An Open Letter to the Bristol Warren Regional School District Committee

Note: I have sent this letter to each committee member's email as well as the emails of the superintendent, assistant superintendent, and principal. If you would like to reach out to them as well but are not sure where to find their contact information, I will be happy to help you out.

To the Bristol Warren School Committee,

My name is Peter Cunis and I am the artistic director of the Providence Improv Guild. It recently came to my attention that the school committee has proposed cutting the theater department at Mount Hope High School. While I have no formal affiliation with Mount Hope, I have witnessed how negative an effect this decision has had on former students and local performing artists. I would like to share with you my own experience with high school theater and how it has affected my entire life, leading directly to my position at PIG.

I went to high school at Plymouth Regional High School in New Hampshire. I entered my freshman year with very few social connections, as I was homeschooled through eighth grade. My initial experience with public schooling was frightening, alienating, and confusing. The only place where I felt safe was the theater department. It was a haven for kids like me who were socially anxious, athletically untalented, and struggling with depression and hopelessness. Where most of high school life felt like a constant gladiatorial combat with grades, self-image, and hope for the future at stake, theater grounded me in the present and gave me something to look forward to in the short term. I made most of my friends in theater; some of those friends are still my closest friends to this day.

I was not the only person who found theater to be a haven; almost every kid in the theater department was struggling to find social connection and discover something that they could bring themselves to really care about in school. The theater department was a safe place where those of us who were socially maladjusted would spend our lunch breaks, study halls, and sometimes afternoons. Our teacher, Sarah Bunkley, was a mentor figure and confidante for so many of us. She and her husband even went so far as to offer living space to theater kids with difficult home lives. Nobody, and I say this with confidence, nobody in my high school did as much real work for the betterment of students as Ms. Bunkley and her husband.

When I went to Providence College, I thought that I would be leaving theater behind, but I once again found myself becoming lonely, alienated, and frightened. Once again, the theater department became my home. I met my wife in the theater department at Providence College. I gained a deep love and appreciation for improv comedy through this department. I took a playwriting class with a brilliant teacher, Gregory Moss, that lead me to writing a play that was performed at the acclaimed Synetic Theater in Arlington, VA. This, in turn, lead to three more plays performed at Synetic Theater. I can now call myself a playwright, only because my high school and college treated my interest in theater like a legitimate academic pursuit.

After college, I once again was lonely, alienated, and frightened, but this time I knew my first course of action was to rejoin the theater world. And so, I started taking classes at Improv Boston, went to New York City for classes at The Magnet Theater, and eventually found my way back to Rhode Island and joined the Providence Improv Guild. Throughout my years at the Providence Improv Guild, I have met student after student and performer after performer who tell me that performing gives them something, gives them a reason to keep going, gives them joy and friendship. I fully believe, from decades of involvement in the performing arts, that theater saves lives. This is a point that I feel is of utmost importance for you to understand before you make your final vote: theater doesn’t just make kids feel good, it saves lives.

I understand that you might read this and your reaction may be, “Well, we still intend to keep theater clubs around,” but I must insist that this is not the same. A fully-funded theater program is one that is validated and recognized by the school; a club is something outside of the school, a sort of hobby that congregates in after hours. A fully-funded theater program takes the skills and social development that happens in theater and says, “Not only are these skills and developments valuable to our community, we believe so much in our students that we think they can take what they are learning in theater and use that for the rest of their lives.” Defunding the theater program tells your students, “Our priority is that you focus your energy on tests that will make our school look good, and by extension, us as the leaders of that school look good. Our priority is that you perform well in athletic programs whether you are athletically gifted or not. Our priority is not your natural talents, your interests, or your mental health. You are a tool to us, a means to drive our numbers up.” You fully embody the “banking model of education” described by Paolo Freire in The Pedagogy of the Oppressed.

Do you think nearly as many kids are going to have the courage and empowerment to pursue a hobby as they would to pursue a recognized course of study? Do you think students are going to develop a strong enough understanding of the performing arts to then pursue that study through college and beyond if that study is so undervalued by their school leaders that it is completely defunded? I want you to seriously ask yourselves, in your heart of hearts, what do I hope these kids study instead of theater? Calculus? Advanced chemistry? Nathaniel Hawthorne? Soccer? Other things they have no interest in and will never use in their entire lives, and that will more likely discourage them and make them consider dropping out entirely? Yes, these fields are important, and yes, they also must be fought for and made readily available, but to take a kid with a genuine, passionate interest in the performing arts and to tell them “No, you are not as valuable to us as those kids who can complete advanced equations or naturally gifted athletes” is to me, antithetical to the very purpose of schooling.

Members of the committee, I am a witness to hundreds of lives that have been given hope, passion, and meaning by the performing arts. I am also a witness to the thousands of audience members whose lives have been given joy and fulfillment by the performing arts. And it is on this second point that I want to make my final statement: anyone who has ever enjoyed a movie, a play, a recording of a musical, Hamilton, The Sound of Music, Shakespeare, opera, a television series, a game show, a stand-up comedian, a live storyteller, ballet, a choir, or any of thousands of types of performers owes that enjoyment in large part to the academic funding and validation of theater. If you cannot be compelled to fund a theater program for the benefit of the students, do it for the benefit of your own life.

In all sincerity, I thank you for reading this letter in full, and it is my greatest hope that you will reverse this decision.

Sincerely, Peter Cunis

Artistic Director of The Providence Improv Guild