As part of the upcoming Winter Week festivities, Wayland High School is getting ready to present its annual Winter Play Festival. The Festival is a series of 13 short plays or excerpts from longer plays that will take place February 3 and 4 at the high school. All of the plays have been produced, directed, and acted by the students themselves. 

 

The selection of plays runs the gamut from O. Henry to Joss Whedon, with stops along the way at excerpts from Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Pirates of Penzance, and Edgar Lee Master’s Spoon River Anthology. A short play by Wayland High Graduate Mike Miles is also included. Erdftg765Some of the choices are funny and poignant, like the Miles play, Room 12640, which features St. Peter interviewing the recently deceased to see whether they qualify for entrance into heaven. Others, like the James McLure piece Laundry and Bourbon, use the dynamics between three women embroiled in small town life to make points about the larger culture. The Josh Whedon piece, Dr Horrible, is a distillation of his 2008 Internet musical, Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog, which won a People’s Choice Award and a Hugo Award, and has been edited down for the Festival from its original 45 minutes to 10. (See play list below.)

 

Richard Weingartner, the high school’s drama teacher and the producer of its plays, says, “The Winter Week plays are an opportunity for students to use a different skillset and explore the theater from a different point of view. As an actor, you don’t look at the play from the point of view of the audience, but as a director you have to. Winter Week provides the opportunity to learn, to acquire new tools and new points of view, which they can then bring back to their work as an actor.”

 

Spoon River, based on the Masters poems, collectively reveals the lives of a group of small town residents by having them speak their own epitaphs from beyond the grave. In addition to its performance at the Winter Week Festival, Spoon River will also be performed at the annual Emerson College Winter Play Festival which takes place this weekend in Boston. Inclusion in the Festival is an honor, as the process is highly competitive among many high schools in the region.

 

Also new this year is the addition of musicals. “It’s an experiment we’re trying this year,” says Catherine (Cato) Crumbley, who is the stage manager for many of the winter week plays. “Both The Pirates of Penzance and Dr. Horrible will be showcasing musical numbers.” The hope is to add musicals on a regular basis to the Festival repertoire.

 

Winter Week celebrates the end of midterms at the High School. Several days of lectures, fun activities, and a lighter course load mark the end of four days of midterms for the students. “The atmosphere that whole week is a lot of fun,” says Nicole Poirier, who’s directing the Emerson play. “We’ve done the hard part and now we get to relax and have fun and entertain our fellow students.”

 

Performances begin at 7:30 on Feb. 3 and 4 in the High School’s Black Box Theater.  Admission is free, although donations are always welcome.