Idyll Banter by Chris Bohjalian

crawlers.
    First, she was called by an out-of-state real estate agent she’d never met who wanted to know what properties might be for rent this winter in Lincoln. And then a Middlebury resident called in search of our town clerk, after mistaking the unique whistle and ding the phone makes in our town office for evidence the phone was out of order.
    Can you count on the Internet this way? Did we ever get this kind of mother’s milk from Ma Bell? Not a chance.
    Nope, if you really want to reach out and touch someone, you’re better off just calling the store.

THE SCHOOL—
PLAYGROUNDS AND
CLASSROOMS

DRAMA LIVES IN PRESCHOOL
OZ ODYSSEY
    NEITHER BETHANY BARNER nor Victoria Brown is the sort of actress who enjoys discussing her craft. But as they await the curtain for the first performance of their new show, the dramatic difference in their approaches becomes clear.
    Four-year-old Victoria is a study in silent concentration. In the last seconds before she will walk onto the redwood deck that today is a stage, the only time she moves is when she methodically checks her props one last time.
    Wicker basket? Got it. Red sneakers that will serve today as my ruby slippers? Yup, still on my feet. Those ribbons that Mom put in my pigtails? Phew, still there.
    Five-year-old Bethany, on the other hand, is already deeply immersed in her role. She has become one with the little dog she will bring to life. She falls to her hands and knees and barks with great enthusiasm.
    â€œThat’s what I’m going to say to the Wicked Witch,” she explains to the audience members as they take their seats on blankets in the grass.
    Certainly there are drama critics who fear for the future of the living theater, but I’m not among them.
    After all, I’m not a drama critic.
    Nevertheless, these days I still find myself waxing poetic and growing downright ebullient when I contemplate the future of the live stage play. Recently I saw that future in the form of the Lincoln Cooperative Preschool’s performance of
The Wizard of Oz,
and I was reassured that today’s young crop of actors and actresses brings a passion to their craft that will keep the theater vibrant and alive for a long time.
    Among the new faces to look for at, perhaps, the Royall Tyler Theatre in the year 2010:
    First there is five-year-old Steven Patterson. With tremendous sensitivity, Steven brought the deeply conflicted Scarecrow to life, especially in those moments when he was suddenly surrounded by five of the seven little girls who thought it was their turn to be Dorothy.
    Likewise, Bridgette Bartlett, four, demonstrated the sort of honesty in her performance in which the fine line between the world and the stage all but disappears. “I think I want to give my mommy a kiss,” she said soon after meeting the Tin Man, at which point she simply walked off the stage and into her mother’s lap and did just that.
    Three-year-old Cameron Skerritt Perta brought immense energy to the role of Flying Monkey (on and off the stage), and Alexandra Ackert-Smith (still a few weeks short of three), conveyed with elegance the despair of the witch as she melted.
    Ackert-Smith also made an excellent scary face on command.
    Viscaya Du Mond Wagner and Emily Wood were both equally reassuring good witches from the north, and worked well as a tag-team sort of Glinda.
    Of course, the performance needed multiple Glindas because there were so many different Dorothys. At one point, Viscaya and Emily were outnumbered four to two, and the witches had to work pretty darn fast to get all four girls back to Kansas.
    As an added bonus, the show was preceded by a rousing rendition of “I Am a Pizza” in both English and French, an appropriate opening number given the pizza’s wistful, Dorothy-like plea at the end of the song: “I am a pizza, please take me home.”
    Directed by outgoing preschool teacher Nancy Stevens, this version of
Oz
was