From Oz To Edgewood, The Power Of Middle School Theater

Top: Antwain “AJ” Johnson with Barnard's Chaz “Mr. C” Carmon and Music Director Sloan Williams. Lucy Gellman Photos. Bottom: Maya Louise Shed introduces the D/EP 2025  plays. Lucy Gellman Photos.

Growing up in New Haven, Antwain “AJ” Johnson didn’t believe in magic—until a middle-school play project pulled him fully out of his shell. Six years later, he’s passing that on to students at the school he once called home, as he prepares to step into the next artistic chapter of his life.

Johnson, who is headed to Morehouse College in the fall, is a graduate of Barnard Environmental Science and Technology School and the Dwight/Edgewood Project (D/EP), which this year celebrates its 30th anniversary at the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale. Earlier this summer, he returned to Barnard to direct The Wizard of Oz, working alongside Independent Support Services (ISS) Coordinator Chaz “Mr. C” Carmon and Music Director Sloan Williams to bring the play to life.

Less than two miles away, the D/EP welcomed its newest crop of student playwrights to the stage, world-building with plays that reached far beyond New Haven. Together, they showed the transformative effect that theater can have, from the Yellow Brick Road to Meowkyo.

The cast of The Wizard of Oz at Barnard.

“When I joined theater for the first time, putting on a show, it brought me so much happiness,” Johnson said in an interview at Barnard, as kindergarten students belted their ABCs during a balloon-studded graduation ceremony. “I love working with kids and thinking about where they find that inner inspiration. It’s fun and inspiring to have kids come out oftheir shells.”

For Johnson, that started in 2019, when he was selected for D/EP with several other Barnard students. Founded in 1995, the Dwight/Edgewood Project pairs young playwrights from Barnard School with mentors, actors, and professional crew members from the Yale drama school.

Since its inception, it has grown into a multi-week, fully produced endeavor, in which Yale drama students bring fantastical, harrowing, hyper-real and explosively imaginative stories to the stage. For a decade, it was helmed by the late Emalie Mayo, a beloved storyteller and community booster who helped bring it back as theater-makers navigated a new normal in 2022.

“In keeping this program alive, we also keep alive her legacy and her life’s work,” said Francisco Morandi Zerpa, a graduate student in acting at Yale, at a recent D/EP rehearsal. Zerpa later encouraged students to “practice any art,” quoting the words of Kurt Vonnegut.

Top: The Wizard of Oz cast, under Johnson's careful eye. Bottom: Johnson in 2019.

The year Johnson came aboard, he was a wide-eyed seventh grader, curious about the stage after a childhood spent in the city’s Edgewood neighborhood. He was, by his own admission, a relatively shy kid, quiet and a little goofy, with a focus on his studies at Barnard.

As he started to write, though, a switch flipped. He felt more self-confident. He learned how to tell a story, building a world around a singing gorilla (played by designer David Mitsch) whose stage fright almost gets the best of him. While the work was partly inspired by the movie Sing, he also made the play entirely his own. 

For a young Johnson, it unlocked something that he kept nurturing, first in productions with Ice The Beef and Elm Shakespeare Company, and then as a student at Notre Dame High School. As he juggled his love for the arts with his interest in basketball, some of his peers joked that he was a cooler version of Troy Bolton, the singing sportsman at the center of High School Musical. 

He took it in stride: this year, he took home a Halo Award for his performance of Sebastian in Disney's The Little Mermaid. He plans to continue acting at Morehouse in the fall.

“Experiencing the arts is one way to channel emotion,” he said. “To find and embrace the real you.”  

So when Carmon asked him to return to Barnard to assistant direct The Wizard of Oz, it was an easy yes. Earlier this year, Johnson joined Carmon as one of the founding members of the Coalition for Peace and Empowerment, an anti-violence group that grew out of Ice The Beef. The play, for which Carmon also enlisted the help of teachers and families at the school, doubled as their first event.

For weeks, he worked alongside students in whom he could see his younger self, drilling roles, getting into character, and transforming a balmy school cafeteria into some fantastical version of Oz. As he did, he thought back to training that he received in D/EP, from drama students and faculty mentors that cheered him on as he wrote. He wouldn’t be in acting without it, he said.

Principal Stephanie Skiba, a former dancer who has held on to the power of the arts in her work, praised Johnson for that constant sense of support, which she also saw from Sloan and Carmon. As students participated in the production, she could see how it kept many of them accountable, from showing up for rehearsals to figuring out when to finish their homework.

“I think it really gives students confidence,” she said. “It brings everyone together.”

Follow The Yellow Brick Road

Alayna Marie Rivera: "I get anxious sometimes, but when I’m acting, it’s really fun. It just brings out the fun in me.”

As Barnard students basked in the glow of a successful show on a recent Monday, many praised mentors like Johnson for helping boost their confidence. Savion Bridges, an eighth grader who played the Scarecrow, said he learned from both Johnson and from his fellow cast mates how to be more understanding, thoughtful, and courageous.

Those are lessons he plans to take with him when he starts at West Haven High School in the fall. It’s also been transformative for his understanding of The Wizard of Oz itself, which he saw at home, curled up alongside his mom and grandmother, when he was just six or seven years old.

“It feels like it’s not just me playing the character, it’s me putting a little bit of myself into the show,” he said. “With every single character you learn a lot of things. Like [from the Scarecrow], knowledge isn’t everything, but it’s better to have it.”

Lily Sargent, a fourth grader who played Dorothy, also picked up some of those lessons. Initially, she wanted to be in the tech crew, far from the spotlight. But Johnson, alongside Carmon, pushed her to try out the leading role and see how it fit.

When she finally took the stage, she thought of both Judy Garland, who originated the role, and her grandfather, who passed away after a brain bleed last year.

During rehearsals, she learned “not to be scared or nervous in front of a giant crowd,” she said. “And being adaptable.”

Tré Scott and Rosie Donoghue in a D/EP original play from Barnard student Za’Nhya Goins.

That also resonated for Alayna Marie Rivera, an eighth grader who played the Wicked Witch of the West. Rivera, who is headed to Cooperative Arts & Humanities High School next year, was nervous before she got on stage. She didn’t know how she felt about playing a character who was evil. Then she thought about why the Wicked Witch was mad.

“If you think about the play, her sister just died,” Rivera said. “She has every right to be mad. This role, it really taught me a new way to control myself. I get anxious sometimes, but when I’m acting, it’s really fun. It just brings out the fun in me.”

Williams, who is in his third year directing the music program at the school, said that was part of the goal. When Carmon enlisted his help earlier this year, he was excited to see what the show might turn into. As Barnard’s music director, he’s no stranger to the impact that arts programming can have on students, from improving their grades to helping them become less shy and soft-spoken.

Rather than The Wiz or Wicked, he suggested, The Wizard of Oz draws from a kind of OG source text—it is the canonical place where these glamorous, emotional, messy, often moving stories begin. Without Judy Garland and Billie Burke and Margaret Hamilton, there is arguably no Kristin Chenoweth as Glinda; no path to the origin story of Elphaba’s green skin; no Wicked movie franchise three quarters of a century after the original dropped. 

“I was blown away to see that they could act and dance,” Williams said, crediting both the New Haven Symphony Orchestra and Yale Repertory Theatre for stepping on as creative partners with the school. “For them to master these iconic songs was the thrill of a career.”

“Keep On Imagining”

In the familiar half-light of the Off-Broadway Theater downtown, that sense of transformation bloomed all over again, as tech rehearsals for the Dwight/Edgewood Project reached their final day before performances. On one side of the theater, a group of five students sat huddled together, joking around before actors took the stage. On the other, creative team members made last-minute tweaks to the program, from costuming requests to lighting cues.

After taking a year off to mourn Mayo—who was the glue that held the program together—they were finally back. Barnard students, their whispers weaving through the small space, fell to a hush. In three decades of planning, the program has braved multiple transitions, growing to include an overnight camp retreat and days of playwriting alongside mentors who are students at the School of Drama. 

But this, in a year still touched by the death of a mentor, proposed cuts to arts educators, and the social and emotional fallout from a pandemic, somehow still felt different.

Top: The Still Museum in action. Bottom: Aaron Magloire and Jeremy A. Fuentes in Angel Morales' original D/EP work. 

“From character to conflict and everything in between, each playwright has crafted a beautifully unique original show,” said Maya Louise Shed, executive director of the Dwight/Edgewood Project, reading the words of mentor and playwright comfort ifeoma katchy before she arrived.

And in just over an hour, all of them showed off those skills, teaching each other—and their audience of mentors, actors and a few technical crew members—through a series of short plays that they had finished during the program. As Barnard student Angel Morales took a seat in a giant yellow banana costume, a voice called out from somewhere in the audience.

“Hey, actors! Could we gather onstage?” it ventured. “I want to just put eyes on everyone.”  Angel shifted eagerly; it was nearly go time. Bruno Mars and Travie McCoy’s “Billionaire” played over the speakers. Somewhere in the building, actors Aaron Magloire and Jeremy A. Fuentes were getting ready to go on and make Angel proud.

Playwrights, indeed, may be actors’ greatest teachers: alongside inevitable fart jokes, lightsaber battles, warring animals and situationships, they have woven in lessons in the ebbs and flows of friendship, power dynamics, mortality and impermanence that feel far beyond their years.

In Anisa Turay’s Cat Tails, for instance, set between a technicolor desert and “Meowkyo” (like Tokyo, but with felines) a cat and a dog (a very silly Emma Steiner and Mark Yarde) navigate the slow journey back to reconciliation after a theft sometime in the distant past. It is Spaghetti Western meets Cats, so delightfully weird that it’s hard not to be on the edge of one’s seat.

Or take The Still Museum, by rising seventh grader Gracey Mathiew. In the play, two friends (Catherine Mackay and Kimberly Vilbrun-Francois) fall asleep at a bus stop after work, so exhausted by their jobs that they do not think twice about the strange men lurking in the shadows. 

The background—which is not New Haven, but is not not New Haven either—is surprisingly vivid. On a projection, a streetcorner comes into being, complete with a little corner store that feels somehow familiar. Bags hang heavy from their arms, too-large polo shirts droop on their frames. A breath or two, and they are out.

It seems like a nice snooze, until they are kidnapped by two men, and wake up encased in cement (yes reader, that plot is chilling, and it’s a great credit to actors that humor is used as a balm). In the museum—the still museum, so named for its purpose—visitors are arriving soon, and the two are terrified. Then they remember that they have each other.

It’s a lesson that sticks with them even as one breaks free, then doubles back for her buddy. In the process, we in the audience get a crash course in how to care for our friends and neighbors. 

Jazmin Esmad Hernandez: Maybe try a little kindness. 

As she hustled down York Street after tech rehearsal, Gracey said that the work was inspired by a D/EP field trip to the Yale University Art Gallery earlier this year. When students entered the gallery, she was drawn to the sculpture hall on the first floor, where light falls in long, unbroken bands over works of art that are hundreds, sometimes thousands, of years old.

It made her start thinking of what would happen if people, caught totally off guard, ended up among those objects. Her heroes became two friends, working gig economy jobs. Her villians were Marvel-level evil, who prey on unsuspecting people to pad their collection. 

“It really inspired me, that’s why I wrote this play,” Gracey said.  “What I learned is, if you write more, then the more creativity you have. Like you keep on creating, keep on imagining things, and all that.”

That sharp-eyed clarity also came to Jazmin Esmad Hernandez’ The End of A Friendship, a sometimes-musical precipitated by the kind of devastating break up that the title suggests. In the play, Snake (Bella Orobaton, who also plays a Shark) and Owl (Grace Wissink) are friends who seem to have drifted apart, each with their own goals and interests by the time they get to high school.

When one chooses to snag a guy who is clearly on the rebound, the other is hurt and uncertain—and also begins to understand that friendships change. The magic, though, is in Jazmine’s sharp, sometimes cheeky language, which feels like it could just as easily unfold in a middle school hallway.

When Snake asks “why is singing in school more important than bagging some boy?” it’s said with an edge that feels so savage it could slice right through the blue-black stage lighting. When Shark asks Owl if she’s ok, “because you care about others more than yourself,” it’s a learning moment that many in the audience may have had. When Owl spits “Clock it!” we prepare for a girl fight in the animal kingdom as if that’s the most normal thing ever.

Jazmine, who is going into the seventh grade, was inspired by a friend break up that happened to her “in IRL,” she said as she walked out of the theater, and into the bright, humid afternoon ("that's in real life," she clarified for this reporter matter-of-factly). After starting D/EP “because I have never wrote a play before,” she transformed the stage into a musical drama that helped her process some of her own emotions.

As she wrote, she felt like she gained a new perspective around the friendship that had ended in her own life. “It was a release,” she said.

“If you’re in a friend group, and it’s a bad friend group, that’s like maybe where the trouble starts,” she said. “[Characters could have been] maybe apologizing more or being nice and talking to each other.”