Student Directed Scenes (SDS) is an annual winter theater event in which students from the two-term Directing, Honors class display the skills they have learned through individual, independent pieces. Student directors cover all the responsibilities of a theater production manager, including casting actors, selecting music, and managing lights. Four of six of this year’s directors give a glimpse of what to look forward to.
Krystal McCook ’20 is directing Odd Couple by Neil Simon, a play spiced with dark humor and dramatization of small events.
“It’s about this group of friends and their dynamic with each other,” McCook said. “There are two main characters, Oscar and Felix. Since Felix’s wife is filing a divorce, Felix plans on killing himself, but Oscar doesn’t believe him. So the story is basically them going through a journey on how to deal with that.”
Although there are allusions to difficult themes in the play, such as suicide, McCook said that the scene is almost a satirization of melodramatic people who overreact to situations.
“At first, I was a little nervous to do it because suicide is obviously a very sensitive topic. But I think it’s different because it takes a dark topic and brings it to life, not in a mean or dark way. Felix isn’t seriously depressed — he’s just dramatic. It’s supposed to be funny.”
Wilson Wang ’19 is directing an excerpt from Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett, a play that Wang deemed “impossible to summarize.”
“It’s about these two characters, Vladimir and Estragon, waiting for this man called Godot. It’s this scene where they encounter two men, a master called Pozzo and a slave called Lucky.”
“This play discusses absurdism in ways that are difficult to comprehend,” Wang said. “I would say that a lot of the scenes that I’ve seen are easy for people to grasp the meaning of, but mine is somewhat haphazard. It’s all about the meaninglessness and repetition in this scene, so even finding meaning is meaninglessness.”
Clay Zachary ’19 is directing The Wedding Story by Julianne Homokay, a play that features characters that break stereotypes for “grooms” and “brides.”
“In this play, this guy is trying to tell this love story to two kids, but he is trying to go for prototypical fairy tale gender roles. The actual couple in the story is really the exact opposite of what he says, so they’re getting upset because he’s not telling their story right.”
“The play is so powerful, especially right now, there’s a lot of talk about women’s roles,” Zachary said. “Back in the day in fairytales, the women were all just damsels in distress, and only the men were powerful. But I feel like, in this piece, it’s very impactful that the woman is the strongest character on stage.”
Ethan Luk ’20 is directing an act from the play Eurydice by Sarah Ruhl, a play that adds a twist to the original Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice.
“Eurydice is based on Orpheus and Eurydice, the Greek myth, but it’s told from the woman’s perspective instead, and there’s a few characters that aren’t in the myth,” Luk said. “Greek plays are normally very wordy and dense so they’re always considered very boring and convoluted. However, this one is much simpler, and more modern and minimalist than a traditional Greek play.”
Luk described the experience of being a student director for SDS as “literal chaos”.
“It’s the most chaotic thing you will ever experience because you only have a few weeks to pull a whole show together,” Luk said. “Specifically for SDS, you’re not just a director; you’re the lighting designer, you’re the sound designer, you’re the costume designer, you’re the composer… you’re doing every single role possible, but you only get credit for being the director. It’s a lot to handle.”
The hard work put in by these directors, as well as by Tyler Redlitz ’19 and Grady Bohen ’19, will be showcased to the community today, Friday, January 25 and tomorrow, January 26.
