Review Fix chats with playwright Ronna Levy about the upcoming performance of her one-woman show, ‘This Gonna Be on the Test, Miss?’ at the Secret Theatre in Queens, New York on Oct. 30. In addition to discussing how the production has helped her grow as a person and performer, Levy discusses how she wants the audience to connect with the material and how important Community Colleges are to the future of America.
Review Fix: What makes this run special?
Ronna Levy: Well, I wouldn’t call this a run; it is just a single performance. However, what makes it special for me is the chance to get out in front of an audience and tell my story and for the lucky audience members to hear this story. Additionally, I get to perform a week before I leave for Baltimore for the Charm Fringe Festival. where I will have four performances.
Review Fix: What have you learned about yourself as a performer and writer through this performance?
Levy: I started to write about how I learned that I am a writer and I enjoy being in front of an audience, and I love how I have this outside life as a performer. But the truth is–I learned that I had an idea to mesh performance with writing and education– and I did it. If I want to do something, I can.
Review Fix: What are your long-term goals for this production?
Levy: I have a few ideas. One idea is that I’d like to take this show to various education conferences, maybe colleges, and fringe festivals throughout the country. The other idea is to write a book that combines this script, discussions and descriptions of other solo shows about education, a contextual piece about my process interspersed with scholarship on the community college, its population, its problems and successes.
Review Fix: How do you want it to affect people?
Levy: I want people, who think of college as a four-year institution with prepared students who will graduate and get jobs, to become cognizant of this invisible and marginalized population who cannot attend a four year institution right out of high school. I don’t necessarily have a “call to action” like write your senators or give money to scholarship funds. Rather I simply want the mainstream society to understand that my students, who are underprepared, socioeconomically disadvantaged, and underrepresented want what they want and what their children want– an education, a stable future, and to be productive citizens.
Review Fix: Bottom line, why should someone check it out?
Levy: It’s funny, touching, refreshing, a different take on education. It’s certainly not your Hollywood, teacher-as-savior- happy-ending. This show is reality.
Review Fix: What’s next?
Levy: I will be performing in the Charm City Fringe in Baltimore, November 11-15 and then I am going to Los Angeles in January (where teaching changed my life) for a performance in the Solofest at the Whitefire Theater. And then who knows.
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