This year the drama club will present “The Trap” for the fall play. The show will be held on Nov. 8 and 9.
Behind the scenes many students and adults are working to make the show a success.
“Last year’s fall show, I had tissues all over the place,” assistant drama director Michele Dugan said. “I had tissues in my bag. I had tissues in my purse. They were stuffed everywhere because that show made me cry every single day. I’m not a crier, but that show was just so emotionally poignant, and I would walk out of the practice exhausted. I don’t think I’m going to have that [this time]. It’s a different kind of emotion. This is a suspenseful kind of keep-you-on-the-edge-of-your-seat show, and I’m going to be really interested in watching the audience put the pieces together as the kids are going on. As we get to the end of the show, I’m sure we’re going to see people start to look around at each other like, ‘Oh my gosh, oh my gosh, this is happening to us.’ So I can’t wait to watch the audience. For me, I don’t have tissues everywhere this year, which is good.”
This year’s production is like something that the school has never seen before. Each year, drama director Ben Cossitor tries to do something innovative to keep people on their toes, whether that be with the emotions the audience feels or how the cast and crew feel.
“It’s told like a documentary, almost,” Cossitor said. “So in the different scenes and things that you go through in the show, a lot of times the actors are talking to the audience. It’s kind of breaking the fourth wall, and then that kind of leads you up to where they are telling you the story, and you find out exactly what happened to the people in that theater.”
This year the drama directors have a larger senior cast to work with for the 2024 play
“We have a lot of upperclassmen this year,” Cossitor said. “We’ve been through this before. Each class is different and we have a different group of people. So when the seniors graduate, we’ll obviously miss them, but we’ll also have a young group that will come in. Because we have so many seniors, we had a ton of underclassmen that came out and we didn’t have a part for them next year. We might have more younger, ninth and 10th graders in the shows than we were able to do this year. not necessarily a bad thing. It can be good because we’ll get more classes involved.”
While the directors run the show during rehearsals, the stage managers are keeping the cast in check while putting on the show
“We all have our scripts that we use to mark things like when something has to fly onto the stage,” stage manager Laila Wilkinson said. “There are typically two managers on each side of the stage and we use coms to communicate with one another during the show so we know what one and other are doing. Making sure the sets are coming in on time can be a difficult thing at the start but once the stage managers along with stage crew and run through it a few times, we get the hang of it making sure everything runs smoothly.”
