The curtain rises for campus theatre students as they will present an 18-40 minute play at Wakeland High School on Thursday to be adjudicated at their annual UIL competition. The contest is held on a single day and open to the public.

“We’ve been working on this show since last spring,” theatre teacher Heather Willingham said. “We found this show after I saw it in a local theatre and fell in love with it and auditioned and started working on the full script and then we cut it down for UIL around Christmas time.”

With five schools competing to advance to the next round, the rehearsals have been intense.

“We are having very long rehearsals,” junior Isabella Knott said. “We’ve been having class rehearsals, basically every time we have class. We’re just preparing after school, doing everything that we can at home. Some schools start at the beginning of the second semester. We started basically since the beginning of the year so it varies for a lot of different schools. It’s very, you start out with one show and you make the necessary cuts to make it a 40 minute show. Ours for example, it’s a lengthy show but we made it into like the standard time and it’s just a lot of rehearsal.”

There are six possible levels of competition: zone, district, bi-district, area, region, and state with only three productions moving on to the next level with only two advancing to  state.

“It would be nice to advance, but in the end it’s a very big bonding experience because it’s a very much of a group effort instead of like just having one lead,” Knott said. These shows are very everyone gets their chance.”

After the awards are announced a judge gives an oral critique to each of the schools.

“Either way, there is a lot to learn from seeing how other schools put on shows, what their techniques are, and comparing it to our own techniques,” junior Emily Degarmo said. “We’ll get a lot of critics from the judges and I just hope that we become a better theatre community because of it, even if we don’t advance.”