Open Forum

One of the main goals for our Theatre Education Community is to help theatre students and professionals from all over connect and identify with each other in order to build resources and support the theatre education field. We shine a spotlight on a different member every other week by conducting a simple interview.

Our latest Spotlight Member is CJ Breland, theatre teacher and troupe director at Asheville High School in Asheville, North Carolina. As a past chapter director, CJ has a world of experience helping schools and teachers in her home state, so contributing to the beta test and launch of the Community was a natural fit. Since then, she’s been a regular participant, earning a silver ribbon for her sage advice and bright ideas.

Ginny: Why do you believe theatre is important?

CJ: As technology takes more and more of our time and concentration, I believe the need for theatre increases. We need the experience of sitting together, watching fellow human beings enact a human story, listening to that story together, developing empathy for characters, and investing in their future in concert with other audience members. We need communal laughter. We need communal tears. We need the recognition of each other’s humanity that theatre fosters.

In an educational setting, all of the performing arts can teach us about working together and the importance of individual excellence in a group endeavor. All performing arts teach about rigid deadlines. But theatre, I believe, has special qualities. No other art form is as reflective of the time and culture in which it was written and first performed. Producing a play requires tons of practical research, as well as creative collaboration sadly missing in most of our high school curricula. My favorite productions are the ones where the design elements are beautifully unified, yet so collaborative that we have trouble remembering who contributed what ideas. Most people not involved with theatre think of it as a place for actors to act, and that’s about all; but there are usually more students involved offstage than onstage, and all of them experience pride in the finished product.     

Ginny: What is the resource you most recommend to others in your profession?

CJ: I recommend that Theatre Arts teachers in my state join North Carolina Theatre Arts Educators. This is a professional learning community founded 20 years ago by a couple of teachers who felt a profound need for an organization by and for teachers of Theatre Arts. We have a Fall Sharing at which we teach workshops for each other on Saturday, with optional master classes on Friday; and Winter Focus, a weekend retreat where we concentrate on rejuvenating the artist within us by focus on one topic. I am a much better teacher because of NCTAE. And I encourage all my high school colleagues in NCTAE to charter ITS troupes, attend our state festival, and consider attending the International Thespian Festival.     

Ginny: What was the first role you ever played?

CJ: In junior high, a teacher asked me to play the woman who loans the necklace in a one-act adaptation of Guy de Maupassant’s The Necklace. I remember the thrill of being in front of an audience and of wearing a beautiful velvet dress the director bought in for me. 

Ginny: What inspired you to become a teacher?

CJ: My father taught business in college. In fact, my first home was in a boys’ dorm. I vividly remember watching my father study students’ papers, writing in the margins with a red colored pencil. Even as a child, I connected those marks to the warm, supportive relationship my father had with his students. I cannot ever remember wanting to be anything other than a teacher.

Ginny: What playwright would you love to have lunch with? Tell us a question you’d ask them.

CJ: I would have to go back in time, unfortunately, but I would love to have dinner with August Wilson. I would love to ask what music he listened to while writing Joe Turner’s Come and Gone. He said that listening to music from each decade was his only research for each play, and I’d like to ask about that as well, because his details about each decade are so spot on. 

Ginny: What is unique about your program?

CJ: One thing about our Asheville High School Theatre Program that is certainly unique in our area is our focus on student directing and playwriting. We produce a collection of Thespian-directed short plays each spring, and along with approving the submissions, buying scripts, and getting the rights, I function as a mentor and resource for the student directors. Over a decade ago, I was fortunate to receive multiple levels of training by Young Playwrights Inc. as a member of the North Carolina Theatre Arts Educators, and this gave me tools to empower students to engage with playwriting. The number of Thespians who have chosen to direct plays written by them or by fellow classmates has increased every year since. This past spring, all nine plays in our show were student written.      

Ginny: Everyone has at least one good theatre story. Tell us yours!

CJ: We had an old analog lighting board when I got to my current school in 2000. The manual didn’t help much, because the board seemed to have a mind of its own. It would occasionally shift all of the patches up by one number. Pleas for a new board fell on deaf ears, until our first performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, when the actors’ faces in about half the scenes were lit by green lights through scattered leaves gobos. The audience was confused, and the actors were devastated. I wrote a rather passionate letter about the frustration of working so hard on a production, only to be undermined by obsolete technology, and we got a new board the next semester.

Ginny: What is your proudest accomplishment?

CJ: I am very proud of the part I was able to play in revitalizing the North Carolina chapter and cultivating a working board. And I am humbled by the number of former students who have reached out to tell me that I had a positive effect on them.  But my proudest accomplishment has to be raising a terrific son, currently the assistant technical director in the School of Music, Theatre and Dance at Colorado State University. 

Ginny: Do you have any hobbies or interests outside of theatre?

CJ: I love to cook. I wish I had more time to garden, but rehearsal gives me very few daylight hours in my yard. Herbs and perennial flowers are about all I can manage, but I dearly love clipping herbs for cooking.

Ginny: If you could live anywhere in the world, where would you go and why?

CJ: I traveled to Ireland last summer, and I would definitely like to live there for a while. Why? The theatre, of course! I would love to immerse myself in the settings of some of my favorite Irish playwrights.  

If you enjoyed CJ’s interview as much as I did, add her as a contact in the Community.

Do you know someone who deserves a moment in the Spotlight? Tell me their name and why at gbutsch@schooltheatre.org. Want to read more Community Spotlights? You can find them here.