Money talks, rockets launch in Highland Community School’s ‘A Very Special Visit’

More than two dozen 4th, 5th, and 6th graders dash around a dimly lit gymnasium. Discussions of money and morality are punctuated by the sounds of fire alarms and mid-period Styx. The richest person in the world plots their revenge. An angry mob cheers as a teacher is sent hurtling into space via a wooden rocket. There’s a fart joke.

No, it’s not the high/lowlights of yesterday’s news. It’s A Very Special Visit, the latest production from Milwaukee’s premier avant-garde elementary school theater troupe, the Highland Community Players.

“WARNING,” the play’s program reads. “The performance will occasionally have flashing lights, along with loud music and sound effects. Those with phobias of rats, lumberjacks, and being sent into space to the music of early ’90s Styx are advised to take special precautions.”

The ever-changing Players are the celebrated project of Highland Community School‘s Performing Arts Director Barry Weber. Under Weber’s 17-year authorship and direction, the Players have tackled it all: original and challenging plays inspired by David Lynch and Jim Jarmusch films, plays inspired by ’80s Nintendo games and ’90s Nickelodeon game shows, and plays concerned with groupthink and co-opted activism. It’s all done with a touch appropriate for the grade-school set: fun, light, and full of goofball humor.

“I wish I could see more ‘theatre of the absurd’ here in Milwaukee,” Weber says. “I would love to see more Ionesco or Beckett. My contribution, if you will, is to increase the diversity of the Milwaukee theater scene starting with its kiddos.”

This year’s production is an absurdist doozy: a kid-friendly riff on the 1956 pitch-black tragedy/comedy The Visit, by Swiss dramatist Friedrich Dürrenmatt. And thanks to overwhelming student interest, Weber is staging the production with two separate casts. That’s a lot of 4th, 5th, and 6th graders.

“It’s a marathon, not a sprint,” Weber laughs between dress rehearsals on a recent Sunday afternoon.

Dürrenmatt’s The Visit tells the story of a billionaire who returns to her crumbling hometown of Güllen (“a name evoking ‘liquid manure’ in German,” Wikipedia informs). She offers to use her wealth to revitalize the town, but there’s a catch: in exchange for her largesse, the townspeople must kill the man who, years ago, got her pregnant and abandoned her. At first, the townspeople are aghast—by play’s end, they’re accepting the money and happily ending the man’s life. (A 1964 film version with Ingrid Bergman and Anthony Quinn somewhat softens the bleak ending.)

“It’s always been one of my favorite plays,” Weber says. “I’ve actually never seen it live, but I’ve read it and dreamed of a way I could introduce it to a younger audience in a way that is hopefully respectful to their age level and intelligence, but that still explores the same kind of themes.”

In Weber’s version, the billionaire woman is the “richest person on Earth,” Cedric Shipp. The liquid manure-evoking town of Güllen is Shipp’s old grade school, Stench Elementary. And Shipp’s dark condition for their financial assistance is that a former teacher who falsely accused them of theft, Mr. Fink, be launched into space in one of Shipp’s own rockets.

Weber says that “a couple of parents have told me they were rather shocked by how apt and prescient the play is,” but insists he wasn’t thinking much about current events while writing it. He defers to the wishes of Dürrenmatt himself.

“Dürrenmatt says in the afterword of his script that actors and directors should simply put on his piece, and that it should not be symbolic of anything,” Weber says. “It’s a dark comedy, and he says it will suffer with heavy-handed seriousness. It should be played with a sense of levity.”

That sense of levity comes through in both Weber’s clever tweaks and the students’ enthusiastic performances. Stench Elementary is populated by frazzled and underfunded teachers. (“Allow me to unveil this very special banner that our students have hastily created for you! We used only our least broken crayons!”) Pop stars and YouTube creators are paraded before Shipp as potential BFFs. (“Let’s make a video where you taste test some Korean sodas!”) At one point, Shipp’s pet rat gets loose in the fictional school; in the real school, young actors clearly have a blast running through scenes with a rubber rat tied to their ankles.

“It’s really hard for me to not break out laughing for a lot of the lines,” says 6th grader Pipp Goelzer-Holochwost, who plays the beleaguered Mr. Fink in the Group A cast. “But being able to see everyone’s progression through all the practices has been great.”

“I play a pop star and a bodyguard,” says 4th grader Aden Taper, making his Players debut. “It’s been easy for me. I know my words and stuff like that, and I just believe in myself.”

Fifth grader Mabel Reyes plays dual roles, too: a forensics champion and a reporter. “I like the ending when the check comes down,” she says. “And the rocket ship scene.” (The check-dropping finale is scored to “Also Sprach Zarathustra,” of course.)

The kid-power energy of the cast extends to the all-student backstage crew as well. The actors aren’t the only ones dashing around Highland’s gymnasium-turned-theater.

“My favorite thing about doing crew is that you don’t have to remember any lines, yet you still have to remember when to give actors props or turn on the lights,” says 4th grader Hannah Siettmann, who’s in charge of the lighting.

Sixth grader Haleigh Walker is a former crew member making the jump to cast member with A Very Special Visit. “I feel like there’s a lot of commitment for both,” she says. “We had a day to learn everything for run crew, rather than rehearsing for eight weeks.”

As is always the case with Highland productions, it’s great fun to watch young actors relish their roles. A particular standout in the Group A cast is 6th grader Elijah Spangler. Spangler’s quiet and mysteriously accented Cedric Shipp is surprisingly menacing, played more like a despotic Thurston Howell III than a basic-troll Elon Musk.

“My favorite part is that in real life me and Pipp are friends, but in the play we have to be enemies,” Spangler says. “That’s been really fun to do.”

Unfortunately, as a 6th grader, Spangler’s time with the Players is coming to an end. “I’m just really sad because I really love doing these plays,” he says. “I wish I could still do them after this.”

But Spangler’s wish isn’t so far-fetched. Assisting Weber in this year’s production is Christian Williams, a former Highland actor turned current Highland teacher’s assistant. Williams was in Weber’s very first play back in 2009.

“I went to Highland for most of my life,” Williams says. “I remember when I graduated from 8th grade I swore up and down that I wouldn’t come back. And now look at me. When I was 21 I came back working here and I was like, oh, it’s actually nice to be back!”

As for the plays, Williams has enjoyed watching the students gain confidence throughout rehearsals. “We’ve been rehearsing for about two months now, and you could tell how timid they were when they were starting off. They weren’t exactly comfortable being in character,” he says. “But compared to where they are now, it’s like night and day. It’s like I’m watching a professional play.”

Weber, too, strives to put on a professional production—a production full of complex themes and weighty subject matters—while still keeping things loose and appropriately goofy. And with two casts this year, he’s doing it twice.

“Is it twice the work? Yes,” Weber laughs. “But it’s valuable work. What would the other option be? This is what I do and what we do, and this is what these kids deserve. They’re looking for a commitment. I can’t expect commitment from them and their families if I can’t give it myself.”

The public is invited to see A Very Special Visit at Highland Community School on Wednesday, March 5 at 6:30 p.m. (Group A), and Friday, March 7 at 6:30 p.m. (Group B). Admission is pay-what-you-can.

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