On Thursday, January 16th, theatre students from Centreville High School and Liberty Middle School performed their annual winter showcase in the CVHS auditorium. This year’s performance, titled A Night of Mythical Plays, consisted of four student-written plays that each illustrated a popular myth or legend.
The students of Mr. McGee’s advanced theatre class had around a month to write their original plays for the showcase. After assembling into groups, they drafted scripts and gave each other feedback in order to refine their pieces. Only a handful of plays could be selected for the showcase, so McGee took various factors like the piece’s length, complexity, and level of entertainment into consideration.
Hannah Crawford is a senior in the advanced theatre class and worked with Macee Schmidt and Matthew Song to write one of the showcase’s featured plays: From Souls to Stars: A Romantic Tragedy.
“[The scriptwriting process] was a lot of bouncing different ideas off of each other,” said Crawford. “We would read the script aloud to see how it flowed, and we also took critiques from people in our class, heard their thoughts, and made adjustments accordingly.”
While all four of the selected plays were written by students, two of the plays were also student-directed. Em Mullins is a junior in the advanced technical theatre class, and directed a short piece as part of last year’s winter showcase. This year, Mullins was approached by McGee to direct another piece for A Night of Mythical Plays; Mullins chose to direct How the Chicken Crossed the Road, which was written by Bella Labay.
“It’s based on the popular joke, and I chose it because it was hilarious!” remarked Mullins. “I also thought it was really interesting that Bella wrote it on her own, and Mr. McGee gave it a lot of praise.”
Meanwhile, junior Jules Couch is directing the play From Souls to Stars: A Romantic Tragedy. In her words, the play is about “the love between Lyra and Castor, and how they met. Sadly, as most tragedies end, one of them dies.” It reaches a happier conclusion than most tragedies, though. When the two lovers die, they become part of a constellation, so they’ll always be together. According to Couch, the student-written myth was based on the Pisces constellation. It takes a strong-willed director to bring the emotion out of the actors, and Couch remarks on the rewarding nature of her role.
“One of the things I’ve looked forward to the most as a director is encouraging the actors to dig down and truly capture the emotion of the characters,” said Couch. “During one rehearsal, I told Hannah to have more emotion when she was playing Lyra, and she really came at it. She emphasized the things that were hurting them the most.”
With passionate students at the helm, Centreville’s Night of Mythical Plays touched the hearts of audience members. Congratulations to the theatre department for a successful performance!
