10
Shining under the
spotlight Lights on, dead silent and all eyes on you: there was no hiding for actors in East Three Theatre’s performance of Complaint Department this February. Dozens of community members filled the seats enjoying dinner while the school’s performers put on a show that was heavy on dialogue and involved complicated roles for each cast member. Lexis McDonald, who had a bone to pick about the ratio of cream and cookie in Oreos, was glowing after nailing the show’s second night. “The first one, I feel like I kind of messed up a bit,” admitted the Grade 10 student. “I forgot pretty much a whole speech. I just kind of ad-libbed and made it look like it didn’t happen at all, and the audience really liked it. “Tonight, I am so impressed with myself. I thought I would have messed up so much. I’m just so happy it went well, because I have basically my entire family here.”
The show revolved around students taking turns bringing complaints to the Complaint Department and then staffing the department and handling other people’s gripes. In one sequence, McDonald informed a complainer that he might be too stupid to own a TV, because he couldn’t understand why it wouldn’t turn on when his side of town was in a power outage. “It was a very big challenge,” said McDonald. “There were big words that I did not know the meaning of until just before the show. I’d get confused with one sentence from a different paragraph. There were two different characters I had to be. It was pretty confusing at first.” But she nailed the final showing in front of her family, friends and classmates. “I’m really impressed with myself,” she said. “I’m happy and I’m proud of the other people in the play. They did a really good job.”
