Into the Light (Spring Production)

Along with the usual theater classes, I am also taking part in this year’s spring production. We have been working from scratch on this production for a few weeks, and I’m very proud of how far we have come so far. In the beginning of the rehearsals, we started developing our ideas using warm-ups and quick improvisations, and progressively we decided that we would be developing a plot around the theme of war. One of the improvisations that we did involved me and my sister Maliha, me playing her earlier version as a nurse in the war and Maliha playing my older version as a mother with PTSD, who eventually commits suicide because the thoughts of me never stop haunting her. Our group was very proud of this performance, because we had developed the story in only 10 minutes and we all worked our best to make the performance as emotional as possible. The impact it had on the audience, such as making many people teary-eyed, showed me that I would love if our production had a similar, dramatic effect on the audience by showing the negative effect was has on a variety of type of people. Mrs. Morris liked it too, so I think we might be including something like this scene in the actual production. While the story writing has gone on, we have finally decided on a basic story line, thanks to the enormous creativity of every cast member:

1. All Sam, James, Anna, Michael, and Beth are children, friends with each other.

James and Sam like each other and James gives her a necklace.

2. Sam gets involuntarily taken away to training.

3. James and Anna fall in love.

4. Beth is killed by the General (see the sniper and old general story)

5. Sam returns home and sees all what has happened.

6. Michael is drafted against his will to war by the dictator.

7. Sam returns to training to become a spy, not being able to live easy with her sister being dead and her lover loving another.

8. Beth and James decide to join the war on the rebellion side, one as a Medic and the other as a soldier.

9. Sam (spying FOR the rebellion and ON the dictator) is ordered by the General from the dictator’s side, to torture but not kill who ever is in the other room.

10. Sam enters and sees that it is James; she tortures him a bit, but then kills him, knowing that the dictator has worse planned ahead for him.

Sam is also still wearing the necklace he gave her, and she touches it for a while.

11. Anna sees a bunch of prisoners brought into her station, and she spots Michael amongst them.

12. Anna helps Michael escape, fall in love, and they live in poverty as Anna is in trouble for helping a prisoner flee, and Michael is that captured soldier.

13. Execution: A mother (Anna) calls in her child/children, not wanting them to see this strange woman be executed, but it’s not really about the killing that makes the mother tell them to not look, it’s the fact that it’s the spy Sam.

There are also some subplots, such as the story of a young general and an old general and the deaths of all the narrators. There were some challenges in creating the story. For example, I wanted Sam to be a different character to the older sister, but in the end the majority of the cast agreed that they wanted Sam and the older sister to be the same role so I had to agree as well. Next, the casting of roles was also disheartening for me. From the start, I was very interested in playing a soldier role because I wanted at least of the major soldier roles to be a girl (go feminism). I was especially interested in playing the role of the younger general, but the cast agreed on another boy playing this role, at which point I have to admit I was quite disheartened. But as more time has passed I’ve realized when you are working as a team, in order to be successful everyone has to make some compromises in what role you want to play based on the skills and talents of all the cast. I was eventually casted into the role of playing Maliha’s earlier version such as I had done early while improvising, and I’m excited to be developing my earlier improvisation into something even more powerful and emotional. As Maliha and I continue practicing this scene, I have learned a lot about how to improve my vocal delivery and physical body language in order to make my role as a nurse more realistic. When we first performed this scene, my crying was too sudden and hysterical for a nurse. As we have continued practicing, I have realized that I need to make my crying slower and build it up, and also make my body less frozen and shocked, because as I am playing a nurse, the scene is not my first time seeing a dying body and I need to show this. I have also had the challenge of not being able to make it to rehearsals due to basketball practices and traveling, but now that the basketball season is over I will be able to devote all my time and energy to this production. Coming back from Spring Break, I’m so proud to see all the work that has been going on while I was away since our tournament in Kuwait, and how hard everyone is working to bring the production together. I’m truly looking forward to the final 2 weeks of working with the lovely cast and seeing all of our ideas finally come through!!