Photo via ep_jhu/flickr
By DCist Contributor Anya van Wagtendonk
After seven months of training and three months of intense rehearsal, the cast and crew of Chatroom will have three short days this weekend to bring their work to life—all before they go back to school on Monday.
For thirteen years, the Round House Theatre’s Teen Performance Program—a months-long training intensive for select D.C.-area high school students—has culminated in a full, professional-level production on the Round House Theatre’s main stage. Colloquially called “The Sarah Play,” this capstone production was established in memory of Sarah Metzger, a local young thespian who died during her freshman year of college.
High school students take on nearly every aspect of the Sarah Play: direction, design, management, marketing, and performance. Following an application and audition process in the late summer and early fall, students selected to participate in the Teen Performance Program are matched with mentors, professional theater artists from across the D.C. area who can “speak with expertise and provide them with the support, skills, and knowledge base to actually execute their position in the company,” Brianna McCoy, Director of Education at Round House Theatre, said in a phone interview with DCist.
The idea, said McCoy, is to offer a rigorous, “pre-professional” experience to passionate, talented high school students—“the most creative young minds we can find in the Montgomery County area,” she calls them. Students from any high school in the area are invited to apply, and many participants return year after year, or encourage younger classmates to get involved even after they have graduated and moved away.
The first months of the Teen Performance Program are dedicated to education and industry exposure. All students take master classes in specialties they may not be otherwise exposed to: the actors learn sound design, the stage managers study dramaturgy, and so on. The idea, explains McCoy, is to give each student a holistic grounding in the entirety of theater-making, so that, when rehearsals begin in January, they understand how different disciplines “[come] together to create and tell this story.”
This year, the story being told is Chatroom, a play by Irish writer Enda Walsh about six teenagers talking about life, death, and pop culture—exclusively in the Internet. One character, Jim, is contemplating suicide, and his virtual buddies egg him on from across their screens.
Ryan Rilette, the producing artistic director at Round House, works with the education department to help choose a play that the student participants will be able to relate to and work with. “We gravitate toward pieces that the teens who are going to be performing and working on these pieces can relate to,” McCoy says. “We look for … characters that teens can play realistically, [so] that they can engage in the conversation about the story from a place that they can use themselves as artists.”
In the case of Chatroom, the themes of technology, and how communication has changed in our hyper-connected modern world, resonated particularly strong. Cyberbullying, McCoy points out, is an issue that most high school students encounter in some form, but that older generations can only try to understand second-hand.
Although the ideas in the annual Sarah Play are intended to be ones that a teenaged actor—or director or designer—can relate, the Teen Performance Program also aims to offer its participant’s guidance in navigating the boundary between adolescence and adulthood. Rehearsals are designed to be safe spaces where teens can wrestle with issues that may directly touch their lives—like depression and suicide, in the case of Chatroom—but this isn’t just about a creative outlet; the students are expected to put in thoughtful, adult-level work.
“We treat them like the professionals we know that they can be, and they rise to that expectation,” McCoy says.
The young artists’ seriousness of purpose derives, in part, from knowing that this play series is a memorial to someone who could have been one of their peers. At the very start and very end of the program, the students are led in a discussion about who Sarah Metzger was, “that this program allows her legacy and spirit to live on,” said McCoy, “and that it’s our responsibility to remember that it’s a gift that we get to do what we do, in the way that we do it.”
For one student, that gift was made clear in the final rehearsals. For weeks, she’d been struggling to get out of her head. She knew her lines and knew her staging yet something wasn’t quite right.
“And then last night, it just happened,” McCoy recalls. “She just took a deep breath before she went on. You could tell she was in a different emotional place than she had been any other night.”
At the end of the day, McCoy says that’s what this program is about: fostering moments — however long or brief — of true and honest connection.
Chatroom runs March 13 – 16 at the Round House Theatre, 4545 East-West Highway in Bethesda, Md. 3 p.m. and 8 p.m. Tickets $20; 240.644.1100 or http://www.roundhousetheatre.org/boxoffice/performances/
