For the 24-25 school year, Midtown introduced a new Advanced Drama class, which focuses on providing students the opportunity to direct and star in plays of their choice. Theatre teacher Jacob Dreiling supervises the class as student directors take the lead.
This year, they have changed their production number from three productions a year to one a semester.
“We used to do Senior One-Acts before [Advanced Drama productions]. Basically, that was two nights, every [senior] director having to do a five minute show,” Dreiling said. “[The plays] were picked out of the advanced drama class, [the students] worked on how they would direct the shows and we did the direction after school. The last Senior One-Acts we did was [a] packed house. We had eight shows and it was a really long evening, but we also had to turn people away at the door or we had parents swap out with other parents so they could see just [their child’s play]. It was a logistical nightmare.”
Following the Senior One-Acts, Dreiling wanted to create a new program that still showcased student-directed shows, but gave them a better spotlight to demonstrate what they had been working on throughout the year.
“The only difference is that all of the work’s happening not after school but in class,” Dreiling said. “It’s all student directed like it usually is with the [Senior One-Acts], except, it’s a cross between the musical theatre production class and the film class. The film class is very much like that where it’s student directed, but they’re writing their own stuff for that whereas this is published stuff, similar to musical theatre production, but the difference is they are student directed.”
This year is senior Lizzie Lyman’s first in Advanced Drama; she is directing one of the shows, “Horse Girls,” alongside senior Zoe Diamond-Wilding.
“I joined Advanced Drama because my friends had talked about it and I had gone to see a few of the shows last year,” Lyman said. “I really liked it because of how student-run and directed it was, but I also specifically was really excited to get an opportunity to practice my directing because one of my possible careers in the future hopefully I’d be doing something teaching theatre so I thought it was a really valuable way to get directing experience.”
When the Advanced Drama class began, the class would work on presenting three plays throughout the year, but due to time constraints, this year the class is working on two plays.
“We had three [plays] before, then we switched it to two,” Dreiling said. “We’re doing an hour and a half long show twice as opposed to an hour long show three times. It’s the same amount of content, just split up differently because we felt like we were really crammed last year as far as time to rehearse three shows. It was just a lot in class.”
Lyman said the new structure of Advanced Drama will make it so that people can commit more fully to the plays and explore their characters.
“I like the new structure of [the class] because I think with two plays you can focus more on both of them and go in depth more,” Lyman said. “I feel like with the numbers in our class, three plays would have been overwhelming, whereas people worked out kind of perfectly for this so everything feels balanced and we don’t feel overworked.”
Because the plays are student-run, the selection process for who wants to be a director, actor or technician is also student-run and is primarily done through student choice.
“To figure out people’s roles in the class, it honestly is mostly preference,” Lyman said. “Sometimes that might not work out but in our class luckily it worked out. So anyone who wanted to be a director would raise their hand and anyone who wanted to do acting or tech, same thing. Because we can only have two acting directors and two overall directors, we would spin a wheel and just decide randomly and luckily that worked for me.”
Junior Reed Flom is also in her first year in Advanced Drama and believes that the selection process is a great way to brainstorm ideas.
“We haven’t really done much right now,” Flom said. “We just did auditions, but I like deciding the plays, collaborating and deciding which ones we were going to do in class and making our own visions.”
In the future of Advanced Drama, Dreiling wants to make sure that the spirit of student production comes first.
“I hope it will be whatever the students make it into,” Dreiling said. “That’s really the reason why we have Coffeehouse, which is also entirely student-run. It’s because we’re constantly tweaking it, constantly deciding what’s going to work, what’s not, that’s the philosophy.
