After more than 80 hours of rehearsal time, junior high students at R.F. Staples are ready to compete at the Zone 2 West Drama Festival at Spruce Grove’s Horizon Theatre on April 26.
And on April 24, the class will be perform Dennis Foon’s short play, New Canadian Kid, to raise money to cover the costs of attending the Spruce Grove festival. The show begins at 7 p.m. in the Cultural Arts Theatre and has a $5 admission fee.
“It’s a big festival,” junior high drama teacher Noreen Holt said.
“I think this year they have 26 plays in junior and senior high, but it’s pretty expensive to go to a festival so we’re trying to cover those costs with admission fees.”
The short play was written for children and aims to inspire compassion for some of the problems immigrants to Canada face. It features a character named Nick from Homeland who is trying to interact with two English speaking classmates, however; the story is told in broken English from the perspective of somebody with a language barrier.
“I think it’s a different play and I really like it because it’s in part gibberish,” said student director Jenna Jadischke. “Some people don’t like that but I think it’s really cool. It’s about an immigrant and their perspective about how we sound and I think it really gives us more empathy and helps people understand, usually we’re not very patient with people that don’t know English.”
Holt said the short play was a good choice for teens because it teaches compassion and challenges the performers by forcing them to learn adult roles.
“I have a tremendously hard-working group of students this year,” said Holt. “We do typically write our own play, but this year, I chose not to. It takes a lot of time to write a play so I thought it would be nice to take a year off from writing a play this year.”
In addition to the play being done by the junior high drama students at R.F. Staples, the senior high drama students have been working on two student-directed plays for both dates as well. Drama teacher Susan Bowsfield’s senior class is working on a play called Tuesdays as well as another one called Sundays and Tracks. That means roughly 30 students will be attending the Spruce Grove festival.
“R.F. Staples has been involved in festivals for, probably, close to 40 years,” Holt said. “We go every year. Last year we hosted, and next year we will again, so it’s a pretty big deal.”
