The Dream is a Sahuaro play, adapted from William Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream. Advanced Theater students performed during school hours on Thursday and Friday from 9:30-11:15 am, as well as after school on Friday and Saturday at 7:00 PM. During the school day, students in Magee’s drama program and SHS teachers and their classes were invited to attend.
Students portrayed high schoolers in a school play (whose character conveniently had the same name as who they play).
Heroine Hermias‘ father appears at the school and pulls his daughter out of all the major senior events: prom, the play, and a college audition. She and co-lead, Lysander, run away to figure out how to get her to her audition. As they leave, a quad of students named The Mechanicals rehearse a few scenes from the play in preparation for a performance later that night.
While they rehearse one lead, Demetrius, runs into a fairy named Puck. Their magic makes Demetrius fall asleep in the forest and when he wakes up, he repeats his character’s lines; he’s turned into him! This proceeds to happen to every lead except the last heroine, Helena. She traverses the forest trying to wake her classmates from their magic-induced daze.
After the characters awake from their daze, they rush back to the school. Unfortunately, The Mechanicals performed their scene without them and Hermia missed her audition. Luckily, Hermia’s teacher sent in rehearsal footage to the college, and they gave her a full ride.
After the curtains closed, the floor was opened for questions. A student from Magee asked, “Where did you guys find the outfits?” Mr. Y answered, “Well I got a lot of them on Amazon. Honestly, this theater program has been here since the 1960s and one of my projects ahead of me is to go through the costume closet because we have about 60 years’ worth of costumes in complete disarray. So it required some digging with some of the costumes but some of the other ones we bought, and some of the other ones are actually the actors themselves.”
Another student asked how long they had to put the show together. “When you’re talking about school, we’ve got absences, we’ve got people getting sick and it’s not as easy all the time to have people show up and rehearse. So, as a result, I don’t think we even had a run-through of this play until our first tech rehearsal this week. So we were doing all this different teamwork, all out of order and everything, but it wasn’t until this past week that we put it all together in order,” Mr. Y replied.
After students exited, I got a chance to interview some of the actors, such as lead actress Hailey Shyrock who played Helena. I asked her if she found it hard to perform in front of classmates. Hailey responded, “No, I’ve kind’ve been on stage my whole life. This is my first play actually, but I’m a competitive dancer and my parents are magicians, so I guess it just feels like a second home.”
Although to some it may seem small, Mr. Y shares, “I was a theater teacher at Academy of Tucson for the last 4 years so this is the biggest set I’ve ever done. We didn’t really have any theater facilities at Academy of Tucson so it wasn’t much of a set, so this is definitely the biggest undertaking I’ve ever done.”
Behind the scenes, Advanced Guitar played a piece titled, What If I Never Speed? in between set changes and a piece named Covington Carol during intermission. Seven seniors working on their Fine Arts seal were chosen to play. Students were Ryder Thatcher, Ana Cowser, Aliana Trotter, Robin Morin, Eli Kamp, Saffyre Laguerta, and Kyler Purviance. For a week, musicians were committed to 2-4 hour practices at either a local park or the little theater.
While some may not know, this is one of the first performances put on by the drama department’s new teacher Mr. Younggren, more commonly known to students as “Mr. Y”. It was an absolutely stunning performance with the perfect amount of comedy and astonishing lighting.
Actors had around 2 months to put this production together, with leads such as freshman Sophia Yanez stepping into her role just 2 weeks before the first showing!
As the play ends and the actors come to bow, they give a hand to the tech crew, whose hard work can’t be ignored.
The stage crew is as follows:
- Lighting Design – Steve Kaczynski
- Light Board/Projection Operators – Jada Guy and Logen Crawford
- Director/Set Design – Christopher Younggren (Mr. Y)
The cast list was as follows:
- Principal Theodore/Oberon – Adam Singer
- Peter Highgate/Peter – Mina “Marsh” Bakker
- Phillipa/Cobweb – Dannica Faust
- Helena – Hailey Shryock
- Hermia – Sophia Yanez
- Lysander – Noah Pittenger
- Demetrius – Tyler McNeal
- Nick/Pyramus – Calen Potosky
- Tom/Wall/Lion – Kullie “Kirby” Marchini
- Francis “Frank”/Thisby – Kaiana Anderson
- Robin/Moonshine – Zoey Adams
- Titania – Victoria Larson
- Puck – Kel Munoz
- Moth – Natalie Valdez Martinez
- Mustardseed – James Pope
Overall, an abundance of different qualities are put into Drama plays, which are not often recognized. Advanced Theater, Stage Crew, and Advanced Guitar were all major factors in the success of this play. If you’re available, you should come out to drama’s next play to support a fellow Sahuaro Scholar.
