Drama

by Raina Telgemeier
Scholastic 2012

Romance and friendships are tried and tested during the production of a middle grade play where everything is one giant emotional... drama.

Callie is crushing on Greg, and after he breaks up with his girlfriend Bonnie it looks like she might get a chance at him, but after one sweet kiss it goes south when Bonnie and Greg reunite. Good thing there's the upcoming play production to distract Callie from her short-lived non-romance. Better, the play is a Southern love story and Callie is chock full of enough ideas as part of the stage crew to put Greg quickly out-of-mind.

While posting the announcement for auditions Callie meets brothers Jesse and Justin who have their own interests in the play and in short order they all become close friends. Things start to get messy when Bonnie tries out and gets the lead in the play opposite heartthrob West and they start dating. No, things get messy when Callie starts falling for Jesse who has his own heart set on... West? And after the Spring formal, when Greg realizes he's been a bonehead by letting Callie go will she forgive the way he's treated her in the past and consent to be his new girlfriend?

So much middle school drama!

There's a lot of shifting alliances and subtle game-playing that makes Drama feel natural, warm, and authentic to the middle school experience but at the same time Callie ends right where she started, without a love to call her own, without the one thing she had been wanting all along. Has she grown because of her experiences working on the play? Certainly, and she's perhaps learned a thing or two about the heartbreak of choosing the "wrong" guy more than once. But the story ends with Callie and her extended stage crew friends toasting their triumph and making plans for next year's play. She's come full circle but she's right back where she started and it feels extremely anticlimactic.

I had this same sense after finishing Telgemeier previous graphic novel Smile, this sense of a time captured in amber but frozen in a way that left it life-like and lifeless at the same time. Both books read more like static snapshots in a private photo album rather than narratives full of characters who experience growth. Both books ring true because they are true-to-life, but in the same way that a diary can be a true record of events without a real or strong narrative through line. You can follow all the character's emotional upheavals, see everyone interact, get come closure on all the open issues, and still not feel like anyone's really changed.

Unless I've misunderstood and the one true love of Callie's life is the theatre, in which case the story has a bit of an "and then I woke up" feel to it. But I don't think that's was the intention. The thing is, there are plenty of examples of this kind of backstage mixed-up romance, and they tend to be MGM musicals from the Freed unit back in the 1940s and 50s. The "let's put on a show in the backyard" Andy Hardy movies with Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney are cut from this cloth, as is another Judy Garland vehicle, Summer Stock. But these films knew the audience was there for the singing and dancing and didn't hold out for great character revelations. Perhaps that's what felt missing to me, that the graphic novel with a backstage setting didn't have enough singing or dancing? Yes, that's ridiculous of me, but at the same time it makes sense; at least in the musicals there is a sense of emotion conveyed in the song and dance portions.


Among middle grade graphic novels I think there is a lot of great opportunity for realistic contemporary stories like Drama, but I think I'd prefer the ones aimed at a girl audience not focus on romance. That's just a preference, not a scathing indictment.

How long, I wonder, before a true graphic novel wins a Newbery? Or is that just out of the question?

Poetry Friday: There's a little ambiguity over there among the bluebells

and other theater poems
by Ruth Krauss
Something Else Press 1968

First you put an image in your head of Ruth Krauss, author of children's classics The Carrot Seed and Open House for Butterflies. Now you paint a picture in your mind of the late 1960's with hippies performing experimental theatre. Superimpose those two images and you get this odd collection of poetic playlets.

Clearly some of these are merely poems that play with the mind's abilities to imagine their execution on the stage but if the jacket copy is to be believed some of them were actually performed. Some of the work in this collection eventually made it out in other "mainstream" collections but I treasure stumbling on this for-a-quarter-at-a-library-sale score (library sales are made of awesome!) and it's always good for a quick cheering-up, especially when I didn't realize I needed cheering up.

There's a little ambiguity over there
among the bluebells

ONE:
What a poet wants is a lake in the middle
of his sentence
(a lake appears)

TWO:
yes and a valid pumpkin
(a pumpkin appears)

THREE:
and you should slice up language like a
meatcutter abba dabba dabba dabba yack
(sliced up language appears)

FOUR:
It's fine we have inhibitions
otherwise we'd all be dead
(all drop dead)

FIVE:
or flat on our backs
(all roll over onto backs)

SIX:
yes and everyone on rollerskates in bed
(everyone on rollerskates in bed appears)

SEVEN
and a delayed verb

EIGHT:
and an old upright piano
(an old upright piano appears)

(all bow together to the audience and then to each other)

NINE:
goes to the piano and begins to play
(everyone dances)

It's funny what context can do. With only the slightest of changes and a few more "acts" this could easily play out as a picture book text, or as-is in one of her collections of smaller poetic musings with tiny spot illustrations by Sendak. But on a stage in front of adults, well, things look a little different. What makes a pumpkin valid, and is it a real piano that appears or an actor representing a piano? Conceptual theatre indeed.

Bonus time!

I'm including another poem from the collection that speaks directly to the combination of children's literature and theatre.

Winnie-The-Pooh and William Shakespeare

Winnie: How sweet to be a cloud

WS: when daisies pied and violets

Winnie: floating in the blue

WS: and lady-smocks all silver-white
and cuckoo-buds of yellow hue

Winnie: Iniquum fatum fatu

WS: Cuckoo cuckoo cuckoo

Winnie: every little cloud
always sings aloud
it makes him very proud

WS: on every tree for thus sings he

Winnie: Winnie Ille Pu
Winnie Ille Pu

Together: Ecce Pu Ecce Pu
it makes him very proud
cuckoo cuckoo cuckoo
to paint the meadows with delight
to be a little cloud

Ah, the Bear and the Bard.