Madison F. Smith

By Madison Smith
 February 2021 

WILLINGTON- Theater Director and music teacher Jason Phillips told the Board of Education on Tuesday about how the drama club has been able to perform during the pandemic.

“The biggest challenge in the script was how people move on the stage and different settings and stuff. So, the challenge was how do you how do you get the people to move while they are on a Zoom screen,” he said. “The solution we used was adapting some of the movement by looking and reaching through screens.”

What they ended up doing was getting a phone that looked similar and in rehearsal, one person handed the phone to the left so the next person would go to the left and grab the phone to make it seem like they were in the same room. Another trick that they did was to darken the background to make it seem like the actors were in the woods at nighttime.

Since there is currently a pandemic going on,  the students are having to do their performances over Zoom so they are missing the audience interaction that they would have gotten.

“The hardest part is the audience response,” Phillips said. “Normally when you would act you have the audience laugh or clap for you and the difficulty goes both ways. And the difficulty for the kids who are performing is that they are not getting the energy from their parents and vice versa for the audience — they don’t get to interact with the kids as much. So what I have done to alleviate that issue is doing these watch parties.”

During these watch parties the students would act out their scenes in front of their parents and Phillips and they would give applause or laugh at the scene that was going on. This helped the students feel as if they were performing their show in front of a live audience as they would have gotten had there not been a pandemic.

To help the students effectively do a scene together even though they are not in the same room, “the answer is rehearsals, to rehearse and to talk about it. A lot of characters, the kids in past shows have done have each played two characters, and they try to find a way to differentiate between the two,” said Phillips.

Some students have gotten creative with different backgrounds, costumes, and even accents to help the audience realize that the same actor or actress is playing two different characters. With the two different characters, they can have a backstory to help the students come up with the way that they are going to portray each of their characters. The pandemic has made differences between shows that Phillips has done in the past and with the new structure that they are having to perform their plays in.

The difference between the virtual shows and the live shows in the past is that they do not charge for seeing the play. The parents and the family of the actors also do not have to worry about driving out to the school to go see the performance they can just go to the Zoom link that the parents can find in the digital backpack, which is a way to send out important information and events to the parents, and from there the parents can send the link to other family members so they can all watch the performance on the day of the performance.

Upcoming events include a monologue workshop in mid-March and a performance of “She Kills Monsters” in May.