“Reviving Ophelia” takes the spotlight in UIL One-Act competition
Former Redhawks Rachel Van Meter UIL One Act competition, with seniors Isabell Kott and Emily Degarmo. The cast and crew will be heading to Lebanon Trail Wednesday, to show off their work, and compete with other companies from across the district.
March 4, 2020
Ready to show off their skills and perform Reviving Ophelia, theatre is competing at Lebanon Trail High School on Wednesday in the opening round of the UIL’s One-Act Play contest.
“Reviving Ophelia is about these four girls: Dawn, Lia, Allie, and Jill and what they do throughout their lives and the effect of technology on them,” sophomore Ava Appel said.
Sophomore Connor Burk, playing Alex Perry, thinks that this show differs from other theatre productions.
“We started preparing right around when school started so it has been a good seven months,” Burk said. “It’s the first time where we’ve actually performed it before in the fall, so we already had it ready and we have had even more time to get ready to perform again in the spring for UIL.”
The play, however, has been tweaked to make more sense in order to have a bigger impact on viewers.
“It’s a lot more relatable for the audience because it’s something that they’re currently they’ve either gone through or currently are going through, like as a student in their lives. We brought it into 2020, so it’s in the present day,” Appel said. “The show taught me that I think we need to kind of take some more time with each other and not as much time on our phones because it definitely hurts our relationships with people and the way we view ourselves.”
To prepare for UIL, the students have been taking different steps to get into character.
“We’ve done some new techniques to get into character,” Burk said. “Some different acting like styles and stuff like we worked with this thing called the Michael Chekov technique which just helps you, fully physically get into like the headspace and physical space of like a character.”
Reviving Ophelia has had some unexpected challenges for Burk given the 40 minute time limit.
“Alex, my role, turns into an abusive boyfriend through the story and it was a bit of a challenge to get a good grip on how that would be like a character,” he said. “The original show is substantially longer than 40 minutes so we had to cut a lot of things, trim it down and stuff, but we finally got that all squared away.”
While Appel doesn’t expect perfection, she believes overall the play will go well.
“I expect that competition is going to be stressful, and a few things are going to go wrong,” Appel said. “But I think in the end, we’ll pull through and we’ll do a pretty good job.”
