One Act Festival Delights and Entertains

Life-Lessons, Fishing, Political Conflict and Time- Travel Take Center Stage

Danny Maguire, Head Editor

This year’s Delbarton Spring One-Act Play Festival was a fantastic evening of entertainment and charm for all involved. Earlier this year, the school selected four student-written plays to be performed on April 7th and April 8th. Following play selection, the writers chose their actors from casting auditions and began rehearsals. Meanwhile, the stage crew, led by Amaan Chaudry ’17 and Mr. Drew Bodd, constructed various sets for each play while organizing lighting, other members of the stage crew included Guy Adami, Milton Zuanic, Ethan Eckert, and Jack Nelson supported the action from behind the scenes.

The faculty moderators for the One-Act Festival were Mr. Chris Pillette, Mr. Greg Wyatt, and Dr. Rachel Carlson.  Although the moderators served as mentors, the key factor to remember is that all of the shows were written, directed and acted entirely by the students.  A special thanks goes out to the actresses from surrounding schools who participated despite the sometimes arduous travel demands.

The four plays were as follows:

Lasrevera by Danny Maguire (myself): This play of mine opens with a somber Shakespearean setting: very reminiscent of the closing, death scene from Romeo and Juliet. However, as the scene seems to end, a stagehand comes on to clear the set. The main character of the Shakespearean tragedy notices and interacts with him. The stagehand (known as “The Man in Black”) lends valuable life lessons to the character (known as “Man”), as he manipulates the stage around him. They encounter a character called Iris from another, entirely different play. One of the main themes of the play is the difference between the character (embodied by Iris, and others from the original tragedy) and the person (embodied by Man and The Man in Black).  The entire and only purpose of my play was to try to teach the audience how to live, and convince them to do so. In fact, at what seems to be the end of the play, I myself took the stage as a “director” character (revealing it all to have been a play within a play within a play), and spoke directly to the audience, telling them that the message was indeed for them.

The Riverside Rift:   co-written by Jaden Buckner and Jack Sameth features two old-school fly fisherman, Rod and Wade, who get a call from National Geographic, offering to make a TV show out of their lives. However, tensions rise between the two lifelong friends when fame gets to Wade’s head. He suddenly shuns friends, caring only about romance, fame, and most of all, money. Eventually, he realizes the error of his ways and reunites with Rod.

Crimea River by Jack Chambers: A first-term college student returns to his family’s home, but this time he has a girlfriend. Unfortunately for him, his mother is a complete control-freak: nothing and nobody is ever good enough for her children.  He also must deal with his younger brother, who he finds has suddenly become a practically-brainwashed communist. To make matters worse, his girlfriend is very anti-communist, as she and her family had to flee the Ukraine when Russia invaded. Conflict ensues, but in the end, all of the family relationships are repaired.

Borrowed Time by Jack Schroeder: This is a play about a young woman named Jenna who has to deal with quite a bit of turmoil. First of all, her ex-boyfriend has been living in her house for months and refuses to move out. Her new boyfriend is has a job and has been offered a chance to study far away, and Jenna is not sure what to do about her future. Suddenly, an undercover and bumbling cop from the future appears and tries to arrest her, accusing her of harboring fugitives she has not even met yet. Eventually, he leaves, and the fugitives do show up, with an undesired bomb. There is a mass confusion about the future, time travel, and how time manipulation affects certain timelines as well as the fabric of the time-space continuum.

All in all, this year’s One Act Play Festival was a hit, and each performance had something different to offer. The crowds came out with more than 400 people seeing the Festival over its two-night run.  If you missed it last week, be sure  to mark your calendars for early April, 2018!