Play Spotlights the Dramas of Children’s Lives

The first act of “The Vork,” a play co-written and performed by fifth-graders at Topanga Elementary School, deals with several difficult issues for young students--teasing, loneliness, competition for popularity, uncaring adults and absent parents.

In the second act, the children are sucked into “The Vork,” a fictional, strange world where their problems manifest themselves as tormenting dummies, talking cell phones and Mafia-styled forest creatures.

The play gave parents insight into what it means to be a fifth-grader in the 1990s.

“It’s a great play that way,” said T. Kappe, the mother of Tessa, a student who played a latchkey child. “It tells me that these things that we think they can handle are really brewing inside of them.

“It’s a wonderful medium for our children to get their message across.”

When the children are sucked into the Vork in the second act, they must deal with their problems in unusual ways. “One of the rules of the Vork is nobody leaves with an unexamined conflict,” said Ben Katz, a parent who directed the play.

The play was written with suggestions from the students about the fears they feel as they prepare to leave elementary school. Katz, a painting contractor who has a master’s in fine arts from Iowa State University, said he heard criticism from some parents that the work was too dark.

But the mood was not deliberate, he said.

“It was [only] deliberate in that these were the stories the kids told,” Katz said. “Some of the writing was directed at the parents.”

One message he hoped to get across was that parents should appreciate their children while they can. This message was felt deeply by Katz, who lost a daughter seven years ago when she collapsed and died suddenly of an undiagnosed heart ailment.

“We didn’t think there was any way to express something that was so personal,” he said.