Adam Hellewell uses ChatGPT to tackle the unsung logistics of school theater, from auditions and rehearsal schedules to budgets, script breakdowns and parent emails, so his students can perform a more demanding task: stepping inside someone elseâs life.
Adam is entering his third year of teaching overallâhis second year teaching theaterâand leads theater for seventh-, eighth- and ninth-graders at North Davis Junior High in Clearfield, Utah. He fell in love with theater when he was a boy, decided in high school he wanted to teach it, earned a degree in theater education and started out as an English teacher before finding his way back to the stage.
The hard part of his work was getting everyone and everything to work together. But he still feels a thrill when they do. The crazy thing about theater is how pure enchantment can emerge from the grind of logistics.
The right student has to step out under the lights in the right role, wearing the right costume, with the right props. Rehearsals march on strict schedules. Sets need planning. Families need updates. Budgets, tracking. And someone has to tell the audience when to show up. Not to mention lighting, sound, music and choreography.
All that has to work before the drama can take off.
Adam built custom ChatGPT skills around the work behind the curtain. One helps organize auditions. Another supports stage management, schedules and production notes. A script-breakdown tool identifies characters, props, costumes and sets for each sceneââa second pair of eyes on a script,â Adam calls it. Other skills help track production budgets, create publicity and write clear updates for parents and students.
Managing that complexity creates room for what Adam says is theaterâs deeper purpose.
âTheater is a very powerful way of demonstrating and creating human empathy,â Adam says.
To play a character, a student has to consider a life beyond their own: what another person wants, what they fear, why they make choices the student might never make. Then the student has to translate that understanding into something an audience can feel. Every rehearsal is practice in seeing the world through someone elseâs eyes.
That is the extraordinary relay at the center of every performance: an author transforms their experience into a script; student actors interpret it; the audience receives an emotion that has traveled through several hearts. Understanding and emotion flow from author to student to audience.
Theater also demands collective trust. Actors, designers and directors working toward one performance that none of them could create alone. âSomething changes in them, every show that they do,â he says.
