Setting The Stage For Something New At NHS

By Shannon Hicks

The drama department at Newtown High School is trying something different this year for its fall dramatic production. Rather than going with one traditional-length play, Drama Club advisors have allowed three students to take the directing helm, with each student responsible for the presentation of a one-act play.

The result will debut for the public this week at Newtown High School, with opening night on Thursday, November 18, for Three One-Act Plays. Performances continue on Friday and Saturday, November 19 and 20. Opening night will begin at 7:30 pm; curtain for Friday and Saturday is 8 pm.

Student directors, actors and crews are in final preparations this week for three performances of The Devil and Daniel Webster, The Ventriloquist’s Wife and Happily Never After.

Last May, Drama Club advisors decided to present a trio of shorter plays instead of the traditional full dramatic production usually presented in the fall (the club’s spring presentation is usually a musical). Advisors Tom Swetts, Ann McNulty and Anne Wheaton, along with Drama Club student presidents Tracy Mulholland and Ryan Braun, announced an application process for would-be student directors.

About a half-dozen students applied, presenting the committee with three copies of their proposed play scripts, their own synopses of their selected plays, expected budgets, crew heads, and set designs. The students were also challenged with explaining why they felt the show they chose would be appropriate for a high school production and the intended audiences, and why they felt they would be good as directors.

The selected directors are NHS senior Elana Bertrum (The Ventriloquist’s Wife), NHS junior Deirdre Dougherty (The Devil and Daniel Webster), and NHS junior Erin Zaruba (Happily Never After). The girls ran auditions for the plays in mid-September, but have been conducting rehearsals separately ever since for their respective plays.

“We usually get less interest in fall dramas than spring musicals, so I think the advisors were willing to take a chance with the one-acts and give us the chance to be even more involved in their presentation than usual,” Erin Zaruba said this week.

“I think it’s been a real learning experience for the student directors,” Anne Wheaton, one of the Drama Club advisors, said this week. With just a few days left before opening night, Mrs Wheaton added, “It will of course be interesting to see how things come together, how everything gets polished up, for opening night.”

The student directors are working chiefly with the casts of their plays. Each one-act play has its own stage manager, who is handling the technical crews for the productions.

Happily Never After, the play Erin Zaruba is directing, is a work by the playwright Tim Kelly. The action takes place in a marriage counselor’s office. The marriage counselor is actually the man responsible for writing most of the world’s fairy tales, explained Erin, and he is suddenly deluged with visits from a number of the characters he has created.

Their problem? The characters — including Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella and the Frog Prince — are no longer satisfied with the “…and they lived happily ever after” endings the writer/marriage counselor has written for them. Not enough definition, they tell him. And so the marriage counselor attempts to re-write some of his masterpieces…

In The Devil and Daniel Webster, from a novel by Stephen Vincent Benet, Jabez Stone has encountered the Devil years after selling his soul to the cloven-footed fiend. Newly married, Stone is not ready to keep his end of the bargain, and so he hires Daniel Webster to defend him against the Devil in a court of law.

And in Charles Ludlam’s The Ventriloquist’s Wife, Elana Bertrum is directing a three-person cast of characters, consisting of a bad stand-up comedian who is trying to break into showbiz, the dummy he purchases (which turns out to have a macabre mind of its own), and the would-be comedian’s wife.

“We ran the auditions together, but then split up to run our own rehearsals,” Erin Zaruba said. _“But now we’re coming back together in order to piece the show together.”

Performances will be at Newtown High School, 12 Berkshire Road in Sandy Hook. Tickets, $10 for adults and $6 for students and seniors, can be purchased at the door.