A month ago, the Conservatory premiered the annual Student Directed Showcase. The directors, seniors Isabella Ribeiro, Mariana Rai, Selina Xu and Sonya Apsey, each selected and produced four one-act plays in conjunction with a semester-long Directing course. In this Director’s Roundtable, Aquila sits down with the four directors to reflect on their experiences and takeaways from the experience.

First organized by K-12 Director of Performing Arts Laura Lang-Ree in 2005, SDS grew from a show hosted in a local restaurant to a production featuring over 50 cast and crew this year. These four seniors were selected in the spring of 2023 and began auditions in October. Isabella, director of Alan Haehnel’s “Perfect,” struggled with picking her script and recalls her time spent searching through Lang-Ree’s closet full of plays.

“I had to cycle through so many because I really wanted to find that perfect play that I really resonated with,” she said. “And it took me like a good, I want to say, three weeks. And I just remember reading my play and literally crying when reading it and I was like, ‘Yeah, this is the one.’”

Each director then fleshed out their plan for their show, whether it be by drawing or textual analysis. Sonya reread Don Zolodis’s “The Audition” until she began to develop an ideal image of the show. This mental reference helped her during rehearsals, but also presented challenges with perfectionism.

“For me, it took a lot of visualizing and just sitting with the actual text,” Sonya said. “For myself, it was a little bit hard to get it of my head and onto a piece of paper. But once I was able to do that, I was able to pinpoint specific things that I really liked about an actor’s choice or a set piece, and that really resonated with my image. I just slowly but surely pointed those things out and gathered them all together.”

Though they expected an ease-in at the start of the semester, the directors were instantly confronted with the pressure of heading SDS. In Directing, they used each other as boards to bounce ideas off of, sources of advice and friends to turn to, something Selina valued as she put Lindsay Price’s “Pressure” together.

“I think we all had some pretty big obstacles throughout the process,” Selina said. “Just having other people to lean on and even just giving each other a hug or talking through how to deal with these obstacles in class, I think I really would not have survived this process without having that support system.”

For all the directors, performance nights realized the months of work and bonding they and their casts dedicated to SDS. Mariana values the bond formed between the “Lockdown,” written by Douglas Craven, cast, which persisted even after Showcase.

“I would say my cast, they synergized,” Mariana said. “I think of course we got closer throughout the process, but by closing night we were all just [in] tears. All nine of us, or ten including me, we’re all there just sniffing each other’s sweat and tears. Just like ‘We did it!’ It was the most genuinely proudest moment of my entire life. I have no words.”