Tonight, I had the privilege of attending (and informally adjudicating) the 32nd annual presentation of student-written one-act plays at Elliot Lake Secondary School.
Of course I taught at this school for over 3 decades before my retirement 4 years ago. The one-act plays were always a highlight of the year, and for many years I was honoured by the annual invitation to adjudicate them.
For the first 20 years or so, this program took place in the context of the Grade 13 English program. It was a yearly source of amazement to me that these students could write and perform so well, since most of them had never been on a stage before and none of them had ever written a play before!
With the removal of Grade 13 from Ontario's curriculum, the program migrated to the Grade 12 dramatic arts class. So now the students have had experience with acting but still have (for the most part) never written a play!
It's a requirement of the course that each student has to write a play. The class goes through a series of workshop sessions covering the ins and outs of play writing, and the significant differences between a theatrical play script and the shooting script for a television show or movie. The writers develop their ideas through this process, workshopping their scripts through several versions as they go. In the end, a small group of four plays are chosen, based on such factors as size of cast and stageability (an important consideration in a small studio theatre that used to be a technical shop room!).
At that point, the authors of the chosen pieces become directors and have to cast their shows from the remaining members of the class. As the program has gotten smaller with the school's declining enrolment, it has sometimes been necessary to have some people appear in more than one play, or to bring in a few outside students (usually those with acting experience) to round out the companies. Finally, after some weeks of rehearsing, the time has come for the plays to be presented to an audience for two nights.
Part of the fun of attending this event is that you never know what to expect. Young writers have such vivid imaginations that they can dream up the most surprising scenarios and characters. While it's true that the material is sometimes derivative in some ways, there are very few writers who haven't had to battle that tendency in their early years. What counts is the personal "something special" that these writers bring to their ideas and materials. All of this year's writers showed considerable potential.
To take this year's plays in the order they were performed:
[1] Not What It Seems (by Nathan Huff). This was a comedic take on the classic murder mystery. The play begins with a scream in the dark, and ends with an unresolved question as to what really happened. Very clever plotting here, and some ingenious twists and turns. The performance made very good use of the multi-area stage, and generated plenty of giggles. In this first play of the evening there were some audibility issues and some too-rapid speaking that caused lines to be lost (but all the plays suffered from these issues from time to time).
[2] Cheque Please by Ricki-Lee Scheck. This play featured the unending romantic upheavals of Dan, a young man who endures a series of three catastrophic blind dinner dates. He made a funny but sympathetic character with plenty of comic bewilderment to lead the laughs, and the three dates were beautifully differentiated -- although all three were uniformly wacky. The sole waitress who keeps reappearing in all four restaurant scenes comes across as a kind of comical Greek chorus, commenting sardonically on Dan's misfortunes.
[3] The Monsters Inside by Rian Porter. In contrast to the other plays, this one was deadly serious -- an unnerving psychodrama. I would classify it as a "chiller" rather than a "thriller". At a key moment about 2 minutes in, you realise which one of the characters is going to die, and it's just a question of "how?" and "when?". As the play progresses you then realise further that the answer to "when?" is simply "Whenever the psychopath gets tired of playing the cat-and-mouse game." Larysa Pye was absolutely terrifying in the role of the psychotic Bethany. Her every word was pointed with menace, her facial expressions composed of 101 smiles that were no smile at all. For me, this was the one acting role of the evening that stuck out as a 110% convincing performance. I hope Larysa plans to continue her involvement in theatre!
[4] Pig in a Blanket by Brooke Macdonald-Talbot. A hilarious tale of a contract hit gone horribly wrong in the Montreal Mafia. There were comic moments aplenty from all of the cast as the tale unfolded. For me this was the strongest ensemble acting of the evening. This was also the play that made the best use of all the multiple levels of the stage. It was a stroke of genius to have the mob ruled by a Godmother, dressed in the highest of 1920s high style -- all she was missing was a foot-long cigarette holder to make the look complete.
One thing is for certain: I enjoyed the evening enough, between bouts of note-scribbling for my adjudication afterwards, that I'm absolutely looking forward to seeing them again tonight -- in the role of pure audience, just for the fun of it!
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