Student Directed Showcase highlights senior talent and vision
Four senior directors presented their 30-minute plays for the annual Student Directed Showcase in the Patil Theater on Jan. 10 and Jan. 11. The directors chosen this year were Ananya Das, Avayna Glass, Leo Sobczyn and Hannah Streeper.
Student directors spent their high school years acting and observing the process of putting shows together. After watching their first SDS in first grade, Avayna hoped to become one of the student directors.
“Since I was literally six years old, I’ve been in love with the idea of directing something, and I wanted to create an art piece that was mine,” Avayna said. “I wanted to put my vision and my creativity onto a stage, and as I got older and older, I craved being a director more and more. I’m so glad I got to have this experience in high school because I want to go on to be a film director or be involved in directing or producing in some sense.”
The show opened with Leo’s comedy “Math.” Dahlia, played by frosh Amber Wee, struggles in her algebra class in school. When she informs her father, played by senior Shiv Deokar, he starts to campaign against algebra education. After realizing the necessity of algebra, Dahlia has to figure out how to stop her father and reinstate math education.
Ananya’s play, “Bus Stop,” by Kendra Thomas, featured Ava, a foster child played by sophomore Megha Unny. Two other teenage characters, played by frosh Anya Lu and sophomore Laya Sunkara, grapple with accepting a new person into “their” bus stop.
Although Ananya admired the emotional impact of the play, she disagreed with many of its original stage direction. When directing, she made significant changes to the original presentation of the play in order to cater to her own vision.
“I went from square one, just looking at every scene,” Ananya said. “What I ended up doing was dedicating each corner of the stage to a different set and using the lights as my tool to change the time of day and the scenery. I thought everything went super smoothly.”
After intermission, Avayna presented “A Small Wooden Horse,” set in a dystopian society where a machine dictates every person’s life. Lynn Swift, played by senior Caitlyn Wong, challenges the system and wears a wooden horse necklace to symbolize her rebellion.
Because of the serious nature of the play, the actors often struggled to convey the necessary emotion onstage. Through drills that required them to emphasize certain words or speak louder, Avayna encouraged her actors to express the full range of emotions in the play.
“Oftentimes, actors will lean towards being quieter or more closed off in a drama, but you want to make sure that all of your really deep, strong emotions can reflect on a big stage,” Avayna said. “You have to keep those intricate emotions while also making them big enough. That was a challenge, but I think we nailed it.”
Hannah ended the showcase with her comedy, “The Mysterious Case of the Mysterious Case” by Paul Meloon. Using a plethora of puns and dad jokes, the play featured sophomore Omar Khan as a detective tasked to find the missing suitcase of Dinah Mite, played by junior Charlotte Ludlow.
To be selected as an SDS director, students applied and were interviewed to take the Student-Directed Showcase course. The first step in their directing process was choosing their play.
“Going into this process, I really wanted a play that would leave the audience thinking,” Ananya said. “We pulled plays from databases, and we spent a lot of time just reading plays. For ‘Bus Stop,’ the text and its message really resonated and had the biggest emotional impact on me.”
After deciding which play to direct, the directors casted actors, working with each other and performing arts teacher Laura Lang-Ree to develop the show.
“I got to direct alongside my three best friends,” Avayna said. “Working together to build this production made our friendship so much stronger. I was scared at first because I thought mixing business with friendship can be hard, but it worked out really well and I’m really glad that it did.”
Through collaboration with each other and with their actors, the senior directors brought their plays to life. Their attention to detail with the technical and emotional aspects of the plays spoke to some audience members.
“It was really amazing seeing what students can do and how professional it actually was,” audience member Janvi Trivedi (9) said. “They were able to do this at such a professional scale, and it was like going to see an actual show that I would pay double the price for. There were so many people in the cast coming together to make something really cool.”