When I was in high school, one of the major fall activities in my life was the annual NCTC High School Play Contest. Our drama club participated every year that I was in high school. We never won even though we should have one year. Oh well. I have been thinking about it lately because the current contest is about to finish up its second weekend of preliminaries before the final competition at the end of the month. Of course, these days it's called a festival because that's more PC. Whatever LOL With the competition, you have 45 minutes to put on your show from the time the stage doors open, you get the set put up, do the show, take the set down and make sure everything is out of the theatre. For us, that meant we mostly did cuttings of shows. Rarely did we do a play that was already complete under 45 minutes. Even the one acts that we did had to be edited down.
My freshman year we did two different versions of Midsummer Night's Dream. One focused on the confused lovers and one focused on Bottom and the Mechanicals. I was one of the Mechanicals. The only thing I really remember about that was that the guy playing Oberon forgot his lines during this first entrance and froze on stage. Later in the scene the girl playing Titania bypassed the stage slap and smacked him good. We didn't win that year.
I didn't participate when I was a sophomore. One show was called Laundry and Bourbon and was about 3 southern ladies drinking and gossiping on a hot afternoon. It was a hoot and all 3 ladies were recognized for their acting, one winning best actress. The other was a weird show about rehearsing a play. It actually had some adult overtones that were uncomfortable that the director tried to whitewash but I'm kind of glad I didn't make it into that one. We didn't win that year either.
Junior year we did Mother Hicks and The Arkansas Bear. The Arkansas Bear was a children's show, but I didn't want to be a bear, so I was not in that one LOL Mother Hicks was a show about an old woman who lived in the woods and the young outcast girl and the deaf boy who lived with her. I was in a supporting role in that one. That was a nerve-wracking experience. Like I stated earlier, you have 45 minutes to get everything done. We never did the show under time. We did a pumped up run through in the parking lot before we went on but we were all aware of the strain we were under. Oh, the director in those days could sit up in the booth but that was as close as they could be to participating. Not calling the show from the booth but watching it from there. We were cutting the show as we were performing it and our director was sweating bullets in the booth. Once the show was over, we all waited with breathless anticipation and then screamed when we learned we had finished at 44 minutes and 50 seconds. Whew! We did not win that year either, but we should have. Even the winning high school told us we should have won. Oh well.
My senior year, I was in I Do! I Do! Our director wanted to do a show for me and another senior, Amy Hunt, and he chose this one. The bad thing about it was that the role was not right for Amy vocally. It was written for a belter, an alto, and she was a very lyric soprano. She knew it wasn't right. I knew it wasn't right even though I wanted to work with her. Only the director could not see it and she withdrew from it. Then we got the great Ginger Stegall to step in and her voice was perfect for it. It was a fun experience, but we didn't win that year either.
So, during my four years in drama club, we never won the competition. Oh well. It's kind of like marching band. We didn't win much there either until I was a senior. But I wouldn't go back and change those experiences. They were wonderful and created great memories and friends that have been in my life ever since. Those were very good experiences in a difficult time in my teenage years. I am so glad that I did it.
