World Premiere Review

by DICK KEREKES
If you are over 50 student testing might not mean much to you unless you have children or grandchildren in school. If you do you have heard more than you share about the subject.
Testing: A Week in the Life of an Ex-Teacher completed a two weekend run at the Neptune Beach Senior Activity Center this past weekend. The play was written and directed by Steve Bailey, a local playwright, who in fact is a former teacher and worked at a testing center.
The play opens in the office of a school principal, played by the playwright. He consults with a teacher Steve Baldwin, who eventually becomes the leading character of the play. The teacher is being advised about his handling of a very rowdy and potty mouth student named Robert who is about twelve and played by David Bailey. At this point Baldwin decides he has had it with teaching and quits.
After a stint of flipping burgers at Burger King and living off the money from plasma donations, he is hired by Shears Testing Center.
The next scene and most of the other action are at the testing center, and opens with the manager Bill Grasso (Bobby Askew) going over the rules for working there. No cell phones allowed, no taking home any of the paper work from the testing and you are subject having backpacks or briefcases searched, no sexual harassment and finally don’t be late or you fill out a tardy slip and too many of these and you are out of a job.
As I understood the play, students in most states (and it varies from state to state) must take a type of skills test in order to move on to the next grade. The test we were concerned with in this play appeared to be one of reading paragraphs and then answering a question or questions in narrative style about what you read. The workers read the submitted answers and score them on a scale of 1 to 4, depending on how complete the response is in relation to the facts presented.
What becomes evident real quick is that the method of scoring seems to change from day to day confusing the workers, especially since they have several hundred of these to process each day. To add to the problem, each paper is read by two scorers and the number given by each must be within one of each other. Example 1&2 or 2,3, but say it is a 1 and a 4, it is classified as a non-adjacent and that apparently is bad news and a supervisor is called in.
Well, you get the idea, and if it sounds confusing, aren’t you glad you don’t work there? The plays cover a week in Baldwin’s life, until he finally leaves this job. Other things do happen in this week, including a romance between Baldwin and scorer Adrienne Moss (Amy Hilton), the arrest and dismissal of the manager Grasso for a testing fraud in another state. The very last short scene is one year later at the center and Baldwin and his now wife Adrienne are running the center and promise more peace and harmony.
Caylor Ventro played the leading role of Ballwin, and considering there were ten scenes in this 90 minute play, he did quite well. Mr. Ventro recently appeared in Sanders Family Christmas at Abet. Since every scene was a different day, it would have been appropriate for Ventro to at least change his shirt once or twice to give us an idea of the passage of time.
I would have liked author Bailey to have had one of the tests read all the way through, giving us an example of what would get a score of 1, 2, 3, or 4. This was confusing to me, but I guess that is what the play was about: the confusion to the workers with shifting standards on an almost daily basis. Explaining terms specific to a topic is important. I was puzzled about the use of the word PROMPT, in reference to the test given to student.
I recall seeing Steve Bailey’s first play at Boomtown a couple of years ago and it was a real wild science fiction spoof. Bailey has a very imaginative mind and has taken on a subject that is certainly controversial. (Ask any high school student!). I don’t know how much of the plot is autobiographical, and where creative license takes over and I suppose the people at the testing center could have used all that rude and profane language but it was bit much for me.
I am also excited by new plays from local authors, and Mr. Bailey and his family certainly put in a lot of effort to produce this play. Bailey is brave to put fourteen characters into his script in these days. Rounding out the cast playing various employees of Shears Testing were: Juliana Milton, Alex McGriff, Robin Street, Vicki Canella, Denis Tracer, Geffrey Lewis, Andrews McCraney, Terry Dean McCraney, and Joseph Lewis, with Leslie Lyne as the producer of the show.
This was my first visit to the Neptune Beach Senior Center, and it worked quite well, with comfortable surroundings that were clean and quiet with plenty of parking.