Dozens of local high school students got a firsthand look behind the scenes of Centerstage Theatre’s performance of “El Coqui Espectacular and the Bottle of Doom.”

“Page to Stage” is Centerstage’s yearly effort to bring young people into the process of putting on a stage show. It’s grown steadily since 2018 and drew more than 50 students this year to see a live performance and meet the actors.

Students spent the last four weeks posing questions to the actors of “El Coqui” over Centerstage’s blog — those actors responded in short video dispatches — then piled into school buses for a daytime field trip to the Knutzen Family Theater April 10 to see the show in action.

“El Coqui” concerns comic book artist Alex, who combats writer’s block by secretly dressing up as his creation, El Coquí Espectacular. The play is set in modern-day Brooklyn and features Puerto Rican history and culture and the Latin-American community more broadly. The story is about comic books, but it’s also about universal themes like family and fighting your inner demons, said Trista Duval, artistic director for Centerstage.

The Centerstage production of the show includes an entirely Latino/Latinx and Hispanic cast, Duval said, and the students’ questions after the show touched on everything from acting to identity: How did you get into theater? How do you memorize lines? How long does it take to build the set?

“What do you think of the term Latinx?” asked Felipe Madrigal, a Todd Beamer student.

It’s a term, like “Latine,” that evolved from a desire to create a gender-neutral term for people of Latin American descent, the actors responded — and it’s a word by which some people feel represented, while others prefer different terms for themselves.

The seeds of the Page to Stage program were laid about seven years ago, when current Centerstage board president Mike Brugato had the idea of inviting students to see a show firsthand at the theater and get to meet the cast members.

Duval liked the idea and wanted to run with it. Duval and Centerstage started looking for the barriers keeping kids from coming.

“How do you knock down (the) barrier of kids who don’t have the socio-economic resources to come to a play on a Friday night? You let them come during the school day and bus them in and make it free,” Duval said. “And so that’s what we did.”

In the fall of 2018, she worked with Todd Beamer High School drama teacher Emily Bray to bring one of their classes to a performance, and the experience inspired the kids to write their own show, which they performed at the end of the year.

“There were kids there that had never seen a live theater show in their life, until they came to see the show at our theater,” Duval said.

Bray took that class of around two dozen drama students and has since expanded it to two full drama classes and a musical theater class this year, Duval said.

“The kids are so hungry for the arts,” Duval said. “There was a time where there was there was no outlet for arts for the kids in some of these high schools. And they were so desperate for it that once that door opened, it was like opening a floodgate.”

Plans to hold the program in 2020 were curtailed by COVID-19, and it hasn’t been until this year that Centerstage has been able to pick the program up again.

Centerstage takes the costs of the program on itself and is looking for more sponsors like Marlene’s Market and Asensio Coffee, who support the program, to keep expanding Page to Stage, Duval said.

“We don’t charge the school districts. We don’t charge the kids. … We’re a very small budget, and right now we’re just kind of doing it on faith because we believe that these kids deserve to have this experience.”

Students at the show Monday said they appreciated the opportunity to see the show.

“I like to see representation without it having to feel forced,” Madrigal said. “It’s just about (them), and they’re not trying to push an agenda. … It’s natural.”

REN (the name is legally spelled in all capital letters) Frank has performed on the Knutzen stage before and hopes to continue doing so.

“I love seeing other people perform on the stage because I know how happy it makes me, and I hope the people I see feel that same thrill,” Frank said. “It’s almost like a drug. (Not) in a bad way, but you get that adrenaline rush. That’s what everyone here is chasing when they get on stage.”