Bring Our Kids to the Arts

Gulfshore Life's Community Advisory Board is made up of opinion leaders from all over Southwest Florida. We've invited them to write on local issues they're most passionate about, with the hope that you will be moved to action, reflection, recognition-or even disagreement.

This month's author is Robert Cacioppo. A Lee County resident for 20 years, Cacioppo is the founder and producing artistic director for the Florida Repertory Theatre, a professional theater company based at the historic Arcade Theatre in downtown Fort Myers. The company has numerous educational and outreach programs for children.

Undeniably, one of the great things in life is the arts. I'm 48 years old, and I think a lot of us who are my age or older were lucky enough to grow up with arts in the schools. I'm someone who comes from a real working-class background, but I remember being one of 400 kids in an auditorium at P.S. 81 in Brooklyn singing Oklahoma and the Great American Songbook. Growing up, I remember watching New York City Opera stage a production of Madame Butterfly at my junior high school, No. 193. That stays with me to this day: seeing Madame Butterfly, the geishas and the lieutenant in his crisp white uniform. Joe Papp [founder of New York's Shakespeare in the Park] brought productions from his theater into the schools. I was lucky enough to see excerpts from his Taming of the Shrew at Grover Cleveland High School in Queens.

A lot of that died out with funding cuts in the early 1980s. Now you can't even get busing to bring kids to the theater. In 1996 and 1997, when we produced Twelfth Night and Comedy of Errors at the Pirate Playhouse on Sanibel, we brought in more than 6,000 high school students to see Shakespeare. Most of them were seeing their first professional play. This season, when we did To Kill a Mockingbird, we brought in 1,000 middle- and high-school students. We had to subsidize 70 percent of the students' cost for attending the production, because the money wasn't there for most of these schools (and others couldn't afford it at all).

It's important for communities and arts programs to reach out and nurture the young people in our community. It's at that young age that we create a love of art or music or theater. One of the things that Americans do better than anyone else in the world is the popular song: Cole Porter, Ira Gershwin, Irving Berlin. Kids are growing up not knowing this incredible huge heritage. Think of how much we can learn from Shakespeare about world history, about human nature, about life and love.

It isn't just about seeing a piece of entertainment. If we don't want history to repeat itself, we have to understand it. To Kill a Mockingbird, for example, brings up issues that have to do with our town and our world. It wasn't that long ago-in the early part of the 20th century-that a black man was lynched from the Banyan tree in downtown Fort Myers. In 1997, when I first staged the play, it was partly in response to a study that said that Fort Myers was the most segregated city in the nation. These are still incredibly segregated communities. Bringing in kids to see the play is a way of opening up a dialogue about those things.

It's been proven that students who have arts in their lives score better on both math and reading tests. My grandparents were immigrants, and my father, the last of 13 children, didn't finish high school, because when his father died he had to support his mother. My mother didn't go to college and neither did my brother or sister. But I had that connection with art, and I think that's why I did well in school and went on to higher education.

Sometimes it's just one teacher who passes you the paintbrush, who has you bang on the drum. And although art is a great joy, sometimes you can't acquire the taste for it until you have some language given to you to understand it. You need a nomenclature. Think of Peter and the Wolf, one of the great symphonic pieces made for children. Once someone says, "The bassoon is the grandfather, this instrument is the boy, this instrument is the bird," then you can appreciate it because you know what you're listening for.

The great communities of the world, big and small-New York, Paris or Louisville, Ky.-are communities where the arts are thriving. We have to decide if we are going to be a great community. Being an optimist, I do feel very excited about how the arts have grown in this community between 1986 and 2006. What kind of community are we going to be in 2026?

Institutions like the Philharmonic and Florida Rep will only continue to thrive if the young people are participating. I think we have a better chance of getting a 10- or 15-year-old excited about the arts than we have with a 30-year-old. We may have lost the 30-year-old, but I think we can still have the next generation.

If the arts are important to you, mentor a child. Call Florida Rep and sponsor a kid for summer theater camp. Call the Philharmonic and ask what you can do. If you love the symphony, take your grandchild, or your neighbor's grandchild, to the symphony. If you love the visual arts, take a child to Eckert Fine Art or to the Naples Museum of Art. Share your own love of the arts. Because it's not happening in the schools as it once was.

-Robert Cacioppo