The Theatre Department performed its original play, We Scene Us, directed by Drama teacher Jamie Donohoe and Meredith Stone, at the Lafayette Town Hall on November 8 and 9. The play portrays different moments in the lives of individuals through a series of unrelated scenes, all with the common theme of human discovery.
According to Donohoe, We Scene Us demonstrates the relentless courage, anxiety, heartache, loneliness, and love that we all share. He believes that each performance reveals something about the young actors as well as humanity. “We, as a performance troupe, are going to show you all of us,” Donohoe said.
According to Donohoe, the play included “guys trying to figure out if they like girls, girls on the precipice of physically becoming a young woman, up to people losing the person they love.”
The play opened with Post-Its, written by Paul Dooley and Winnie Holzman, and performed by juniors Harrison Joy and Marisa Wood.
Joy and Wood played a married couple, and in turn they read aloud the post-it notes they had left each other throughout their marriage. The first series of messages were happy and blissful, but over time the post-its became angry and disagreeable. The characters inevitably grew older, and eventually the woman died. Her husband left one last note for her, explaining his discovery that she had saved every note he had left her, and that he wished that he had saved hers.
Sophomore Lauren Raff played a 12 year old girl named Valerie in the 3rd scene, The Valerie of Now, written by Peter Hedges. She delivered a 5-page monologue about her struggles of becoming a young woman, including the side effects that she had experienced while having her period. She complained of mood swings and weight gain, dramatically claiming that she had been “destroyed by nature.” Valerie experienced alienation; she felt as if she was being discluded by her friends because she was different. However, eventually, she came to terms with her new self, realizing that there were advantages to growing up.
This was Raff’s first play, and drama’s first community performance of the year. “I’m extremely excited to see the development of the scenes as it went from being ok to being really fantastic, and I’m excited to see how other people perform on stage,” said Raff. However, the different setting of the Town Hall concerned her. “It’s just going to be very different from performing for your friends to performing in front of an audience, I’m kind of nervous,” she said.
Raff believed that performing for the community would provide her with necessary experience to continue her acting carer. “If you want to be an actor, you’re going to have to face an audience that you have no idea what their tastes are,” she explained.
“Instead of just students and parents watching the play, it’s other people you don’t even know,” agreed sophomore Tenshi Lucasey. Lucasey performed in Controlling Interest, a scene written by Wayne Rawley, which featured a group of 8-year old boys, debating about whether they should grow up and start liking girls or stay kids for a little while longer. They decided to “stop eating boogers” and invited 2 older girls over to discuss terms of agreement for becoming romantically interested in one another. Ironically, the children were dressed in formal attire.
Lucasey also performed in the closing act, Night Visits, as a doctor named Tom. A girl named Emily was brought into his clinic after being in a car accident; she was found in a church surrounding herself with wish candles. Emily said that when she hit the divider, the first thing she thought of was her dad who had died 4 years ago. She believed that this was the moment she realized that her father was really dead. Then, it was revealed that Tom’s wife, a nurse named Katy, died exactly 1 year ago in a car accident. “It’s really deep and I don’t even understand it,” said Lucasey.
