The Advanced Drama class took to the stage in C-16 for their spring play, Play On!, with the opening show on April 25 and further performances from April 30 to May 2. The “show in a show,” created by Rick Abbot in 1996, captures the struggles of a cast preparing for the opening night of a murder mystery play as the playwright interferes with constant script revisions.
Especially relatable to anyone who has been in a production themselves, the play delves into the constant interruptions involved with putting on a play. Characters missed cues, forgot lines, and kindled secret romance while sets remained unfinished, soundtracks got erased, and there were constant script rewrites, all on a tight schedule. Safe to say each character got exasperated at one point or another.
“It was very fun to get to see [that] it ended up kind of being a show within a show within a show during the rehearsal process, because we were seeing kind of mirrors of what’s happening in the show, happening in rehearsal,” sophomore Fiona McGaraghan, who played director Geraldine ‘Gerry’ Dunbar, said.
Act I began on the set of the upcoming murder mystery play called Murder Most Foul, written by the fictional Phyllis Montague, who was played by sophomore Nadia Moehler. Since Montague was not charging royalties, Dunbar had tolerated many rounds of changes to the script already, but that did not make the director any more tolerant of actors’ errors. While the actors were still in everyday clothes, the audience caught glimpses of the various scenes being rehearsed.
McGaraghan had unique blocking, sitting in the audience to view the rehearsals from different vantage points and messing with the unfinished set. They prompted laughs and added an interactive element that drew the audience into the chaos ensuing onstage.
Partway through, Montague made her first entrance, accompanied by groans from the actors. Not surprisingly, she came in with another rewrite, and although the actors first pushed back, they begrudgingly accepted the changes. The first act came to a close as the actors ran the revised scene, but the sound board broke. Technician Louise Peary, played by freshman Lillian Jackson, screamed in frustration in response. With the audience and actors cracking up, the curtain closed to usher in a short intermission.
Act II opened with the actors returning for dress rehearsal in their murder mystery costumes and with a more polished set. With rehearsal time running out, the cast skipped to practicing the final act of the murder mystery, where they discover the famous scientist Saul Watson, played by senior Jasmine Johnson, is a murderer. When Montague accidentally wiped an entire audio track, the actors were left exceedingly irritated and nervous for their first performance.
Concluding the show, Act III featured everything that could go wrong on opening night. The audience, being familiar with the proper versions of each scene by that point, was quick to pick up on the escalating mishaps. Costumes got caught on sets, actors butchered lines, props were misplaced, and Montague, there to watch her own show, randomly crossed back and forth between the audience and backstage. Though the opening night devolved into chaos, the actors took their final bows, closing out the show within a show.
The show presented unique challenges with its repeating scene structure, where the actors’ lines changed ever so slightly upon practicing and performing each scene. “It pushed me to kind of memorize other people’s lines in case someone else messed up. It also pushed me to learn how to do sound cues and tech,” Jackson said.
The Advanced Drama students, who have been gaining skills all year, also took full charge of designing all their costumes, building the set, running all sound and lighting tech, and directing the show.
“I took on student directing in the fall, and I absolutely love it, mostly because the group of people that I’m working with are very patient with a student director and are just so talented, and so it makes my job easy. And I also am obviously trained by our drama teacher,” junior and student director Gracie Johnson said.
“It’s definitely a lot though, like seeing a show in a different way, because I think sometimes when you’re in it, it’s hard to figure out what’s wrong with it because you’re only one small piece of the puzzle. But when you’re looking at the whole picture, it suddenly clicks to like, ‘Oh, this is why I wasn’t getting it earlier,’ so it’s nice to take a step back,” she added.
“It’s honestly kind of the most down to earth show I’ve been in recently. I’ve been in a lot of out-of-this-world productions like ‘Chicago’ and ‘Hadestown,’ and ‘She Kills [Monsters]’ was crazy. So it was interesting to play just a normal person for once,” McGaraghan said.
