Sophocles in the Slums

The solidly Negro area around Philadelphia's Chester A. Arthur School is the kind of poverty-ridden slum where more than 40% of the people are on relief and illegitimacy is common. Yet last week some of the area's most "hopeless" youngsters aged eight to twelve, put on a boffo production of Sophocles' Oedipus Rex in the Yeats translation. They had already staged Cocteau's Orphee at their 60-seat Philadelphia Theater for Children, an abandoned slum building. Equally adept at Shakespeare, the kids cheerily greeted each other with "What ho, varlet?" and "How now, spirit! Whither wander you?" The force behind all this is 23-year-old Christopher Speeth, the only white teacher at 76-year-old Arthur School. A lawyer's son, Speeth grew up in Cleveland with a bewildering variety of talents. He began studying the violin at 3 1/2, won numerous musical competitions while also acting at the Cleveland Playhouse. He also painted; Washington's National Gallery owns some of his work. In high school, he won third prize at the National Science Fair for building a symbolic logic computer. At Kenyon College ('60), he majored in math.

More Fun with T.S. In 1961, Speeth took a job teaching second grade at Arthur School, where he was appalled at "basal" readers such as Fun with Dick and Jane. He reasoned that apart from the intrinsic fatuousness of the books Negro slum kids could not have much in common with the middle-class white children who are the characters in the books.

Speeth junked the books. Appealing to his children's imaginations, Speeth substituted T. S. Eliot's Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats. Later, in fifth grade, he handed out mimeographed excerpts from Baldassare Castiglione's 16th century Book oj the Courtier. He soon had youngsters memorizing Yeats and Shakespeare --and writing creditable poetry.

Last Christmas, Speeth's fifth graders staged Amahl and the Night Visitors, went on to an uncut version of A Midsummer Night's Dream. This summer a church volunteered use of the vacant "theater" building, where Speeth and volunteer collegians held six-hour daily classes for 101 kids in literature, music appreciation, dancing and dramatics, with play rehearsals after hours.

Praise from Scholars. The effect on Speeth's troubled youngsters has been momentous. One little girl, n, whose 14-year-old brother is already a father, has blossomed into a promising soprano. A boy of eleven, whose father tied one of the boy's brothers to a chair and beat him to death, is busily learning the child-prince role in the summer's last production. Arthur Purnell, n, used to be classified as "retarded" because, says Speeth, "he gives funny answers to people he doesn't like." The same boy's diction in A Midsummer Night's Dream elicited a glowing letter from one of the University of Pennsylvania's top Shakespeare scholars.

Arthur is one of the more than 50 heavily Negro schools in Philadelphia that are striving mightily to emulate New York City's pioneering "Higher Horizons" program. The premise is that a child who can look, figuratively, over the horizons of a slum will get out of it. Speeth has lifted the horizon to the loftiest levels of literary and artistic achievement--and has made an exemplary success of it.

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