TMSS drama students play it up

Grades 6 to 9 drama students at TMSS came up with a class act for their end-of-year production, “Inside a Middle Years Play Festival.” Under the guidance of TMSS teachers Linda Aspen-Baxter and Leslie Fenton-Irving, the students adapted a play, rewriting about one third of it to make it more suitable to their needs.

“Inside a Middle Years Play Festival” was the perfect choice for these young students to explore acting because it dealt with subjects they are familiar with – school, friends, teachers – yet allowed them to diverge from them by creating new characters for the story.

"The Preppies" discuss the play they are rehearsing

The premise centred around three high school drama groups, all as different as chalk and cheese, which enter into the same drama festival. Of course the “play within a play” is a popular dramatic device that allows meta-layers of characters and storylines, and in this case provided just the right vehicle for the students to do that.

And just like the Middle Years (MY) Drama Club worked with Aspen-Baxter and Fenton-Irving in preparing the play, each group in the play worked with a “teacher” to prepare their play for the competition. These roles gave the three students who played the teachers (Chandra Wassill as Mrs. Hockenschmoss, Janelle Mayerle as Mrs. Mellencamp, and Danielle Norris-Pott as Mrs. Grubowski) a chance to mimic stereotypes in order to make their characters plausible and humorous. Although each one was successful in her attempt, Janelle Mayerle’s role as the flaky, artsy teacher can be singled out as the funniest.

"The Artsies" get instructions from their flamboyant teacher

The set was surprisingly simple, yet met the needs of the script to a tee. The stage was divided into three parts that used the same idea structurally, but in different styles to represent the three groups. Each section had a set of black cubes that served as seats or props, and a column or partial wall painted to illustrate the style of the group (preppy, artsy, and metalhead), with the traditional theatre masks painted on them.

As the climax builds, and the moment of the competition arrives, each group goes through their play in accelerated motion. This approach was funny enough in itself, but when the “Artsy” group performs a fast-speed version of “Kabuki Lear,” drama becomes comedy as all the characters are either killed off or kill themselves, and the stage floor is strewn with bodies within the space of scarcely a minute.

The play ends in disappointment for each of the three groups, as none of them are the chosen winners in the play festival, a humbling moment for each group that was sure theirs was going to win.

It’s a bit like a moral in a fable, and what the narrator (Laney Yarycky) says at the end sums it up nicely, “And that’s it. We show up, we do our play, and we hope we don’t get crushed. And if we do — well — at least we learned and shared…”