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[skygiants]

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.

Comments

[skygiants]

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.