he American premiere of Rainshark, by South African playwright Neil McCarthy, didn’t happen in a big city theater but in the auditorium at East Chapel Hill High.

The School of Education’s International Social Studies Project (ISSP) produced the play as a way to start high school and middle school students thinking about South Africa. The ISSP, directed by Suzanne Gulledge, clinical assistant professor of education, was founded in 1996 to provide training and supplemental materials in international and world studies to high school and middle school social studies teachers. When Paul Frellick came on board as program coordinator, his experience as a theater director helped jumpstart the ISSP’s GlobalArts initiative, which presents plays as a resource.

Working with local actors, some of whom are Carolina graduates, Frellick has mounted productions of three different plays for teachers and students at schools in Durham and Chapel Hill. Carolina faculty lead discussions during intermission and after the performances.

Learning about politics and culture through drama can help students "see that history isn’t just timelines and events, that there are people just like them at the heart of it," Frellick says. The productions also include practical lessons, such as the glossary of South African terms and slang included in the teaching materials for Rainshark.

The plays are not only teaching tools but acclaimed in their own right. One reviewer called the ISSP plays "some of the best drama in the Triangle." And two local newspapers named the ISSP’s production of A Walk in the Woods, a drama about nuclear-arms-reduction talks between the U.S. and Russia, one of the top 10 productions of 2000.

"If it doesn’t work as a play, then we might as well just be lecturing," Frellick says. "You’re putting on a production for a group of people who have not come necessarily because they’re anxious to see a play. But it’s worth it when you look across this sea of faces, and they’re all focusing on the stage and the circumstances of an individual not all that unlike themselves."

The ISSP productions were free and open to the public and funded by the North Carolina Humanities Council, Carolina’s Center for Slavic, Eurasian, and East European Studies, and the University Center for International Studies.