Play Puts Diversity Center Stage

Forty elementary school students at The Inter-national School at Dundee yesterday performed “The Rainbow Christmas,” a play that promotes tolerance and diversity.

Debbie Kendrick’s second-grade class and Gene Schmidt’s fourth-grade class performed the play in front of a schoolwide audience. The message of the play coincides with the school’s values of fostering a society of acceptance among people of different beliefs and cultures, Schmidt said.

“We need to be open-minded and tolerant of everybody, no matter what their beliefs are and where they’re from,” Schmidt said.

In the play, the student-actors were dressed as animals and lived in the Black and White Forest. Initially, the animals segregated themselves into two groups: one for black and white animals and another for colorful animals.

Then, Santa Claus encountered the animals in the forest and told them he was discouraged by the way they had divided themselves on the basis of their colors. Santa told the animals that their skin color should not cause division among them and that they should live together in one community.

The animals agreed with Santa’s message and then renamed their community The Rainbow Forest. In the play’s final scene, the animals linked arms and sang “The Colors of the World Blend in Perfect Harmony.”

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