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09/07/2016 08:30 AMYou might assume that all theater-arts teachers are former high school theater geeks who went on to major in drama in college and settled on teaching only when they realized they couldn’t make it on stage or screen. Matthew Price, who for 10 years has taught theater arts at Robert H. Brown Middle School, in Madison, has flipped that script. He didn’t get into acting until after he had received his college degree in education and had started teaching in elementary schools.
Putting teaching first has paid off. On Aug. 29, Madison’s Board of Education announced that it had selected Matthew as the town’s Teacher of the Year. He was also recently chosen by Connecticut’s chapter of the Educational Theatre Association to represent the state’s theater teachers at the Celebrating Excellence in Education event in Hartford this October.
To hear Matthew, who’s 45 years old, describe it, his job is mostly fun.
“It’s called a play for a reason,” he says. “We get to play.”
And he says he gets a lot out of it.
“It’s my creative outlet,” he says. “I’m an artist at heart, and it’s such a treat and a pleasure to put on art with 5th and 6th graders.”
While Matthew stresses that he covers the state’s objectives for theater, he also says, “For myself, it’s more to get them excited to be in a performance, to get them excited to be a part of theater, to get them excited about theater in general and to want to go see a play.”
Many students, Matthew says, get another benefit.
“To belong is so important,” he says. “I say to parents that it’s great we have it in middle school so kids can find out early ‘Holy cow! This is great! This is where I belong.’ Or other kids, can find out ‘Holy cow! I’m terrified.’”
Matthew’s philosophy of teaching acting comes from one of his acting coaches.
“I define it as taking action to get what you want,” he says. “Acting is the playing of actions. It’s not about being emotional. It’s not about expressing all these feelings. It’s about wanting something and using actions to get it. That’s what makes performance compelling.”
Matthew says that’s not only useful on stage; it’s also a life skill. One time, he says, after a long, angry, fruitless phone call to his wireless provider, he decided to call the company back using his performance training.
“I acted like a complete and utter airhead,” he says. “They gave me everything I wanted.”
Admitting that even his students who pursue acting are unlikely to become rich and famous—”It’s such an incredibly difficult profession,” he says—Matthew says his classes can have another short- and long-term benefit for the kids.
“They’re going to be asked to do presentations,” he says. “They’re going to be asked to stand up in front of groups. It’s great as a 5th- or 6th grader to get that experience.”
A Circuitous Route to Teaching—and Acting
At that age, Matthew didn’t have the opportunity. He grew up in Glastonbury, where he attended first public, then Catholic schools. His middle school didn’t offer theater; in high school, he was captain of the tennis team and didn’t have time.
Matthew attended Penn State, where he planned to study architecture, thinking it was a viable career path, but the program proved too rigorous.
“There was like this badge of honor that you pulled an all-nighter,” he says. “It was like a double badge of honor that you pulled two nights in a row. Well, I like sleep and I didn’t like it all that much.”
Matthew got some advice from his mother that he passes on all the time.
He says, “She said, ‘Stop worrying about what you want to be. Worry about what you want to study. Study something that makes you excited. Because that way, you’ll want to learn, and then that will take you somewhere to what you’re going to be.’
“I remember listening to her,” he says, “but I didn’t take her advice—like an idiot.”
He considered studying acting, but says, “The idea of actually doing it as a profession was just ridiculous for an 18-year-old who’s thinking, ‘How am I going to support a family?’
“Instead,” Matthew says, “I went into veterinary medicine.”
He enjoyed it until the class had to dissect a calf.
“I remember like holding the ribs back,” he says, “and you could feel the fur on one side and the slime on the other. I remember thinking, ‘This is just not what I want to do with my life.’”
Spending a summer as a tennis instructor at a pool club in Glastonbury, Matthew realized he enjoyed teaching children.
“It’s apparently a skill that I possess,” he says, “to connect with and get along with kids. So I decided to do elementary education.”
After graduation, Matthew worked briefly in a district near Penn State. He has since worked at schools around Connecticut, including Oxford, Glastonbury (at his former elementary school), and Greenwich.
The husband of a colleague in Glastonbury was the artistic director of the Thomaston Opera House, in Litchfield County, Matthew auditioned for a part in a play.
“I actually got the lead,” he says, “which was, like, bizarre.”
Matthew wound up performing in eight or nine plays in Thomaston.
It was a great hobby,” he says. “Some people play basketball with their friends. We put on plays. And the great thing was, there was a lot of down time during rehearsals, so I’d just sit there and grade papers.”
Meanwhile, he had to get a master’s degree.
“I already had a degree in education,” he says. “I didn’t want another one, so I decided I would go get it in theater and see where that led—finally taking my mom’s advice, which is brilliant.”
Matthew took some courses toward a master’s of liberal arts at Wesleyan University, where he met his future wife, Maria, in an acting class. They put together a scene in which they, ironically, played a couple breaking up.
On their last night of rehearsal, Matthew says, “I was about to ask her out, and she asked me out first. We were both about to speak at the same time, and being a gentleman, I said, ‘Go ahead.’ Later on she told me, ‘Thanks a lot for being a gentleman, I had to do all the hard work and ask you out.’”
Matthew and Maria now live in Glastonbury with their four children—Margaret, 12; Charles, 10, Jonathan, 8; and Josephine, 6. Nancy has stayed at home raising the children while teaching night classes at various colleges in the area.
“She’s worked so hard to keep our house going, raising the kids,” Matthew says, “and then she kind of flies out at night. We sort of high-five at the door.”
This fall, Nancy’s new job, teaching English as an adjunct professor at Sacred Heart University, in Fairfield, will finally give her some free evenings.
After Wesleyan, Matthew went to Roosevelt University, in Chicago, where he earned his master’s of art in theater.
“I didn’t close the door to teaching,” he says, “but at the same time, I wanted to see what I might be capable of.”
But, he says, “after incurring debt for this degree, the idea of pursuing acting financially just didn’t seem smart. We were going to start a family soon and have kids, so I decided to go back to school.”
When Matthew heard about the job at Brown, he says, “I thought it was awesome. To be a theater teacher, typically you are in high school or college. The fact that it was 5th- and 6th grade blew my mind.”
After 10 years at Brown, Matthew still talks excitedly about new challenges. He writes the scripts for most of the pieces the students perform, so he can fine-tune the parts to the talents of varying cast members. For the upcoming year, he plans to have the kids build scenes using characters from the Peanuts comic strips. He thinks this could eventually become part of a curriculum that could be used at other schools.
Matthew doesn’t seem likely to leave Brown anytime soon.
“The staff is awesome,” he says. “Our principal is so supportive of the work we do. The kids are great. They eat this stuff up, and it just makes every day fun and exciting.
“If Spielberg called me tomorrow,” he adds, “I’m sure we could work out something for the summer.”