Ohio State Thespian Festival (2023)

Painesville (2023)

Paul Feig tells this great story in his memoir Kick Me about how, as a high school student, he volunteered to announce a home football game. He loved the sport and also thought of himself as witty and a good talker and of course, he was entirely unprepared and the whole evening was a fiasco.

The first time I led a workshop at a Thespian conference (they used to call it a conference) was as a college freshman. I was going to teach improvisation, and this was also a fiasco. I imagined myself as this elder statesman of theater, with plenty of wisdom to provide. But that was, in fact, entirely in my imagination.

Looking out over the gathered and interested Thespians, I saw people my age – I was still only 18, after all – and they were not impressed with my attempts to engage them in acting exercises, because, like Paul Feig, I was entirely unprepared. I had no lesson plan, and as I spoke my voice rang hollow, drifting to the ceiling of the band room in which we were working.

I thought I had something to offer, but hadn’t given a moment’s consideration as to what that might be. That was thirty-six years ago.

Hilliard (1994)

Four members of Guerrilla Theater Company led a workshop at the state Thespian conference in Hilliard in 1994 called “Adjustments: Surviving the Rehearsal Process.”

(Photo: Torque ignites the imagination.)

“Students will work with scripted material written by GTC members… with the GTC members taking the part of directors. The focus of this project is to get the student actor used to the notion hat no part of character is meant to be performed in a specific or “right” way, and that the process of discovering the character requires concentration, imagination, and most importantly, the ability and flexibility to try a lot of different choices before settling on one."

To wit; we were teaching acting. I don’t remember much about the day except it felt like there were more of us in the room than students.

In 2020, the state conference was canceled (of course) and plans were set in motion for how to engage motivated Thespians in creating something "virtual" in place of a conference in 2021. Great Lakes Theater arranged for online workshops, and Chennelle Bryant-Harris as the primary organizer and director for those, while I played a small role as script coordinator.

Virtual (2021)

The All-State show that year was the live-streaming of that video, Time Capsule. My main contribution was the suggestion that the song one student wrote and performed, extolling all the hopes and dreams this teenager had for the year 2020, which was written to open the show, be put at the end. It was a brutal conclusion, and I stand by it.

Because the State Thespian conference is supposed to be one of those transformative events in the life of a young theater artist. Our high school hadn’t attended one until my junior year, and then because it was being held in the next city over, in Rocky River. We all loved it so much, we asked to attend the next year’s, which was held at Fairborn High School, outside Dayton.

It was at that festival that I met at least a half dozen or more high school seniors who would join me as a freshman at the Ohio University School of Theatre that fall. That was where I saw The Crucible for the first time. I took workshops in improvisation and audition, and saw several one-acts and cuttings from full-length plays. It was thrilling. It was intimidating.

This weekend the Ohio Thespian Festival was held at Riverside High School in Painesville, and the offerings have been nothing short of epic. Yes, there were fully staged performances of not only Rent and The Prom, but also (ta-da) the Cardinal High School production of The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee which was first pulled by the school, and then reinstated after the controversy became national news.

The All-Ohio Show on Friday night was Moon Over Buffalo, and the students also received an hour-long talkback via Zoom with playwright Ken Ludwig and – as if that were not enough – a live presentation and Q&A with composer Andrew Lippa!

Hilliard (1994)

As for me, I offered a playwriting workshop called How to Write a Play a Day, for which I tried not only to describe the techniques I used to write every day, but to address issues like writer's block, and how to develop small ideas as well as big ones.

(Photo: Tower rocks the 90s jeans.)

Pre-pandemic, I once offered a forty-five minute writing workshop at a regional conference, which I wasn’t satisfied with. There was no time for writing, just talking about writing. So I asked for a ninety-minute block, which was a little presumptuous. With so much to see and do, I knew it was asking a lot from the students. But then I also figured, not all kids are actors, dancers, singers, directors or designers. Some of them want to be writers. I was there for them.

And they were there, and we wrote, and read what we wrote, and even then it didn’t seem like we had enough time. But in that good way, you know?