School Pictures
Written and Performed by Milo Cramer
Playwrights Horizons Fall 2023
The Wilma Theater Fall 2022
This playful collection of poem-songs, written and performed by Milo Cramer – a former tutor – paints intimate portraits of ten NYC students fighting to get into competitive schools. School Pictures is a charming musical journal of keen observations which builds to a sweeping meditation on inequality, learning, parenting, and the cruelty of puberty.
Set and costume- Jean Kim
Lighting design- Isabella Gill
Photo credit- Johanna Austin
Vulture / New York Magazine article 'best play of 2023'
Cramer has the students, tutors, and teachers rapt from basically their first sentence (“Charlotte is in seventh grade; she wants to be an actress”) and certainly from the fourth (“Charlotte has radical dramaturgical ideas”).
The setup, a pseudo musical, has Mr. Cramer wailing funny songs that tell the stories of individual, fictionalized students accompanied by a ukulele and, at one point, a toy piano.
This American Life episode, "The Question Trap, Chapter 4: Can I Help You?"
