A play in the making

By Sascha Zimmar and Abbie Lorenson

Acting is a great way to learn important life skills, but staging a play like Shakespeare's A Midsummer's Night's Dream takes a lot of work. It requires just a few simple components: actors, time and a well-written script. It also requires compromise.

Staying in the director's good graces is the first step on the long and sometimes painful road to an amazing drama production. Finding agreement is not always easy, but remaining flexible is needed to achieve the common goal of a great production. This can be painful, but it taught all of the students how to compromise and to accept the important lesson that life is not always fair.

It's easy for the cast members to waste time during rehearsals, but in the end we've learned that procrastination hurts everyone. Most student actors need encouragement, and we learned that the greatest encouragement for us is the thought that the audience will be hanging on our every word.

Without a story to tell and actors to tell it, there can be no play. If our play is to reach its full potential, the story has to hold the attention of the audience. The most import job we actors have is convincing both the audience and the other actors that we are our character.

Staging a play has been a lot of work for us; it takes lots of time, and it can be frustrating. Over all, however, the experience is a great one; it helped us improve our public speaking and presentation skills. By being a part of Explorer West's Drama Program, we learned things we've needed to learn and been asked to remember some lessons we might want to ignore. Drama at Explorer West is something we'll always remember!

Sascha Zimmar and Abbie Lorenson are eighth graders at Explorer West Middle School.