skygiants | (no subject)

I picked up The Wilder Plot after reading

rachelmanija's review of it - it's a middle-grade book by Stephen Krensky about a high-school production of Midsummer Night's Dream, which protagonist Charlie Wilder has been volunteered for very much against his will. A heated battle for the seat of school president also ends up intersecting with the machinations around the play, thus providing plenty of opportunity for Stephen Krensky to run some mild middle-grade political satire.

It's definitely a funny book, and the Midsummer Night's Dream riffs are extremely cute, although I had a hard time getting over the premise, central to many of the characters' activities, that acting in a school play generates valuable political capital among one's peers. Some theater kids were popular, sure -- I have fond memories of the resident Theater Dreamboat, a sweet lad who received love notes on a regular basis, came out in junior year, and concluded his high school career by forming one-half of our high school's first gay power couple -- but I don't think anyone I knew ever tried out for a play on the assumption that it would yield social dividends.

(OK, I lie: we did have one kid in my high school who thought that having made an appearance on an episode of Law and Order was a good argument for his qualifications as a prospective school president. He attempted to make this argument in his campaign speech. We were unconvinced.)

But, I mean, other thing about the The Wilder Plot is that it's the kind of screwball comedy in which all the characters are colliding in entertaining ways due to their own wacky priorities, but nobody is actually friends with each other or acting in the play for fun, and that makes for an entertaining plot but also does not accord at all with my memories of high school theater.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

That's really interesting! I stand fully corrected as far as theater as social capital goes.

(How many plays did you guys do a year, usually? We generally did three - a straight play, a comedy, and a musical -- so there wasn't a ton of down-time between them. I love hearing about everyone's high school theater experiences; it varies so much depending on the culture of the school and the personalities of the people involved in organizing things.)

We did three! A fall play (almost always a comedy) in late October, a children's play in February or so, and a spring musical usually in mid-May, IIRC. But for actors it was usually just a month or so of twice weekly afternoon rehearsals, and then one or two weeks of intense crunch time (I forget what we called it, it wasn't hell week, but similar), and then a couple weekends of performances.

And the children's play was kind of JV - minimal sets and staging, only about an hour long, and by tradition the people being cast as leads in the other two plays didn't audition; it was usually underclassmen and understudies. And we took it on tour of the elementary schools, so all but one of the performances were during the school day.

So other than those crunch periods twice a year, it didn't really take up any more time than other extracurriculars.

It probably helped that there were a lot of support people too - set construction, technical crew, stage crew, costumes, musical director, and student directors were all different people from the actors. I understand that in some schools the actors also have to build the sets, but at ours they only acted.

There was a pretty strict popularity gradient, too - leads/speaking parts; then student directors/choreographers/solo dancers; chorus/extras; costumers; band (who were not The Band Kids because the band director wouldn't let them skip marching practice, they were kids who played instruments but didn't want to commit to Real Band.) And then it started over again with the coolest counterculture kids (punks and goths mostly) as the set/lighting designers; then light crew; sound crew; stage crew; set construction. The set construction were the kids who played 1st edition D&D in their offtime and/or drew their own manga, and they rarely interacted with the lead actors. I made it as high as sound crew at my zenith!

(Note:

stellar_dust, who made it as high as student director, would probably claim she was never a Popular Kid, and that there was no social hierarchy, but she would be wrong. There were plenty of actor kids who would help out with the crew when needed or when not cast, it is true - they weren't the bad kind of popular kid, generally. And there was the occasional kid whose sheer talent - especially if they could sing bass parts - got them a lead role despite not being a standard-issue Popular Kid, or a gothy tech person was given a minor speaking role in the children's play, but even they got that popular kid status for the duration of the play.)

Although I should note that theater was not a stepping stone to being class president or SGA president, but this was not because they couldn't have won, it was because class office and SGA were both way too uncool for theater kids to care much about.

The children's play idea is REALLY cute. We also had full support crews - costumes, props, set, tech - and how much time you spent depended for sure on the crew and the amount of work done; costumes and sets were generally the busiest, and I always did costumes where we tended to be WAY overambitious (our trial by fire was a production of Gypsy where we sewed dozens of stripper outfits by hand) so my perception of how much time we spent on each production is definitely a little skewed. But the actors were definitely there most of the same nights that we were, and often if they didn't have anything to do for their particular scene, they'd wander over and help out the other crews with painting or seam-ripping or whatever and we'd all think more warmly of the as a result.

The actors and producers/directors were also definitely top of the pecking order in our theatrical social strata as well, but we did have a fair bit of crossover between tech/set people and actors because there was a requirement to have worked a certain number of shows in order to officially become a full member of the high school Players organization. So we had a bunch of people who under other circumstances might have only participated if they got cast in something, but instead spent the rest of their time doing props or scenery because they wanted the show hours to count towards full memberships -- and each technical team had a crew head and a designer, and those roles also carried social cachet.