Middle-School Cruelty

New play by JET/YES troupe comes uncomfortably close to reality.

Detroit, which had presented a grant to
JET to develop and produce the show.
"We got some really good feedback,"
said Helen Katz, the foundation's direc-
elcome to middle school,
tor.
where the intrigues of the
"We're all very proud of the fact that
popular girls make super-
the Jewish Women's Foundation under-
power negotiations look
like a game of Candyland.
wrote this project. There wasn't a word
written when we made the grant. We are
In Maddee Sommers' one-act play,
Mean Girls, four young women insult,
so happy with what they came up with.*
ostracize and play cruel tricks on one
When it came time for the talk-back
after the show, most Hillel middle-
another. The play's cold and brutal, and
the sixth- through eighth-grade girls in
schoolers denied that cliques were a
the audience at Hillel Day School of
problem. "I thought it was exaggerated,"
said one audience member. "Girls do
Metropolitan Detroit couldn't tear their
mean things, but not that mean."
eyes away from the stage.
Mean Girls is the newest offering of
Another girl said, "I have a friend from
first grade. She told me about something
the Jewish Ensemble of Metropolitan
Detroit's Dorfman Family Youth Theatre that happened to her at her camp. She
JET/YES program. These
never went back"
A girl from the back
three one-act plays, available
row said that, at Hillel,
to public and private schools,
"we're very sheltered."
feature the same professional
"So it's a lot more like-
acting, staging and direction
ly to happen in a public
as the troupe's performances
school," she said.
aimed at adults.
The Jan. 23 performance at
Playwright Sommers,
who lives in West
Hillel was the second preview
of the play, intended to show
Bloomfield, said books
girls in fourth through ninth
such as Rosalind
grade that cliques exist in all
Wiseman's Queen Bees
schools and they are not alone.
and Wannabes and Rachel
Among the audience mem-
Simmons' Odd Girl Odd
bers were several trustees of
had verified her impres-
the Jewish Women's
sions of middle school
Maddee S ommers
Foundation of Metropolitan
and its cliques.

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"There's always the formation of
groups — if it's not the Fab Four, it's the
Sexy Six," she said. "Parents ask me, 'My
daughter comes home crying; she doesn't
want to go back to school — what do I
do?'
"There was peer pressure here on the
girls not to talk"
Just over a year ago, a national expert
on bullying spoke to Hillel middle-
schoolers, and the response was similar.
"Kids started coming to me afterwards,
in private, after the presentation," Cyrlin
said.
She expects the same thing to happen
now El

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"The most popular group is the most
dangerous place to be," Sommers said.
Rosemarie Denton of Novi, a guest of
JET who was previewing the perform-
ance with her 13-year-old daughter,
Gracie, said she was impressed with the
play and "thought the message was con-
veyed very well."
She hopes to bring Mean Girls to her
daughter's school, Huron Valley Catholic
in Ypsilanti. There is a charge of $595
for each performance of the play.
The plot of Mean Girls was uncom-
fortably close to reality, said Alita Cyrlin,
assistant director of Hillel's middle
school.

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