Q. Given your experience working in Hawai'i classrooms, what impact do you think the federal No Child Left Behind Act is having?

A. It is creating wreckage in its wake. If a state has the guts to tell the federal government to keep your money and go it alone, it would be better off. It means that schools need to teach to tests, and here in Hawai'i we have a really high standard. Becoming a teacher now is much different than 20 or 40 years ago when it was much more pure. The reports that are required now make teaching tough to do, and it's not an attractive profession.

Q. What kinds of skills do kids learn at the Alliance for Drama Education and T-Shirt Theater that will help them down the road should they decide not to pursue a career in theater?

A. The mission of the Alliance is helping young Hawai'i rehearse for life, not for a part on Broadway. We're interested in promoting life skills by teaching kids the "four P's" — how to project, pronounce, have poise, and personality. While these are important in acting, the "four P's" can help with communication skills in their working life. We've used this from kindergarten through high school.

Q. You chose Farrington High School as the base of operations for T-Shirt Theater. What was the reason for this?

A. Inner-city Farrington High School and surrounding elementary and middle schools suffer from a violence-tarnished image. Each time T-Shirt Theater performs or an alumni artist-educator leads a residency, that image positively transforms. Students develop stage productions around social issues of prime relevance to the community in which they live, helping both performers and audience to internalize positive values and methods for building a successful community.

Q. Has this helped the academic performances of the students involved?

A. Participants both practice and teach citizenship, while actively learning academic skills. Students improve their self-confidence, become better writers and speakers, improve their organizational skills, and deepen their academic performance by applying learned values to real-life situations, empowering them as learners.

Q. Was it difficult getting the students to appreciate what you were trying to do?

A. At Farrington when we started in 1980, behavior was so bad that they could not open the auditorium for a performance. Kids were too rowdy. So our first challenge was audience behavior. We had a very simple idea: If we got every kid to memorize some Shakespeare — even big, tough football players — and have them recite it facing a cavernous auditorium, we would teach them empathy. We were able to take extremely boisterous and rowdy kids and tame them by using their own sense of empathy of what a performer has to go through.

Q. Some students who have moved up through your program as performers become "envoys" and are given a chance to direct. What is the thinking here?

A. We start auditioning at the end of seventh grade for the envoys. They'll take a cadre of six to eight kids, go to a school like Kalihi Uka Elementary and do a performance. As each kid becomes a director, it takes away the feeling of doubt and lets the kid know you can do anything you want. The envoy business trains them to become future leaders, future teachers, future directors. Earlier, it was just the adrenaline of performing. Now it's a much more thoughtful process and it can be a life-altering experience.

Q. State funding for the arts has become increasingly scarce in recent years. How is the current funding at the Alliance for Drama Education?

A. Just when the state was going to vaporize some of the funding for the State Foundation on Culture and the Arts, the governor's office came up with a solution to tap into funds from another agency that will allow the state to match a federal NEA (National Endowment for the Arts) grant. The state is in a much better financial situation this year thanks to what has been a wonderful turnaround in the economy. The governor was acting prudently in not releasing the money until she thought the state could afford it.