Mundelein High School put on a virtual production over the weekend, which was made up of 13 total scenes all written and directed by MHS Theater seniors. From the funny, to the serious, to the weird and everything in-between, the one-act scenes from the night hit a wide range of topics.
The plays featured the theater department’s student-directed one-act plays, which are typically performed in September. But due to the restrictions created from the coronavirus pandemic, officials within the department decided it was best to move it back.
Along with this, they combined it with the department’s New Faces play, which involves underclassmen and is performed around Halloween in a usual year. As a result, the performance over this weekend featured a dozen one-act plays, with the scenes performed by many underclassmen, and directed by MHS seniors.
MHS Theater Director Jonathan Meier said they did this because the nature of the scenes allowed them to keep groups smaller for COVID-19 restrictions, and have them broken up all around the school. He estimated about 60 students total are involved in the scenes.
Scenes on the night included one featuring two World War II nurses corresponding from different parts of the world. The story was told through the letters they are writing back and forth to each other.
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Another featured a young girl meeting her mother for the first time, who gave her up for adoption. One involves the Sept. 11 attacks. Another, on a lighter note, tells the story of the Greek myth of Narcissus.
The plays were all student-directed by MHS seniors within the department. In introducing the show, Meier called the application process to direct a one-act play “rigorous.” He added the criteria to be chosen comes from what those students have produced over their MHS Theater career.
Meier added that each group of students had their own adviser. But he stressed how much adults and teachers try to stay out of the one-act productions.
“These are extremely student driven,” he said in the show’s introduction. “We adults try to keep our noses out of it . . . Our role was as minimal as we could make it.”
In addition to the 12 scenes, MHS’ Shakespeare Slam Team performed one of two five-minute scenes for the production over the weekend.
Due to further restrictions on gatherings, officials also came to realize it wouldn’t be possible to perform all these scenes live. As a result, each of the scenes were filmed.
Jeff Harding, who is a MHS faculty member and works alongside Meier on the theater’s productions, along with Sara Gunther, a technical adviser for several of MHS Theater’s shows, helped film and edit the scenes. Shot on Dec. 5 and 6, the pair finished editing about 10 days later, Harding said.
In this filmed approach, Harding said a big part of theater is being able to see the whole stage. As a result, each scene was filmed with five cameras, each set up to get one angle of the scene. Harding said it was a challenge to figure out which angles at which times were important and added to the story.
“We told the kids, flat out, we are not mixing and matching,” Harding said. “This is not T.V. We are not going to look through the video and try to (match). We said we wanted to try to preserve that fact that this is what theater looks like.”
Harding said part of the fun for this type of production is seeing students fight through things when they don’t go well. He added another thing that blew him away was how the kids jumped to attack the task, even with some of them having little experience.
“We’re incredibly happy with the product we’re putting out,” he said. “We think these kids did a very good job and we’re very grateful that we found a way to give our younger kids an opportunity.”
Meier shared a similar sentiment, saying he was happy that the show has been able to go on despite the hurdles.
“The bottom-line is, we’re still doing theater, and that’s fantastic,” Meier said.