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

Play a Day: John Proctor is the Villain

Kimberly Belflower

To round out the week, I am enjoying a script that I have been looking forward to for months, yet purposefully avoided.

For Friday, I read John Proctor is the Villain by Kimberly Belflower and listed at New Play Exchange.

Last weekend my new play The Witches was to have received a workshop production at Cleveland Public Theatre. As I was trying to create a modern take on the historic events of the Salem Witch Panic of 1692, I was worried that I might be influenced by this piece which has been getting a lot of attention.

I need not have worried. If anything, Belflower's play script has inspired me to return to my own text and push it further. Because her play is startlingly biting and beautiful and just what we need right now. I hope it gets produced all over the place.

And it is in reading such pieces that I feel challenged to create more and better work.

I love the title, that's first. And I was stunned and delighted that the holding company for Arthur Miller's written works granted permission for text from The Crucible to be quoted in this play. We could compare and contrast how those gatekeeping works by dead white men such as Samuel Beckett or Edward Albee have (mis)managed their estates, in this case I was gratified to know the keepers of Miller's work appreciate that criticism does not mean erasure.

Taylor Atwara, Anna Nicolosi 
Academy for the Performing Arts, 2023
Photo: Daren Stahl

John Proctor Is the Villain is a high school drama which excellently describes the familiar manner in which woman is still pitted against woman in American society, a society still haunted by its Puritanical roots, for the continued domination by men. The cracks are beginning to show, though the light shining through them remains dim. It's a hopeful story, but also realistic. There's so much work left to be done.

This script is tense, taut, humorous, dramatic, powerful, poetic, and devastating, and high schools everywhere should be producing this.

In the past two days, I have read plays about transgressive relationships between teacher and student, this one and Meet Me In The Bathroom. One of the iconic taboos, as it is not only a violation of our communal understanding that it is criminal for adults to engage in sexual activity with children, but also represents a violation in the bond of trust between student and mentor.

It is a power play; one uses their position of power to satisfy their own desires, with little or no regard for the damage that might cause the disempowered.

Broadway Premiere
Starring Sadie Sink
The Booth Theatre (2025)

As a child, or pre-adolescent, I was exposed to the Kubrick film version of Lolita, and also the popular song which name checks the author of the novel from which it was adapted, "Don't Stand So Close to Me." At that time, in these cases, such titillating fare made an impression on me because I thought of myself as the child, receiving forbidden knowledge, and not as the adult, and I was caught up in the romantic danger of it, instead of paying attention to the very apparent abuse.

This was further complicated as I entered high school and as a freshman was complicit in turning a blind eye to an actual teacher-student relationship. "Tell my parents I'm with you," is a lie teenagers have been pressed into telling on their friend's behalf since before the invention of the telephone.

Whether it be Nabokov or Sting, we used to learn about these stories from the predators point of view, one who positions himself (usually himself) as the hero. Increasingly, as with these two scripts, we see it from the student's. And that is a powerful thing.

Who should I read tomorrow?