Directing the Senior Showcase

Lety M. is a member of Coral Reef Drama's 2009 graduating class.
This piece has been edited for style standards and clarity.

Directing the senior showcase was definitely the highlight of my high school theater “career.”

Although I had directed a lot of small pieces for competition and other shows, I don't recall the pressure of the final product falling on my shoulders quite as vividly as I recall this showcase. You see, for years, my class had whined that we were never given anything of value to perform and this was why, allegedly, my class was undisciplined. I knew this was false. I knew my class lacked discipline and motivation because of the members it was composed of, not because of external sources. You could have put my exact class at our “competitor” high school (I say “competitor,” but really, they were bounds better than us), and they wouldn't perform any better. It was a combination of the people in the class sprinkled in with an apathetic demeanor culminating throughout the years.

I digress, the showcase was something we got to create ourselves and therefore there was no one to blame but us. However, instead of doing a normal showcase with individual pieces and no throughline, I decided to complicate a rather uncomplicated thing and create mini storylines that somehow were all supposed to complement each other or play part of a larger nonexistent theme. I also had to play nice because I was just a student, not the teacher. So I couldn't be an authoritarian and say “this is precisely what we are doing” or else no one would listen. I would lose the class. So I had to let people think they were active participants in the roles they played and the pieces selected. Obviously, this turned into a mess. Three students decided to dance to the first 16 seconds of Chicago for no reason. Another student decided to sing a song from Fame that had nothing to do with anything, and so on and so on. Two boys decided to do a scene that made absolutely no sense, either standalone or as part of a collective showcase. I had people who couldn't sing deciding to do so for the first time in four years! I had others deciding they could dance when they couldn't. Envision a ragtag mess of people gathered together, springing ideas off one another, and me receiving them and trying to integrate them at 17 years old without the benefit of a theater degree, proper training, or faculty support.

Looking back, I took myself quite seriously. I was always screaming at my classmates for their somewhat age-inappropriate tendencies. I was always frustrated that I felt I was ready to work and they weren't. It created a superiority complex of sorts. Maybe I should have chilled out a bit because, after all, nothing we did in high school had any bearing on real life. All the stress, panic attacks, and even legitimate chest pains that I endured were… well, pointless.

If I could go back now and redo my high school senior showcase, I would in a heartbeat. I would first chill out completely and not spend hours fighting with my class to listen, pay attention, stop rolling on the floor, stop touching each other. And I would have jumped into the madness. Why shouldn't I have been rolling on the floor in a blanket during class time when that was permitted, and to some degree, fostered at my high school? Why shouldn't I have spent time thinking about boys I liked, or who liked me, instead of stressing a showcase that no one would ever remember? I am sure if you ask an audience member of that performance to name one thing about the performance other than the fact it was bad, they couldn't. No one remembers. No one cares. However, I can't go back and redo it, but I can learn from it. I didn't realize at the time how special the relationships we had all formed were. I didn't realize that I would never be in a time and place where that could be fostered so organically ever again. I would spend my twenties searching for that large group dynamic and never again would I find it. It was a special time and although I don't think most of us were particularly talented individually, as a group there was something special.  ❒

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