One Act Play advances to regionals

Levi Walters | Reporter

With winter coming to a close, the One Act Play competition season is just beginning.

“The students are the ones directing this year,” co-director Michael Fisher said. “They changed the system.”

The One Act Play is part of the UIL UIL Academics contest that happens every spring, where students select and perform a play less than forty minutes long.

Last year's One Act Play made it all the way to Area, though this year they hope to reach even greater heights.

This year's One Act Play is called The Caucasian Chalk Circle, which is about a period of economic instability wherein a poor woman finds a child and decides, against her better judgment, to rear the child as her own in the face of adversity and financial struggles. This show was picked in celebration of the school’s 20th anniversary.

“Caucasian Chalk Circle was the first One Act Play ever to be done at

Hendrickson back in 2004,” Fisher said “So it’s kind of a “book end” of that time period for the program.”

Hendrickson's One Act Play team placed in the top three teams at District, and went on to compete in Area at Bastrop High School.

“The Area competition went very well, it was our best show yet,” Fisher says “We were competing against some of the Houston suburb schools, and many of them have been to State before, so the competition was tough.”

But that didn’t stop the department from advancing. There are six other groups that they will be competing against at Regionals at San Jacinto College on April 21.

“We’re taking a different approach this year in that wer'e trying to allow the show to be driven by students.” Fisher said. “I think that’s why we’ve gotten to where we are, with the teamwork of everybody involved.” ridiculous amount,” Mitchell said. “That means we don't need to rely on foreign oil. However, that's also nearly a million tons of carbon that will be once they've started, which is a massive issue."

If the project generates its estimated 600 million barrels of oil, an equivalent of 277 million tons of carbon dioxide will likewise be produced (Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.) With this immense amount of carbon emissions comes a slew of complications regarding climate change and the deterioration of the ozone layer, a section of the Earth’s stratosphere that is essential in protecting against the bulk of the sun’s

“Right now the ozone layer has holes in it,” Mitchell said. “The ozone layer is not something solid, it's fluid, and it's moving. And so, when we have holes, as time surpasses, and we're not compounding what's causing those holes, they will shrink in size.

What I would imagine if we're letting a million tons of carbon out into the atmosphere, is that those holes will become irreparable. They will get larger, which means then global warming is going to take a massive tick upwards. Oceans are going to warm, ice glaciers are going to melt, tides are going to rise, and then it's just a cascade from there on."

It is still unclear when construction for the project is to begin, as environmentalist groups continue to attempt to block the progression of the operation.

"It's one of those things where it's really tough,” Mitchell said. “They're trying to give us domestic oil, which would reduce prices. We wouldn't have to be importing things, we wouldn't have those gatherings of all the OPEC nations in terms of figuring out prices, and all the conflict that comes with that. But in my opinion, I would say maintaining that tumultuous relationship with those foreign countries that run the oil trade is the lesser of the two evils to climate change."

Illustration by | Yael Behar