by Julie Gowel, Marty Green, and Carlene Phillips ·
Friday, November 29, 2024
The Bromfield School put on its fall theater production Friday, Nov 22, and Saturday, Nov 23, in the Cronin Auditorium. Student thespians confused and amused the audience with “Just Another High School Play,” written by Bryan Starchman and directed by Bromfield school psychologist Madeline Price, music teacher Emily Trainor, and chorus director Sarah Rutkiewicz.
The entire drama department faculty is new this year at Bromfield. It wasn’t until two weeks into the school year that Price was in conversation with new middle school principal, Daniel Hudder, and learned the play had no directors. With a background in performing and directing, Price threw her hat in the ring to direct a show. “At first I was a little nervous because the Harvard schools are well-known for their theater program,” said Price. “Some of their kids have gone on to really prominent schools for theater. So I knew it was a big deal.”
Shortly thereafter, Trainor and Rutkiewicz joined Price to create a directing trio, another first for the Bromfield theater world. “The kids were really wonderful. They took charge,” said Price. “They’ve been really patient with us, understanding that we’re new to this. We were surprised by how many parents and community members reached out to us. Even staff and teachers asked, ‘What can we do to help?’”
It certainly takes a village to put on a production with 28 cast members. “Getting organized was our biggest challenge,” said Price. “We didn’t really know where to start. Once we did get the ball rolling, we said to ourselves, ‘All right, we got this.’”
There was a lot of new talent on the stage this year as well, with many middle schoolers playing prominent roles. “There aren’t a lot of high schoolers who do theater. A majority of our cast members have graduated,” said Adelle Besse, female lead in the play and a grade 11 student. “We had a lot of new middle schoolers this year, sixth- and seventh-graders specifically. I really liked getting to know them. Working with a cast as large as we had, getting to meet new people, and helping grow the theater program in our school is something I’m really happy that we did.”
“We were originally going to do a show that we realized wouldn’t work,” said Besse. “We felt that it was best to pivot and find a show that would fit the number of people that auditioned and the different experience levels that we had.”
Choosing a show with very little in the way of scenery and costumes, “Just Another High School Play” was an interesting art-imitating-life-imitating-art production. Besse, who plays a stage manager, and sophomore Rupert Harvey, in his role as assistant director, introduce the plot of the show. It’s a play about a play that takes place on opening night. The directors have fled due to the fact that the actors and stage hands never attended rehearsals so there was no actual show.
The stage manager and assistant director characters decide to use an assortment of scripts that the theater department has lying around to put on a compilation of productions. They assign the cast scenes and the announcer, played by senior Luke Bala, introduces each one. Each short scene is a situation that involves its own cast and has no connection to any other scene. The audience’s befuddlement was a testament to the show’s cleverness and the actors abilities to make a scripted scene feel very ad libbed.
With jokes, puns, banter, and a bit of slapstick humor, the characters manage to eke out a show while interacting with the audience in an effort to “stall,” giving the actors time to “rehearse” their scenes. While the cast shone in their theatrics, Price credits a lot of the success of the show to the students working on the crew. “Our stage manager, Will Stoddard, was amazing,” she said. “We had kids doing the lighting and sound effects. I don’t know what we would have done without them.”
In the end, the audience was treated to a speed-dating approach to the history of theater—Shakespeare, melodramas, and various other takes on improv, monologues and word play. “We started this show really late, but once we got going, everyone gave 110% all of the time to get the show off the ground,” said Besse.