The Play

With Chalk, Letson has created a new genre of theatre he calls "The Poetical".  A Poetical works similar to a Musical, but instead of the dialogue leading into musical numbers, in a "Poetical", the characters perform poetry. These poems are a kin to the type of poetry one would see at a poetry slam, and give insight into the character’s inner conflicts.  Light instrumentation created by the characters or pre-recorded beats can be used to help maintain the rhythm of the poetry.

Written to be performed “bare-bones” or with a full set, Chalk is extremely malleable to the performance space. 

A Brief History

In the 2003-2004 school year, the Baltimore School of the Arts commissioned playwright/performance poet Al Letson to write a play for their Senior Acting Ensemble.  The play, Chalk, centers around a group of girls making the transition from Elementary to Middle School, as “relational aggression” manifests and begins to change the lives of the students of the school.  Chalk illustrates the cycle of aggression; how it trickles down from the world at large, to a small community and it’s children.

Chalk has been performed across the country by youth theatre groups, high schools, and community theaters. The Ophelia Project, an organization dedicated to helping girls channel anger into healthy directions, reviewed the play in their quarterly publication: “Letson has an extraordinary gift of painting a realistic picture of the inner-landscapes of 14-year-girls.”

Get in Line or get left behind.....

Chalk centers around childhood friends, Angie, Laura, and Lisa making the transition from Elementary to Middle School.  Their friendships begin to unravel as the pressure of trying to be apart of the in-crowd take their toll.  The brutal, but often unseen struggle of relational aggression, separates the haves and have-nots, leaving Lisa on the outside, and Angie torn between her friend, and Laura’s in-crowd.  Eventually, Angie succumbs to the desire to fit in leaving Lisa to fall between the cracks and disappear from the middle school’s social circle.  Meanwhile, in the world at large, war becomes eminent with Iraq, and Angie’s parents struggle to pay the bills.  Angie is enveloped into Laura’s clique, making uneasy truce with her own conscience, as she fights to avoid the same fate as Lisa.  Life at Claymoore Middle School goes by uneventfully until the new boy in school, falls for Angie, when Laura has crush on him, and everything starts to change.