The summer humanities program grew out of March cabin fever. I had made a presentation on teaching the Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf in high school as part of the Council's Winter Weekend at Bowdoin. At the end of the day, Victoria Bonebakker asked if I would bring Beowulf to the Maine Youth Center as the Council had done with previous Winter Weekend subjects.

She set up a meeting with Peter Duffy, who is an English teacher at Maranacook High School in Readfield and involved with theater. I had been considering staging Beowulf as the focus of the Youth Center project, and Peter's experience and qualifications were a wonderful fit. He has taught creative movement with inner city students in New York and New Jersey and appeared in two Shakespearean roles this summer at the Theater at Monmouth.

Peter outlined our plan in broad strokes and worked out a division of labor. I met twice with Jim McManus, chief of volunteer services at the Youth Center. He was helpful, supportive, and enthusiastic.

On July 2, Peter and I met with the boys who had signed up, and we all dived in. I began with an introduction to the poem and then plunged into reading it with the group. Students volunteered to take turns reading. I paused often, to emphasize or explain or simply comment on the story. Reactions varied. Some boys were enthusiastically involved and offered their own ideas. One or two responded to poetic turns of phrase and images. Others were less attentive.

We read the poem in four days. We would read for an hour and a half, have refreshments, and then do theater exercises, including mime, improv, and focus exercises. The refreshment part was clearly an important draw. As Jim McManus said, "Food is the coin of the realm here."

After the poem had been read, we identified 12 significant events that could be dramatized. Each boy chose a scene to be responsible for. Each was the writer/director for his own scene. They found that the creative exercises they had been doing with Peter all week had prepared them for the task of developing their scene and directing the other students to make it work. One of the most enthusiastic poets in the group worked on splicing quotations from the poem together with bridging phrases to make a unifying narrative to place the individual scenes in context.

The boys clearly enjoyed developing the action segments and took obvious pride in their own scenes, in which, incidentally, they usually starred.

I cannot say all went smoothly. Maintaining focus was a problem, and there was some friction between individuals. In the hours, even minutes, before the show, much was still chaotic. Changes were made up to the last minute. It was all up to the boys. I told them that what would be remembered is how responsibly they played their parts.

To my delight - and, frankly, my surprise - the production (to a packed house of their peers, their parents, staff from the Youth Center, and other adults) was practically flawless. The young people in the audience seemed engaged in the play. The actors focused, each playing his part and making the effort to take up any slack that developed. The show was a huge success.

I found the experience frustrating, emotionally exhausting, and deeply rewarding. Most rewarding was the apparent success the boys felt. They worked together through an unfamiliar process. They had to cooperate with and support each other as well as take initiative and responsibility. We had taken a 1,000-year-old poem and made it available to a contemporary audience without compromising the integrity of the story or the poetry of the translation.

As part of the Council's Beowulf project, writer Hodding Carter -- in his multi-layered Viking costume -- also spoke at the Youth Center about his own adventures in the North Atlantic retracing Leif Ericson's voyages in a replica of his ship. Each of the nine boys received a copy of Carter's A Viking Voyage. The Youth Center project was made possible by the generosity of Winter Weekend participants. An article on the Council's literature project for young women at the Center will appear in the next issue.