic director Madie Hays crafted a bare and minimalist school hallway saturated with bright colors that established the play’s feeling of youthfulness. Meanwhile, transient dream-like sequences of soft lights and ethereal live vocal music by singer Marissa Stewart established Stern’s vision of fleeting surrealism. Though the audience was so close to the production, one of the major challenges of the process was deciding just how much the characters were to directly engage them. In this aspect, Stern says, having the playwright involved in the process was an invaluable asset. Stern says that Graney suggested a more presentational feel to communicate the self-conscious nature of 10-year-olds.

The character of Johnny (Dereks Thomas), despite being a grown man pretending to be a child, was so uncannily and inexplicably familiar that when he complained of being let down by the quality of the ever-present juice box from which he’s sipping, it is evident that he’s bemoaning the difficulties of something more sophisticated. This inexplicable connection to such a purposefully awkward character—after all, it is an adult portraying a nine-year-old—is not easily established. But Stern and his production team accepted this challenge; through a genuine reproduction of what was supposed to be a play written by children, they managed to convey a deep message while maintaining the emotion of confused and innocent children.

“I want the takeaway to be that we are all struggling…. Ideally we will learn to recognize when we’re cruel so we can continue to work on ourselves so that we are kinder both to ourselves and to others,” Stern says. It’s an ambitious goal, but one well within the production’s reach. “4th Graders” doubtlessly incited a plethora of different reactions to the content of the show, but one thing is for sure—we will never think of juice boxes the way same again.