Here Are The High School Plays! (Revisited)

To paraphrase what a traffic court judge once said to me, this blog has hair on it. Which is to say, it’s been around a while. When I began this blog on January 1, 2010, our kids were six and four. Now the younger one is entering his junior year at the University of Cincinnati, the elder just graduated with honors from my alma mater, Ohio University.

Seven years ago, I wrote a post about the kinds of plays being produced in American high schools. The elder (Zelda, I will name them, they are an adult now) a freshman in high school, was in their first evening of one-acts, which included Don Zolidis’s omnipresent 10 Ways to Survive the Zombie Apocalypse. Later that year, Zelda would play Poppy in a very good production of Noises Off.

One of my biggest regrets, if not theirs, was that they were cast as Celia in As You Like It their junior year, a production cancelled due to COVID-19. I hope to someday see them do Shakespeare.

Most plays chosen by high school drama departments, be they contemporary, classic or sometime in between, aren’t about high school students. I have been led to believe teens don’t want to play teens, they want to be something other than who they are. It is also true that many shows that have featured teenage characters feature poorly drawn teenage characters (I’m looking at you, Bye Bye Birdie.)

Recently, however, there have been several musicals that have broken through, due in part to their freshness and accuracy in addressing the concerns and interests of modern young people; musicals like The Prom, The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee and Ride the Cyclone. And in just the past few months, I have had the chance to take Zelda to see two recent plays that are very present and particular to the current moment.

The first was last spring’s Dobama Theatre production of Sarah DeLappe’s The Wolves, an 80 minute play about a competitive high school travel girl soccer team (I think I got those adjectives in the right order). I read it in 2020 and I loved it – as a soccer dad, I felt it rang with truth – and I thought, oh man! Zelda needs to read this! Then I thought again. They were in the thick of it, and this story might come as an unwelcome intrusion.

"The Wolves" by Sarah DeLappe
Directed by Nell Bang-Jensen
Philadelphia Theatre Co. (2020)

I did watch a production of The Wolves produced for Zoom in late 2020 by the Philadelphia Theater Company, which was surprisingly effective given the limitations of the technology. When Dobama announced their production, I thought, perfect! I can now take them to see that. It had been over four years since the quarantine-era match that took Heights out of the playoffs, and the flagrant foul that took our child, the keeper, out of the game.

So we attended the performance together. I was sure Z would be particularly drawn to the character of 00, the goalie for the Wolves, and in this production played by Jasmine Renee, who is also directing The Right Room for BorderLight this summer. Z said they loved the show, and also that they never need to see it again. I don’t know it, but I get it.

More recently, we saw John Proctor is the Villain on Broadway. The moment they went on sale we got tickets – I just had to take the family to see this show. And then I got very concerned. I loved the script, I also loved the Performing Arts Academy production two years ago, But … Broadway? Would it work? Would it be successful? Would the market bear a play about the very real concerns of people who were not yet adults?

The marketing campaign was interesting. I kept getting texts that were written (I guess) like an actual teenager was sending them. I forwarded one to the rest of the family and Zelda thought I’d been hacked.

Long story short, the production is not only successful but very successful, and nominated for seven Tony Awards. Having seen Oh, Mary! last fall, this is only the second time I have had the chance to see two Tony nominated shows before the awards drop – the first was two years ago when we saw Merrily We Roll Along and Purlie Victorious on the same weekend in late 2023.

The evening we attended John Proctor was a Tuesday night, and the place was packed. So many young people! So many young women! Attending a play! And they were rewarded, too, as the entire company who played the teenage characters signed everyone’s program at the stage door.

This is a fascinating time in American theater, where challenging new ideas are making their way onto professional stages across the nation. That the voices of young people are represented with honesty and accuracy, and in a way they have not been before. Will plays like The Wolves or John Proctor is the Villain supplant chestnuts like Twelve Angry Men or The Crucible on our high school stages? And would it be such a terrible thing if they did?

See also: 

Here Are The High School Plays! (2018)

Play a Day: John Proctor is the Villain

On Site-Specific Theater

BorderLight Theater Festival presents The Right Room, a new play by David Hansen and directed by Jasmine Renee, July 16 - 19, 2025

Let us define our terms.

Dr. Suzy Woltmann defines immersive theatre as “a performance art movement that aims to transform audience members from passive recipients to active participants.” Furthermore, she highlighted features of immersive performance which may include:

• Blurring the line between audience and performer
• Leaving the stage behind
• Including sensory experiences
• Shifting between the personal and the collective

An immersive experience can often be described as site-specific theatre, though those terms are not necessarily mutually inclusive. The folks at the Australian Performing Arts Conservatory states that site-specific theatre “breaks free from the confines of a traditional theatre where actors perform on stage. The performances take place in unexpected locations, from bustling city streets and historical sites to warehouses and parks.” Site-specific performance can:

• Create a more immersive experience
• Add a layer of authenticity and depth to the performance
• Allow creative teams to innovate and experiment with storytelling techniques

Site-specific performance is not, of course, a recent thing. By any basic definition, we may assume theater originated any place people were, and only later did everyone decide it needed to happen primarily in what we call a “theater.”

Sleep No More (2011)

But it is because of this codification of theatrical traditions that producing a play in a non-traditional space became something of a novelty. In early years of this century, for example, Charenton Theatre Co. produced a string of site-specific performances across the city of Cleveland, staging Albee’s Zoo Story on a park bench, Edgar Lee Masters’ Spoon River Anthology on a tour of cemeteries, and James McLure’s Lone Star in a number of local drinking establishments.

Site-specific and immersive cross over when they engage the audience in some unique, sensory way. Perhaps the most famous recent example of this was Punchdrunk’s Sleep No More, which was set in a vast warehouse made to resemble a stately and crumbling hotel through which a masked audience was welcome to freely wander, handling sets and props and even on occasion, the actors – this last was not specifically encouraged, but it happened. A lot.

Inspired by this, a team of us created the Love In Pieces project in 2014, in which we produced Sarah Morton’s play of that name inside an actual house. Due to space limitations, an evening’s audience was between sixteen and twenty people, and they were split into four groups, each group of four or five experiencing one of the four, ten-minute scenes, before being escorted to the next one.

In 2023, the Give Me Your Keys company presented my play Step Nine as part of the BorderLight Fringe. Director James Rankin had asked for a play for two men to be performed in an actual bar, and I provided him one. Thirty or more crammed into the Snug at Parnell’s in Playhouse Square as two actors spoke at normal, human volume, forcing the crowd to lean in, as if eavesdropping on a private conversation.

I had not planned to apply for BorderLight myself this year, until I read the application and found this note about submitting a site-specific adaptation.

Site-specific Adaptation
Are you willing to adapt your performance to a site-specific location? For example, an alley, a hotel room, a park, a car, a loading dock, or a public street. Artists are also encouraged to suggest a site-specific adaptation/production. (emphasis mine)

Nicholas Chokan, Jason Leupold
Step Nine (2023)
BorderLight Theatre Festival

A hotel room? I have spent the past year writing a script that takes place in a hotel room! I took it as a challenge – a challenge to them. If they could really find a hotel room in which to produce my new play, then by God, I would present my play there.

And so, I am happy to announce that my new play, The Right Room, will be performed as part of the BorderLight Theater Festival 2025 this summer, and produced in a room at the Crowne Plaza Cleveland in Playhouse Square. One single hotel room will represent four different hotel rooms, in four different cities, in four different eras, to tell one very epic narrative. Epic – but intimate.

Source: 

“What Is Immersive Theatre?” by Suzy Woltmann, Backstage, May 8, 2023
“The Role of Site-Specific Theatre in Contemporary Performance Art,” Australian Performing Arts Conservatory, September 19, 2024

The Right Room | BorderLight Festival (trailer)

Here (film)

I'm staring at the asphalt wondering

What's buried underneath (where I am)

- Death Cab for Cutie, "The District Sleeps Alone Tonight"

Here (2024)

On a recent transatlantic journey, I had the opportunity to watch a couple films including The Northman, a re-watch of Spielberg’s West Side Story and also Bob Zemeckis’s adaptation of the graphic novel Here.

The film Here came and went last fall, cost $50 million to make and made $15 million at the box office. That it was based on a short comic from 1989 that I had found very inspiring at the time had piqued my interest, but the negative reviews kept me from seeing it. Recently, however, in describing my new play The Right Room to a number of people, one said the concept reminded them of this movie (which they had liked) and of course, that filled me with great concern. I will go into the comparison in a moment.

Like the 1989 comic and the 2014 graphic novel, both by Richard McGuire, the film depicts the corner of an American living room from one fixed vantage point. The camera never moves (until the very end) but the narrative moves back and forth in time, from the 1940s to the 1970s, back to the 1910s, forward to the 2020s, even further back to before the house was even built and even into prehistory.

The major failing of the film is that an in-depth narrative is laid upon it, and that this narrative is not terribly compelling. A young man (played by a CGI de-aged Tom Hanks) grows up in this house, and just as our vantage point is stuck in one place, so is he, confined by the expectations of his father, his inability to succeed in business, that in spite of having a loving wife (Robin Wright) and family, he is unhappy and cannot move on from "here."

The movie’s fatal flaw, however, is its score by Alan Silvestri, an award-winning composer, responsible for iconic themes found in wildly successful movies like Back to the Future and Avengers. You can hear them, right? Of course you can.

To Kill a Mockingbird (1962)

The Here score put me in mind of Elmer Bernstein’s legendary score for the 1962 film adaptation of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. The main theme to that film is like liquid nostalgia, at once sweeping and sweet, grand yet intimate.

The first time I read Mockingbird, I found the first half to be interesting but disjointed – a selection of unassociated small town tales. When the trial happens, however, all the elements of the first part come together to define what happens next. And Bernstein's music serves to underscore lost innocence that comes with seeing the world as it really is, while remembering what it used to mean to you.

The thing about the graphic novel Here is that it has no narrative, it is an abstracted rumination on the meaning (if there is one) of time and space, and our brief place in it. These moments sometimes turn back on themselves, as when a 20th century child plays with a plastic dinosaur in the same frame as an actual dinosaur from millions of years ago that once occupied the same space, or a young woman is offering a cocktail in the same panel as she, as a baby years earlier, is being nursed with a bottle.

The Here screenplay by Zemeckis and Eric Roth includes a few brief, abstracted moments like these within the larger narrative (the one defined by the the Tom Hanks character) but they clash with the movie's serious, dramatic tone, and come off not as humorous but obvious and heavy-handed, especially as they allude to recent events, like COVID or the BLM uprising.

Meanwhile, Silvestri's score keeps reminding us that this is meaningful, this is important. But all we are seeing is a number of (mostly white) people living, growing old, and dying. And while there is a common philosophical argument that death gives life meaning, death does not in and of itself give life meaning.

Here (1989)

A professor of playwriting once described to me what he called the “dead baby” plays. He had had a number of students – people in their late teens and early twenties – drop a dead baby into the narrative of their scripts, which he saw as cheap, unearned poignance, and he absolutely has a point. When I was a young man, I dropped suicide into the narrative of more than one project, and that was also sloppy writing, and thoughtless.

Death does not provide meaning, but it can inspire meaning.

My new play, The Right Room, takes place in four different time periods, and in four different rooms, but they are all hotel rooms (or three hotel rooms and one room in a boarding house) in four different cities. And it follows the story of one family, in these elements I can see how I was inspired by McGuire’s original 1989 comic Here.

In my first draft, there were four distinct scenes, which I have since braided into one continuous scene, and so four couples share the same room, all at once. And I like to think that meaning is revealed by the actions that take place in those rooms, by those characters. Not time, nor place, nor even death. That it is life that gives life meaning.

"Here," a student film by Tim Masick and Bill Trainor (1991)