The cast and crew of Bishop Kelly’s Fall Play, Alice; or the Scottish Gravediggers, demonstrate their “General Stupefaction” faces (Bishop Kelly Theater Arts).
Chances are that if you’re a student at Bishop Kelly, you’ve heard of this school’s Theater Arts program. Whether it’s from announcements over the PA before closure prayer, your teachers offering extra credit for attendance of our plays, or hordes of theater kids not-so-subtly advertising our shows, it’s practically impossible to not at least be familiar with our theater. But do you know exactly what theater is and what it means to those who partake in it? Most people don’t give the audition notices and show flyers hung in the hallway a second glance; but theater is, at its very least, a magical art form that deserves an infinite amount of appreciation.
When someone mentions that they’re in one of our shows at Bishop Kelly, do other students truly grasp what that means? From start to finish, casting, rehearsing, and performing a play is an arduous process. First, the director of the show schedules and organizes auditions. Anyone at Bishop Kelly is welcome at these auditions, whether you have any previous experience or not! If you can speak loudly, have a free enough schedule, and put some feeling into a script, you’re more than welcome to audition! Especially if you’re a boy. Boys of Bishop Kelly, this is your sign: Please, please, please audition for our plays! Auditions are usually two hours long and last for two days. There are no sign-up sheets, no audition fees, nothing! You just show up with your schedule for the next two months, a pre-prepared joke, and you’re good to go! During auditions, you’ll be doing cold-reads, which is pretty much just reading scenes from the play’s script with other people. That’s it! You don’t have to memorize a monologue like other theaters require. Neat, right?
After you’ve auditioned, you get to go through the… thrilling experience of waiting for the cast list to come out. This list shows what roles actors have been cast as in the play, and it is agonizing waiting for it to be posted. It can take as little as a day for this list to be pinned to the Drama board in the 200s hall or as long as a week. That’s a long time to wait!
So, assume that you’ve endured the pain of waiting for the cast list, and you finally see a new slip of paper pinned in the 200s hall. You run up to it, and… you’ve been cast! Now what? Well, the Monday and Tuesday after the cast list is posted, all the cast and crew gather for the first table read, which is where everyone reads the full script for the first time and discusses the plot of the play.
Once the table read is over, you rehearse. And rehearse. And rehearse. The average rehearsal period for a Bishop Kelly Play is two months— I hope you didn’t have anything planned! First are blocking rehearsals, where you determine your basic movements onstage. Then you move on to working the show; during this stage, you get into all the fine details of your acting and line delivery. And speaking of lines, I hope you’re ready to start memorizing! The second you get your script, it’s your job to memorize all of your lines as soon as possible. Before long, you won’t be able to carry your script onstage!
Finally, we come to the part of rehearsals that every theater kid dreads: Tech week. Tech week is when all our lovely lights and sound operators come to the theater, and we painstakingly go through every sound and lighting cue in the play. This includes every lightning strike, sunrise, gunshot, cow’s moo, and epic jazz soundtrack that the audience sees and hears. We also work through the logistics of quick changes, props, and set changes. Bishop Kelly’s tech week kicks off with a seven-hour rehearsal on the Saturday before the show—and you wonder why theater kids are never free to hang out on weekends.
But now, you’ve finally done it—you’ve made it through blocking, tech week, and dress rehearsals. Your two months of hard work have led up to this moment: Opening night! With bated breath, you wait behind the curtain as you listen to the audience settling in for the play. A tangible sense of anticipation hangs over everyone in the cast and crew. You know that whatever happens tonight, you’ll get through it together. After a quick “Break a leg” to the rest of the cast, you head out onto the stage to begin your four-day run of the show.
But then, as soon as it begins, the show ends. You’ve completed your four performances, taken down the set, and put away all your props and costumes. Congrats! You survived! You can go back to rehearsals on Monday knowing that you… hang on. You don’t have rehearsals anymore, do you? There’s nothing left for you to do after school except do your homework and catch up on your favorite reality TV show. You should feel happy, right? So why do you miss the show as much as you do?
Post-show depression is real and can be devastating to a theater kid. Think about it: for two months, you’ve worked closely with a group of amazingly talented and funny people, and now you don’t get to spend every day with them. Often, theater kids feel lonely, isolated, and morose after a show has closed.
“So Daisy,” you ask, “If rehearsals are so hard and if you feel so depressed afterwards, why do you still do theater?”
I’m glad you asked, dear reader! Theater means the world to me and thousands of other high schoolers across the country, and here’s why. You get to meet people who share your interests and passions. You have the unique opportunity to form a close-knit community with the cast and crew of your show. Oftentimes, people make lifelong friends in theater. You get to put on a piece of media so unique, so ephemeral, that it can quite literally change people’s lives. That’s all worth a little bit of gloominess after a show’s over, don’t you think?
So for goodness sake, please go watch our plays.
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