Fourth Grade Play 2025
Class of 2030 explored blind and deaf artists’ worlds through two plays.
The fourth graders captivated the audience with their thought-provoking performances that examined human communication and expression across different sensory disabilities. 4A told of visual artist, performer, and advocate Christine Sun Kim and musician Evelyn Glennie, and their relationships to sound as deaf artists. 4B honored Burke’s own alum, M. Leona Godin ’86, who developed a progressive eye disease when she was in fourth grade, and is now a blind performance artist, disability advocate, professor, and published author.
Fourth graders have been preparing for the plays since September with theater teacher Ms. Larsen, from researching deaf and blind histories and cultures in the library and exploring the senses, to examining how humans learn to communicate with each other and investigating language and words that are not spoken or written down. Ms. Larsen, who brings a background in devising, movement direction, and new play development to the drama classroom, helped both classes write and develop their plays and scripts.
Lower School Music Specialist Ms. Mandelstein was heavily involved, bringing her expertise as a musician and storyteller to explore sound as vibration and to add musical instrumentation, songs, and sound effects. This was key to bringing the plays to life, enhancing the exploration of sound as vibration and the idea that there is no wrong way to experience it. Her work was especially stunning with 4A, with students performing on marimbas to bring the world and work of percussionist Evelyn Glennie to life on stage. Sound was also explored as both character, emotion, and place, adding to the immersive sensory experience and exploration of how to tell a story if we are not only favoring sight or hearing.
Ms. Herman, Lower School Art Specialist, had the fourth-grade students create internal and external landscapes. These were used as projections throughout the plays to consider if we can ever truly understand what is happening inside another person. No matter how we communicate or how hard we try… a person’s inner world will always be deep and somewhat of a mystery.
With themes of power, access, disability, and language across both plays, the Class of 2030 showed that communication, art, and language transcend writings on a page and even the spoken word!
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