By Abby Lass
Editor-in-Chief
This past Thursday through Saturday, South Stage hosted its annual Student Directing Festival, which saw the world premier of the student written one-act, Hannah.
South Stage has had its fair share of student written material over the past few years, covering everything from family upheaval to zombie to invasions to a sex robot revolution, but this production, written and directed by senior Emily Snider, was the first to focus on the life of an average teenage girl.
Hannah follows the title character (played effortlessly by junior Tema Siegel) as she navigates friendships, unwanted advances, overprotective parents, and every other struggle that comes with being a high school student.
This play is anything but subtle. From costumes calling out nameless extras (junior Matty King sports a “Random Stupid Student” t-shirt) to sets that forgo posters for subtext (“Another book about an old white man and a river” hangs in the English class; “Hannah, have you STILL not talked to your mother about birth control?” in the doctor’s office), Snider calls out the often ridiculous reality young adults are forced to endure in the most hilarious way possible.
Through Hannah’s eyes, we watch as the well-meaning-but-often-incompetent adults in her life become caricatures. We see Hannah’s feminist literature teacher (the zany sophomore Katy Ronkin) throw herself at a male student (the endearingly earnest junior Noah Weisskopf) and praise him for saying that men and women are equal– a point Hannah just brought up– and roll our eyes as Hannah’s mother (the ever-smiling, Lululemon clad junior Aviva Rosenberg) and doctor (the perfectly cringeworthy senior Phil Batler) jokes about how kids these days are such narcissists for sucking up all the unwanted attention they receive. These interactions are clearly farcical and heightened to an unreasonable extreme, but they also strike a chord.
Hannah taps into the sense of guilt that everyone feels when they’re forced to choose between their happiness and someone else’s. It plays on female shame and male entitlement (senior Patrick Gloria and junior Naomi Honig have a brilliant exchange about what “nice guys” supposedly deserve, and whether or not they even exist) without ever going so far as to buy into overused tropes.
The show is blunt but never preachy. It’s a new look at one of the oldest and most overdone storylines in existence and screams for people to acknowledge how absurdly teenagers, particularly female teenagers, are portrayed in the media. It forces you to acknowledge the water that you’re swimming in, maybe even drowning in, and makes you pray that there will be more material like this circulating by the time you have teenage children.
