NPR-Style Audio Story

[NAT 1: <<Actors singing backstage for vocal warmups>>]
Intro: In the backstage of Theatre Memphis, several actors prepare their voices by singing alongside each other. Many of these actors found themselves in the Theatre world through the virtue of a strong theatre program at their school, but not everyone has that opportunity to see the Theatre world from that point of view.

[VO1] Becky Caspersen, the director of stage management, outreach, and volunteer management at Theatre Memphis has found herself trying to address that problem. (0:21 – 0:40)

[ACT 1]: The first time that I was backstage, and I realized that everyone looked like me. It was the first time that everyone backstage looked- it was the first time, Memphis is a very diverse city and so why does everybody backstage look like me? So, I started looking into what was going on in the community here. It became very evident very clear that most of us fell into theatre, specifically backstage theatre, had a big high school theatre facility if not a big thriving theatre department. What you have are a lot of private schools and municipal schools that have really great
programs and so their kids end up going into technical theatre and the underserved schools in the Memphis Shelby County Schools have such a dearth, some schools have everything, and some schools have nothing. (0:41 -1:18)

[VO2]: When Caspersen taught at Evangelical Christian School, or ECS for short, she received nearly $40,000 for each production. At a nearby school, East High, they received only $1000 in production.
It was at this time that Caspersen started to create the curriculum for her Tech Academy. (1:19 –1:35)

[ACT 2]: I would come in and teach them everything about lighting, DMX, LED, color mixing, how to hang the lights, how to circuit the lights, how to patch the board, and then how to program the board and leave the lights with them for a couple weeks after they did their show and show them how to strike their show and put it all away. (1:35- 1:52)

[VO3]: While expecting a small group at first, at the end of the first enrollment period, eighty nine children enrolled for the academic year, which consists of 12 to 16 workshops. (1:53 – 2:01)

[ACT 3]: Combined last year, our tech academy volunteered 5623 hours (2:02 – 2:06)

[VO4]: On October 23rd, the Tech Academy opens their doors up for students once again for a
workshop on Tools. [02:07-2:12]