Morning Bishop Theatre Playhouse goes beyond the stage to teach students
CHICAGO (CBS) -- For the better part of 40 years, a community theater in Gary, Indiana, has been transforming the lives of young people through art.
CBS 2's Jackie Kostek has more on how the leader is now expanding the theater's footprint across the country and around the world.
The first thing to understand about the Morning Bishop Theatre Playhouse is that it is so much more than a community theater.
They typically produce about three plays a year, many of them written by the kids involved, but they also have a language program that led several teenagers on a trip to Europe last year, as well as a summer camp this year.
At the Morning Bishop Theatre Playhouse, theater is the foundation for empowerment.
"We are a theater of purpose," executive director McKenya Dilworth Smith said. "Theater is the perfect culmination or marriage of all the different disciplines. So, if you're good with your hands, you can help us with scenery. If you can draw, you can help us with costume design and also scenery. If you're more of an expressive extrovert, then of course you're acting, you're going to be on stage."
While producing plays has been at the core of the playhouse's work since 1984, Dilworth Smith said the arts are a springboard to introduce young people to other opportunities and other ways of thinking.
"I learned how to communicate and work with others, I can say that, and it made me more comfortable opening up," said 17-year-old AnQuan West.
"The arts are so unassuming and they allow people to bring down their barriers, or whatever they have and we introduce them to new things like kayaking, hiking, paddleboarding," Dilworth Smith said.
"I was looking at those horses. I was like, you know, it was really fun. It was actually really fun," said 16-year-old Gavin Spencer.
Twelve-year-old Mariah Smith said her favorite thing at the summer camp was kayaking.
"That was very scary for me at first, but when I got into the water, I was like, 'This is easy. I could do this,'" she said.
While it's hard to put your finger on just one why for a program chock full of purpose, fostering lightbulbs moments like that might be it.
"I like to push them in the direction of overcoming their fear, because if you start now to succumb to your fear, your life is going to be very limited," Dilworth Smith said.
Maybe the best example of living life without limits is Dilworth Smith herself, who has expanded what her mother, Morning Bishop, started. Last year, she helped raise more than $12,000 to bring four students on a trip to Germany and France. This year, the theater partnered with Coppin State University on a scholarship program that will help students attend the historically Black university.
"I believe my mother's doing her dance in heaven. To actually see young people go beyond the city of Gary, and now go to Baltimore, Maryland, carrying the theater there; go to Germany, Holland, France, and now Italy. It's my mother's dream realized," she said.