How Life Imitates Art in Theatre

Benji Goldsmith, student at Hunter College High School and composer, introduces the Average Achievers Club, a musical he co-wrote with Jonathan Karpinos, which takes a look at the insane world of standardized testing in high schools.

The Average Achievers Club was musical that in September of 2007, Jonathan Carponnels, a Chicago bass player at that time, and me, myself, were commissioned to write for acting menato, a camp which both of us had work at before. Jonathan was teaching play writing and I was working there as a musical director and also going there as a camper. And we spend a good chunk at that time trying to figure out what to write about. We knew we were going to have a teenage cast. We knew the audience there was going to be mainly teenagers. So we knew we were going to be writing a show for teenagers to be performed by teenagers. And we really wanted to be true to both the issues today that are concerning teenagers and kind of the teenage experience. And so we spend a while kind of trying to figure out what to write about. At some point it was a this kind of, it was based on Kenny Lier and then we ended up settling on what was really original story and we realize that something that we felt was not really talked about enough was the whole standardized test system in America and how it’s really just a little crazy. How much pressure there is how much pressure is put on teenagers from their parents, from their school, from their teachers, from their college counselors to really excel in all areas and we really wanted to satirize that because it just seems like something that we could really easily identify what and right about. So what to show into the being is really truly a satire of the hyper competitive culture that standardize testing breeds in American high schools and at the same time though it’s also really celebration of the young energy that this standardize tests culture oppresses. And so in the show really all the adults are like insane, they’re just totally over the top. And you really kind of see the show from the kids’ point of view and they are really the grounded ones in the story. It’s really been an interesting experience for me I think because I myself of most junior in high school and I’ve had, I literally, a couple weekends after the workshop, went and took the SAT’s. It was really, it’s been a really interesting experience I think. in some ways its nice for me to just kind of use it as a form of releasing that energy and in other ways its really kind of a way for me to ground myself and really think about the whole process of applying to college and dealing with all this things as a whole and really evaluate it from my perspective. I do think satire is a really powerful tool of getting a message out, I think in our show it’s been something that we could really easily just kind of write about because there are some things that are really truly ridiculous and writing them, heightening that ridiculousness is really powerful I think. and there’s a song in the show called Sujet Alexis Oxana and Who, Where a, the main character of our story Lenny is taking the SAT actually and he’s reading a word problem where the character in the word problem, Sujet Alexis Oxana and Who, all just burst into life and he, they are just like taunting him, yeah there just this kind of like perfect people inside the SAT. And in the end Lenny spends the whole test struggling on that question and totally bumps it. I think, I think the show I mean I hope the show is going to have a long life here in New York. I think it’s really a topic that hasn’t been talked about a lot in theater and really hasn’t been talked about a lot in American culture, I think. It’s been something that people would have just kind of accepted it as fact and really never put the time to discuss it.