By Neil Offen

noffen@heraldsun.com; 419-6646

DURHAM -- Angela Williams was still wearing her security guard uniform, although it was a Tuesday and she works her 12-hour security guard shifts Monday, Wednesday and Friday.

Instead of patrolling a building, Williams was sitting cross-legged as part of an unwieldy semicircle on the floor of the auditorium stage at Durham Tech's Educational Resources Center building.

"I knew I was going to prison," she said, her voice projecting into the audience. "I had 11 whites and one black on that jury."

Williams wasn't speaking about herself. Like the other 20 students in Tracy Francis' oral interpretation class, she was reading lines from "The Exonerated," which dramatizes the stories of six people wrongfully convicted of murder, in preparation for the staged reading of the play the class will do next month.

"I took the class because I needed it for my humanities requirement," said Williams, who is also a full-time student at the school, when she stepped away from the stage. "But really, I took it because I was kind of shy. I didn't like to speak up. This pulled me out where I could be myself."

The Durham Tech drama program -- one of the few at a community college in the state -- provides more than a few roles for its students; it offers a panoply of experiences for a widely divergent student body.

"For some, it shows them that the theater can be a viable career," said Francis, the school's one-man drama department who has been doing it for five years. "For others, it helps them with their self-esteem. But for many of them, it's just an opening on a world they didn't know."

Francis teaches oral interpretation in the fall and a class in play production in the spring, along with several developmental reading classes. He stages a large production in the spring, several smaller ones in the fall and regular poetry readings throughout the academic year.

Unlike more traditional drama programs at four-year schools, Francis must cope with a student body that ranges from teenagers right out of high school to seniors citizens back in school after many years. He also must deal with students who frequently have significant commitments -- like full-time jobs.

"These aren't your typical drama students," Francis acknowledged. "I've had students who are 16 and some who are 55. They have lives outside the schools and various levels of talent. They have different levels of maturity, too. You'll get two or three each semester who are just brilliant and others who have never done this before. You adjust."

Francis estimates that only about 10 percent of his students have had any previous drama experience.

"I was a little embarrassed the first time I had to read lines," David Murray, one of the students in the oral interpretation class, admitted. "I had never done it before, and it was a challenge."

Jasmine Jones, also reading from "The Exonerated," did have high school theater experience. But she was hesitant at first to join the drama program because it's her first semester at Durham Tech and she felt she needed a period of adjustment.

"But I'm really glad I'm doing it," Jones said. "I want to go into theater now, theater education."

Some of the students do. When Christine Wright came to Durham Tech, she hadn't been in front of an audience since seventh grade. But "Tracy's class reminded me why I wanted to pursue dramatic art for a living," said Wright, now a part-time student at UNC Chapel Hill and a dramatic arts major. "Tracy's class meant the world for me. It changed my life."