Unmasked
Good Counsel Theatre Company, 2019.
In my final year at Our Lady of Good Counsel High School (OLGCHS), I challenged our company to explore a new frontier in contemporary theatre: devised work. GCTC e had consistently produced a diverse swath of theatrical cannon, but had never attempted a devised piece outside of the International Baccalaureate theatre curriculum.
The goal of this project, initially known as #Untitled, was to create a play about student’s experiences at the school while immersing our students to a more collaborative process of theatre creation.
Employing Moment Work
Integrating Tectonic Theatre Project’s Moment Work as the devising method enabled the artists to think more holistically about crafting segments of the play – for instance, actors who incorporated lighting and sound elements into moments, while the lighting designer crafted moments with movement and costume. The exposure to Moment Work, combined with verbatim text pulled from student conducted interviews, resulted in a more robust sense of ownership over the piece.
Conceptually, Unmasked sought to bring a wide array of student’s perspectives to the collective consciousness of our school. The young devisers developed strong theatrical depictions of the student experience at OLGCHS. Drawing from text pulled from interviews, as well as their own experiences, a number of visual themes began to emerge that shaped the visual concept for the show. For example, two students crafted a metaphor likening high school to a boxing match. This created the structure for Unmasked and allowed the script to flow through various character plot lines from the view of the four years spent in high school by segmenting the play into four rounds. Crafting an environment that would both represent the many locations within the school, but remain flexible was a challenge.
Defining the Themes
Initially setting out to examine how well Good Counsel lived out its mission from a student perspective, I asked the cast and design teams:
Where do we as a school excel?
Where are we underserved as a community?
What do you love most about the school?
Using an online discussion tool, the student devisers shared honestly about their experiences and perceptions at OLGCHS. This yielded two main themes: student stress/anxiety and diversity/inclusion. Over two months of collecting interviews and devising theatrical moments, I organized the work into a two act play – part docudrama, part fantastical impression – which shed light on the student’s experience of stress and diversity/inclusion issues at the school.
