Lubbock Avalanche Journal
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Curtain Up: Ray touches young lives on stage
By Joe Gulick | AVALANCHE-JOURNAL
Tuesday, February 17, 2009
Story last updated at 2/17/2009 - 1:36 am
This time of year, Karen Ray is a steady and calm island with a sea of chaos swirling around her.
The days are drawing near for the annual musical that is the biggest event of the year for her theater arts department at O.L. Slaton Middle School. This year she is directing Cole Porter's "Anything Goes" with a cast and chorus of 100 and a crew of 40 - all of them in the sixth, seventh and eighth grades.  She has painstakingly staged the scenes, and she appears laid-back and relaxed as she answers seemingly endless questions from actors and crew members and solves problems that arise from every direction.  Bit by bit, the acting, singing, dancing, sets, props, costumes, lights, sound and music settle into place.  By the time the curtain rises before a paying audience - which will be at 7:30 p.m. on Friday and Saturday for "Anything Goes" - the professionalism of the cast, crew and chorus will have reached such an impressive level it will be easy to forget they are middle-school students.  "Kids can achieve more talent and do more than most people believe they can do. The more responsibility we give them, the better they do," Ray said.
She has learned a great deal over the years about students - and about directing musicals. "Anything Goes" is her 17th production.  "As a director, I used to worry about things all the time," Ray said. "I have learned everything works out. I certainly want a professional appearance, but the kids are more important than the product. I know that if I am stressed, they will be stressed."  Choosing the annual play every year can be complicated. She selects the musical to fit the talents of the students, and has to keep an ear on the boys' voices, which usually have just changed and generally are not as strong as those of the girl singers.  When she began directing musicals, they primarily featured the ninth-grade class, but that switched to the eighth grade when freshmen were moved to high school.   And then there was spring of 2006, when both the ninth- and eighth-grade classes would be going to high school the next school year.  After the exhaustive effort of staging a musical, she started all over again and did another one.
"I had the ninth-grade musical in February, the eighth-grade musical in April and my daughter's wedding in May that year," she laughed. "But I wouldn't have cheated (the eighth-graders) for anything. They were the best group I ever had."  The annual musical is the culmination of three years of theater training that begins in the sixth grade, she said.
"We perform all year long. The students do monologues in class and prepare plays to perform, including the younger kids.  By the time we get to the two-hour musical, they are used to performing," she said.  They have learned more than just acting, however. They have studied costuming, make-up and all the technical parts of theater, Ray said.
"They know how to run lights, work sound boards and build sets," she said. "They gain confidence they can use in every part of their lives."  Linda Gober, a Coronado High School teacher and academic decathlon coach who has known Ray since the second grade, calls her "one of Lubbock's hidden treasures."  "Her students are her second family, and they know she cares about them.  When they leave O.L. Slaton, they not only know theater arts, but they have experienced the love and dedication of an excellent teacher," Gober said.  Ray said rumors seem to get started every year she is retiring.  However, she said she intends to teach for many more years.  More than 20 of Ray's students have gotten full acting scholarships to universities, and at least five or six of them work as professional actors today, Ray said.   Many others are working as directors, screenwriters and in technical jobs in show business.
"A lot of my kids have gone into law. They have gotten used to speaking in public.   A theater background is good for lawyers," said Ray, whose daughter, Lori, is one of those attorneys.  Ray's dream for Lubbock is a true performing arts high school for the acting, choir, band and orchestra students.  "We have so much talent in Lubbock," she said. "If we could have one place where we could teach all of these kids together, it would be great."  In addition to her duties at O.L. Slaton, Ray wears other hats in theater arts involvement.  "Karen serves as the University Interscholastic League Region 1 3A and 5A one-act play contest manager as well as event director for the Master Theatre Workshop, the One-Act Play Director's Workshop, and Student Activities Conference, all hosted by Texas Tech University," said Lynn Elms, director general for UIL Region 1 spring meet events. "The responsibilities of this assignment are huge. To date, Karen manages the best regional one-act play contest in the state."  Since Ray's involvement as the event director for the Master Theatre Workshop, offered to area high school students, and the One-Act Play Director's Workshop, offered to directors across the state, both events have tripled in attendance, Elms said.  Ray enjoys managing the contest and conducting the workshops, she said. In the Director's Workshop, she teaches, teachers how to select a one-act play and stage it. Smaller high schools that participate in the UIL one-act play contest usually don't have a theater arts class and may have a teacher directing the play who doesn't have a theater background, she said.  One of the favorite memories of Ray for many of her former students is the six-day theater trip to New York City she leads every spring break. Students see four Broadway plays, get to meet someone from one of the plays and take in New York's tourist sites.  The trip next month will be the 15th one Ray has led, and she enjoys getting to experience vicariously a new group of students' discovering The Big Apple each year.
Ray grew up around show business. Her father was an All-American football player at Arkansas, who played professional football for the St. Louis Gunners, who later became the Cleveland Browns.  He was a sales manager for a Lubbock radio station, was a friend of Buddy Holly and other music artists and had other ties to the movie business.