Live theatre is messy.
Live theatre is missed cues. It’s dropped lines. It’s broken props, intentional or unintentional.
But most of all, it is passion.
As we enter the holiday season, I want to again commend the kids in Mount Vernon, Lisbon as well as Cedar Rapids Prairie and North Cedar for the first annual Hwy.30 Theatre Festival.
Audiences were treated to six magnificent short plays. Writers wre given a genre, a prop, a character and one line. In 24 hours after that, they were to have written a script, given it to directors and had a show ready to go.
It was called improv in Lisbon’s school board meeting a few weeks ago, but improv doesn’t do justice to all the work these students had to do. In improv, you build a plot and characters out of a hat with an even shorter time span.
The addition of thinking of set, of blocking, of sound, of light, of giving actors a script to memorize — that’s a whole different melange of theatre working together. It’s a lot of pressure.
But as many of the students spoke about after the fact — it was a lot of fun. Their passion and enthusiasm came across with scripts that had wordplay, visual puns and characters that came alive in mere minutes on stage, all because students were passionate for this 24 hour pressure cooking situation.
And it furthered the goal of Grant Freeman to have many of these actors make connections in the arts.
Many of you know I wrap quixotic about speech season, and why I find it fun. One of the most fun things I get to do is to go into a room and watch students from across the district and state perform, give their all and have fun. Not all the performances will hit the same, there will be areas that you can point to where they can improve, can do better in future performances. But I challenge anyone not to have a piece or performance you don’t think about for the next week.
That’s what I’ll be thinking about with the live performances this past weekend. How many students had opportunities to help these shows go on and get experience that benefits these schools move forward.
And like Freeman said — being the first annual, there will be learning lessons for next year’s same festival.
The thing we in this community need to continually remember is the passion of students to excel when given the opportunity to get outside their comfort zones and support experiments like this. So I encourage you all to show up to the next theatre festival in 2023.