Glover, Scheider Star For Hayground

The actor and social activist Danny Glover made room in his busy Hollywood schedule recently to spend a few days in Bridgehampton at the behest of his longtime friend Kathy Engel, who has a child attending the new Hayground School there.

With Belvie Rooks of San Francisco, an award-winning writer whom Ms. Engel also knows from activist circles, and the actor Roy Scheider, another Hayground parent, the group created an original production, featuring the two Hollywood stars, that they hope will not only raise money for the school but spread its message to a wider public.

Called "Who's Gonna Be There?," the production is scheduled for presentation as a benefit for the school at the Bay Street Theatre on May 10.

Diversity

"There's something extraordinary happening" at Hayground, Mr. Glover told The Star. The actor said he saw the school, which prides itself on its diverse student body, as "a model we can take somewhere else - to educate all our children."

Roughly a third of Hayground's students are Native American, Latino, or black, according to Ms. Engel. Two-thirds of the school is on full or partial scholarship, she said, a total of about $200,000 a year that must be raised for tuition.

Another $500,000 a year for the next five years is needed to pay for the complex of buildings and playing fields now under construction at the school's new Butter Lane site. Classes at the 12.8-acre facility are expected to begin in September; the school has been housed meanwhile in the Bridgehampton Methodist Church.

Mentoring

Although the writer and the actors declined to reveal much about "Who's Gonna Be There?," its backbone will be a give-and-take between Mr. Glover and Mr. Scheider on the subject of mentoring.

Ms. Rooks and the two actors said they had "investigated" their lives to determine who along the way had increased their "sense of self," a goal that is central to Hayground's purpose.

"We found our paths were similar," Mr. Glover said, after a rehearsal session one day at Bay Street.

Mr. Scheider, a star of stage, film, and television whose 7-year-old son, Christian, attends Hayground, recall ed a junior high school teacher who was "boring until he read poetry," from which the actor learned that "the right words spoken at the right time can move mountains."

A Wider Aspect

"We have narrow, socially prescribed definitions of who we are and who we can be," said Ms. Rooks. "I am fundamentally a black woman - that is how people respond to me - but I also know that that is only an aspect of the whole."

"The magic," she added, "is how the whole expresses itself through differences."

She recalled the father of a friend whose house she loved to visit as a young girl, "because he used to ask me what I thought about the world."

"Quemoy and Matsu," recalled the writer, laughing. "He kept asking me what I thought about those places." Her friend's father was a mentor of a different sort: "kind and welcoming, [who] taught me something about family."

The theatrical collaboration, which will include music and audience participation, will be performed again the day after the benefit at the Old Whaler's Church in Sag Harbor.

The hope is that it will go on to become a model "to the larger community," as Mr. Glover put it, both dramatically and educationally.

In recent days, a group of 7 to 13-year-olds at Hayground completed the study of two cultures, Hopi Indian and Muslim. One young girl, a Hopi, pointed out inaccuracies in the literature about her culture.

Students and their teacher agreed that indigenous "storytellers" may have a better grasp of the truth of a culture than anthropologists, who, it was noted, frequently are white.

Starting Small

Teachers, advisers, parents, and supporters hammered out some of the precepts of the Hayground philosophy during a series of meetings before the school opened its temporary doors in September.

Viewing their tenets as works-in-progress, they are still at it.

"We focus consciously on diversity every day," said Sara Ford, an educational adviser at the school. "You can't legislate a shift in heart" on race, gender, and religion. "You have to start small."