SCHOOLS
The Show
Must Go on(line) Drama students adjust to the virtual stage
By Dani el Stevenson | Photo by Cornel l Wat son
chool remains virtual and many extracurricular groups have shelved projects this semester, but East Chapel Hill High School students have adapted their fall theater season into a virtual play reading series. The group reads scripts together over Google Meet and has four scheduled performances over the semester. Virtual theater has presented its challenges. Student directors, actors and stage managers have all made changes to their roles to fit the format. But for many students, theater helps make virtual learning feel more normal. “I think virtual theater has really been the thing that has grounded me,” says Maria Ledin, a senior at East Chapel Hill. “I feel like I know the work, and then I can connect it to how it used to work. Everything else for school has been very fluid because it’s new and unfamiliar.” The group is split into two productions: a G series and an R series, the latter featuring Pulitzer Prize68
chapelhillmagazine.com
November 2020
winning plays that contain mature content. Parent permission slips are required to participate in the R series, and student actors can choose to read or skip inappropriate content in the script. Hope Hynes Love, the director of the after-school program for East Chapel Hill who facilitates the series, sees this as an unintended benefit of the virtual productions. “There is mature content that we would never be able to produce if we were physicalizing many of the things that were happening on stage,” Hope says. “But as a virtual play reading, we have the advantage of being able to honor all of those constraints.” A unique element in Hope’s approach to virtual drama is the Critical Response Process (CRP), a collaborative method used to provide feedback and workshop all roles within a creative process. Hope was awarded a professional development grant by Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools and studied with CRP creators Liz Lerman and John Borstel just before shutdowns in March. She now uses the technique with her students as a
