DIRECTOR’S NOTE

Thank you all for coming out to support live theater! Over the past six weeks we’ve guided these students through a compressed process of staging a play, from the inception of an idea through playwriting, feedback, and rewrites, to auditions, rehearsals, tech, and performances. It’s been a wild and fast ride and we are incredibly proud of everyone involved.

The festival model allowed us to develop a cohort of directors and playwrights who spent the first two weeks workshopping their pieces. By reading and responding to each other’s work, we were all able to benefit from respectful but challenging feedback that elevated the work of the collective while creating and maintaining a safe space to bring ideas.

The winter production spot has always been a place in our season where we can experiment, take risks, play outside the box, and gently push beyond the traditional forms of theater our students may know. We strive to create a wide range of experiences for our students throughout their years at RAHS. Crafting a festival is a unique challenge in and of itself for all involved. When we started out in early January, we didn’t know how many plays or directors we would have, let alone what the title of many of those scripts were!

Providing scaffolding for students to develop into roles of artistic leadership and fully realize their creative ideas is something students have been asking for and it continues to be a unique component of RAHS Drama. It requires patience and boldness while forging one’s own path, the ability to be comfortably uncomfortable in the face of the unknown, and the agility and resilience to dodge curveballs and embrace failure as part of the creative process.

We hope you enjoy these new plays from this group of emerging young artists.

Dudley and Kaitlen

Learn more about RAHS Drama at: https://sites.google.com/apps.isd623.org/rahsdrama/