Strains of French café music mesh with the chatter of performers as they prepare backstage for the first Student Directed Showcase (SDS) production. Directors and actors alike hurry from one room to the other, some practicing their roles, others gathering to chat with each other.

Having undergone the challenges of preparing D.N.A, The Choice Is Yours, The Shadow Box, and The Madwoman of Chaillot, respectively, this year’s SDS directors Hannah Prutton (12), Lori Berenberg (12), Cecilia Lang-Ree (12), and Cristina Jerney (12), along with their casts and technical crew, were closer than ever to the real performance.

Directing:
Casting

Since both the auditions and callbacks were so short, some directors had difficulty with the casting process. Instead of selecting students based off past experiences, actors were chosen depending on how well their personalities matched their characters’ roles.

“The casting process was difficult and incredibly stressful because you are choosing people for these roles with not very much evidence,” Hannah said. “The way that I looked at it was I wasn’t [thinking] ‘Oh, she’s done a lot before, so she should get the biggest part.’ It was really character-based and if someone fit a character perfectly and they’d already done a lot in the theater program, they would get the character that fit them perfectly.”

Because the four shows were so different, they required different personalities to fulfill the roles. This year’s directors worked well together in choosing actors for their shows, unlike some previous student directors who experienced complications with overlapping cast choices for their shows, according to Hannah.

Challenges

Among the obstacles the directors faced, the two most prominent difficulties consisted of leadership responsibilities and time management, according to performing arts department chair and SDS advisor Laura Lang-Ree as well as technical director Brian Larsen.

“I think it’s the same every year – directing your peers,” Lang-Ree said. “I can’t think of another leadership situation on campus where the peer has to be that much in charge, and that’s hard for anybody, especially teenagers, to allow that trust to happen.”

In addition, the time constraints for show preparation increased the number of tasks the directors needed to complete within a deadline. The production team had only two days to learn their cues, while the student directors and cast also had little time to rehearse, thereby making the directors’ leadership even more crucial to ensure progress.

“There’s generally more time with the spring musical at least. With these, we were dropped in on Wednesday, and the first show is two days later,” deck crew member Jeremy Binkley (10) said.

Props and Costumes

One of the directors’ numerous tasks included choosing props and costumes, for which they found inspiration in internet sources and various magazines.

“We had a budget of $400 for all the costumes and props, and we went out and we shopped around,” Cecilia said. “Some shows did more vintage shopping, some shows went to army surplus stores, some went to normal clothes stores, and it took me about a week to find all of my costumes that I needed for nine people.”

In order to stay within budget, the directors took advantage of the school’s costume closet by borrowing old props and costumes from past shows.

Technical staging:
Lights and Sounds

In addition to the directors’ months of work, the technical crew also played a crucial part in creating the show.

A large aspect of shows that often goes unnoticed is the lighting and sound effects. Though subtle, the successful implementation of stage effects can be attributed to the job of the technical crew. Working from the sound booth at the back of Blackford’s theater, the crew created the spotlight for the performers in the foreground.

“The whole point of our jobs is to help tell the story of the play or whatever we’re doing, so the less people notice us, the better our job has been done,” deck crew member Alex Thomas (10) said.

According to lightboard operator Nicholas Semenza (11), the shows in SDS are low-scale with only 80-100 cues, as opposed to bigger shows, which tend to have upwards of 300 cues.

However, the number of cues in the show did not detract from the excitement the technical crew had managing the effects.

“Part of the fun of running the shows is running the cues,” stage manager Simon Orr (12) said. “The fun part is seeing when that gets [messed] up. If you manage to [mess] it up and nobody notices and everybody thinks it’s perfect, that is fantastic and it’s such a good feeling.”

Set

In comparison to other shows, SDS incorporated platforms and stages that were already in stock or quickly put together as opposed to ones that required months of planning.

“Where [Paul] Vallerga and I get involved in it is helping [the directors] realize what they want up on the stage – getting the set put together, helping coordinate lighting and sound elements,” Larsen said.

Although the directors were not in charge of constructing the sets of their plays, they collaborated with the technical crew to plan out the final design.

“We went through a long and difficult process with Paul Vallerga where we described to him what we wanted, what our vision was, and we had him read our scripts, and we talked about it for loads of time and then he came to us with sketches,” Hannah said. “We looked at those together and kind of analyzed them and ripped them to shreds and started over again and kept going through that.”

After several months of production preparation, the showcase was presented at Blackford Theater on Friday, January 4, and Saturday, January 5.