Senior Shari Gaynes‘ passion is theater. She began acting in sixth grade, when participating in musicals was a “make-friends activity.” She has taken repertory theater (rep), beginning acting and advanced acting in high school, and she wants to audition for shows in college and possibly minor in theater. Gaynes, along with seniors Erica Christie and Amanda Miller, is currently writing an original play about changes in high school. The show will be based off the responses they receive to the email at the bottom of this post, which has been sent to approximately 50 people so far. The show will be performed by the repertory theater class in the Black Box around April or May.

Anyone is encouraged to send their own responses to Gaynes at [email protected].

Q: What is your favorite part of theater?

A: I just like the story-telling aspect of it. It’s just the opportunity to share someone’s story in a physical way.

Q: Do you have a favorite production or memory from a show?

A: “Noises Off” was probably my favorite thus far, just because it was so crazy and hectic and the cast worked really hard together and the show went so well. Before the opening show, the entire cast was backstage —  except Caleb and Brandon because they started sitting in the audience — but we all hummed Shake it Off, and we all danced around for the entire song. We didn’t have the music; we just sang the entire song together really quietly, and the audience was there and the lights were dark. That was a great memory.

Q: Why did you decide to write this original play?

A: Usually years in the past, there have been student directors of shows — so a couple kids would direct a show as a senior project type thing, but it was never an official thing. So this year, Schmidt told Erica, Amanda and I that we could, and he wanted us to, write a play for the rep theater class. Last fall we wrote a play as a class called “Boardwalk Dreams” based on Bruce Springsteen songs, and it went surprisingly really well, so we thought maybe we could just write a play and it’d probably go well? We’re hoping.

Q: How will you use the responses you receive?

A: We’re going to make what people say turn into dialogue and turn into scenes, but I think we’re going to have a lot of monologues based on straight what people said. We’re sort of compiling responses we got that are the same and then separating ones that are different, and then that’ll turn into different characters, and then those characters will interact with each other. We haven’t figured that out yet, but it’s going to tell a story and there’s going to be dialogue, and it will be interesting once we develop it.

Q: Where did you get the idea to incorporate responses from community members?

A: We took this playwriting workshop at the State Thespian Conference in the first or second week of January, and this guy…did this activity with us about devising playwriting. We didn’t know what that meant — we just walked into the workshop — but we learned that it was like “Letters to Sala” [and] “The Laramie Project.” The words that the actors say in the show are based on interviews and court hearings and actual things that people said…so we were trying to write a completely fictitious play from the ground up, but we realized how much work that would be and we didn’t know how that would actually go in the time that we have to write it, so we heard this idea and we did this workshop and we just thought it was a really cool idea.

Q: What inspired the theme of the show?

A: Our super original idea was that we were going to write a play [where] there were a bunch of kids at a party, and the party was going to be a metaphor for high school, and then from the beginning to the end they would have changed, but we could never actually figure out how that would work. So we liked that idea, but we never knew how to actually develop it, so we sort of kept that idea and we’re going to work with it now.

Q: What do you hope that people will take away from the play once it’s finished?

We think at the end we want people to see that change can be good and things get better. That’s sort of an obvious thing, but we understand that not everyone’s going to be ending on a happy note…there’s no exact theme, but it’s just going to be something like change happens, whether it’s for the better or the worse. It’s there, and sometimes you don’t see it, but it’s happening — it’s happening to the people you know, and it’s everywhere, and it doesn’t stop. 

Hello!

Amanda Miller, Erica Christie, and I are writing an original play as a senior project in our repertory theatre class at Blue Valley Southwest. The theme of the show is changes experienced in high school, and we hope to incorporate a variety of different, truthful perspectives in order to tell the story. Here’s where you come in: we’ve come up with 8 different subtopics that we want to specifically explore during the show. With that, we are hoping you can take some time to share a few of your thoughts on the topics below.

You can copy and paste the topics into a new email to me or simply forward the email with your responses filled in. We suggest that you take about 2 minutes per subtopic to free-write your responses (but more or less is perfectly fine). There’s no right or wrong way to do this – thoughts, stories, quotes, anything is welcome. If we incorporate any of your responses into the play, it will remain completely anonymous.

Thank you so much for your time and your voice!

Shari Gaynes, with Amanda Miller and Erica Christie

1. “Parent/Child Relationships”

2. “First Love”

3. “Self-Worth (confidence, body image, mental health)”

4. ”Friendships (and social circles)”

5. “Unknown Futures”

6. “Social Media”

7. “Academic Commitment”

8. “Loss of Relationships”