By Gil Alon
The Student Directing Festival is coming to the lab theater at Newton South, April 29, 30 and May 1st. Auditions will be held in February in the auditorium, along with the auditions for Macbeth.
Rebecca Williams, Yasmin Yacoby, and Samuel Fidler, all seniors, are busily preparing for their directed or original plays to take the stage.
Williams is directing a show called Park Angel, by Isaac N. Perelson, while Yacoby and Fidler are writing their own original play, called The Nelson Family Thanksgiving.
Park Angel is a story of a boy dealing with loss through his unusual coping mechanism: talking to a forty year old stranger on a park bench.
Williams’ preparation before the casting and directing process begins consists of reading her play multiple times to further analyze the text.
“Honestly I’ll just read my play over and over again because every time I read it… I get more from it,” Williams said.
Williams hopes that while directing her play, she will manage to create an open and comfortable environment where ideas will flow freely through her and her actors.
“There are directors who have a set vision and to some extent I have a set vision of how the play will look and what I want the audience to get from it, but I plan on being very open to… my actors interpretation of the script” Williams said. “They are new brains and would think of things I would never think of. I think it is really important for me to create an environment where they feel comfortable to say: ‘here’s what I think this means,’”.
The second play, written by Yacoby and Fidler, discusses issues that high school students might not be as familiar with. The play is one act focusing on a family’s Thanksgiving.
“A family gets together for Thanksgiving and secrets unveil, relationships crumble, and we will see will happen from there,” Yacoby explains.
With the unique challenge of writing their own play, Yacoby and Fidler seek advice by working with multiple people, such as previous directors, to assist them and give them feedback.
They plan to discuss how to handle the casting and rehearsal schedules further in the future. For the directing part of their play they plan to focus on bringing the characters to life.
“I plan on analyzing actors and really sitting down and getting to know each of the actors, [as well] talking to Sam a bit about how he imagined the actors coming to life. So I can help the actors that we will cast get more familiar with who they are embodying and how they are embodying them and what kind of situations they are put in,” Yacoby said.
