It’s not a secret now. Special Gifts Theatre prepares to celebrate its 10th anniversary of serving North Shore kids with physical, verbal, and developmental disabilities in February. Founder Field, whose background is in occupational therapy for adults, received a 2009 Studs Terkel Humanities Service Award from the Illinois Humanities Council for her work with Special Gifts.

“It started 10 years ago with six children,” says Field. Now, she notes, Special Gifts has provided service for about a thousand children, including peer mentors.

Field identifies two components that are essential to the mission of the company. The first is that the kids actually get to perform in front of audiences—it’s not just a training and theatre games program. Field notes that this is great not only for the kids, but for the parents, who don’t often get to see their special-needs children taking the spotlight.

“They want a place where they can point and say, ‘That’s my kid,’” says Field.

Though Field herself isn’t the parent of special-needs kids, she notes with a laugh, “My kids didn’t play sports, which is a disability on the North Shore. I knew how much school theatre programs did for my kids.”

It’s not just the kids with disabilities that benefit, however. The mentors that Field mentions are all peers of the special-needs students, and they work with them one-on-one throughout the rehearsal process.

“I try to make sure that they are matched with someone else from their school, because [special-needs children] have trouble forming those social relationships,” says Field. “There is a lot of talk about ‘mainstreaming’ in the schools, but often what that means is that the kid sits in the back of the room with an aide and they’re still ‘that weird kid.’ What we do is reverse mainstreaming—we bring the mentors into our world, and many times our kids will be correcting the mentors, telling them, ‘That’s not the blocking!’”

Field originally thought she could offer her services as an occupational therapist for an existing special-needs theatre program, but she found that there really weren’t any in the Chicago area. The theatres she approached were sympathetic, but, she says, “The script I heard was, ‘It’s not fair to lower the quality of the shows to accommodate kids with special needs.’”

Counterintuitive to that philosophy, Field notes that Special Gifts focuses on pushing kids past their perceived limits. “You might think the higher-functioning kids would play the leads, but we’re more process-oriented than product-oriented, so the kid with the softest voice might play the Cowardly Lion, so he can learn how to ‘roar,’” says Field.

Field and her family were the original benefactors of the company, and they put the first show up three months after that fateful dinner. Now the company contracts with 60 specialists, including physical therapists, occupational therapists, speech and language pathologists, and other special-education teachers. They also contract with theatre educators.

“The special-ed people know how to adapt the material for the kids, and the theatre people know how to craft the theatre part of it,” says Field. The program charges parents no more than 18 percent of what the real costs are, says Field, and she says those rates are equivalent to what a park district program would charge “for 15-20 kids and no special ed.” The teacher-kid ratio for Special Gifts is 1:3, and kids meet for 75 minutes once a week for 25 weeks as they rehearse shows. Several kids from lower-income households are also eligible for scholarships.

The shows themselves tend to be familiar stories, says Field. “We do shows that they can see as a movie—Annie, The Music Man. If you put them in a story they already know, they have an easier time understanding it.”

And like every other youth-oriented theatre company out there, Special Gifts has also jumped on Disney’s High School Musical bandwagon, which will run the first two weeks of March. Details hadn’t been confirmed as of press time, but Field says that at least one of the stars of the film will be on hand to work with the kids at a rehearsal.

The program originally focused on kids from 8 to 21 years of age, and once a child is accepted, they remain in the program for as long as they wish. The only limits on participation, says Field, are that the kids have to have some level of physical mobility so they won’t hurt themselves or others. The kids have disabilities that encompass autism, Aspergers syndrome, cerebral palsy, Down syndrome, and many other conditions. More recently, the company expanded its programming to include early-childhood kids ages 3-6.

Right now, Special Gifts operates on an annual budget of $450,000, and is housed in the Skokie School (which, despite the name, is actually located in Winnetka). According to Field, the principal offered them the auditorium and classroom facilities with one small proviso: that, as peer mentorship openings came up, his students could be considered.

“He said, ‘We’re in Winnetka and this is a very affluent community. I want our kids to learn service,’” says Field.

She cites research that indicates that 96 percent of kids who do philanthropic work will grow up to be philanthropic adults. Field also thinks that the kids with special needs “want to please their peers more than anyone,” which adds to the program’s success rate.

More recently, Special Gifts has focused on documenting the effects of theatre training and performance with their special-needs kids. Beginning in 2005, researchers from the University of Illinois-Chicago evaluated how participating in Special Gifts affected the way the children interacted with peers, parents, and other people. Results, as published in the professional journal for occupational therapists, OT Practice, revealed that parents found that “their children were exhibiting more social skills: making eye contact, speaking more frequently and clearly, and becoming more proactive when asking playmates to come to visit. Some parents stated that their children were becoming more comfortable with peers, teachers, and others. Parents also noticed that these skills were transferring to school.”

The study was prompted, says Field, when a neuropsychologist called her and said, “Three of my patients are in Special Gifts, and something is happening there. I’m seeing a significant change and the only common factor with these kids is that all of them are in your company. You need to investigate this.”

Field suspects that one reason Special Gifts succeeds is that “it’s fun—it doesn’t feel like therapy.” By having the peer mentors as well as the trained staff and volunteers, kids can get coaching and encouragement every step of the way.

“If the goal is to have a kid use their right arm more, then we’ll have their mentor on their left arm, so they have to use that right arm on stage.”

In production, they’ve come up with creative ways to keep the kids on track, including attaching an invisible fishing line to a kid’s ankle to remind him, with a gentle tug, of when it’s his turn to speak, and spending extra time spiking the set so that the kids, especially the ones with visual-discrimination problems, will know where they’re supposed to stand.

But despite the growing success, Field notes that Special Gifts, like every other theatre company, has been hit by the recession as family foundations have seen a drop in their own investments, and as arts education—even for kids without disabilities—continues to land on the chopping block in public schools. In order to build up the financial reserves, the company is hosting its first-ever gala at the Renaissance Chicago North Shore Hotel in Northbrook on Feb. 20.

“Nothing we do cures anything for kids, but it helps break down prejudices about disabilities,” says Field. “When you come to a production, you see what they can do, not what they can’t do.”