The work it took to perform at the Sears Ontario Drama Festival paid dividends for the Elmira District Secondary School’s drama students. The group performed Ramblings in the Night, which they haven’t done for many years, and came away with three awards.
“We won an award of excellence for ensemble work, which we’ve won many times. That’s sort of one our school has a tendency to win all the time. That’s great,” said EDSS drama teacher DJ Carroll. “We won an award for our special effects makeup, which was awesome. And then the stage management award has been out of our school for 10 years. It’s nice to bring it home.”
Every year the award of excellence is given out to the best stage manager of all the shows and this year EDSS’ Audrey Gruneberg took home the prize.
Carroll says the students were excited for what they were given, but disappointed they weren’t moving on to the next round.
“But they are very pumped and I think all of the students were extremely excited over Audrey, our stage manager, winning,” Carroll said.
He says they chose the play because it hadn’t been done in about 13 or 14 years and it just felt like it was the right time to do it.
“And just because it’s nice and creepy,” Carroll said.
They held auditions back in December and rehearsed for two months until the festival at the end of February.
Kayla Buckley, Rachel Scott, Melanie McArdle and Krista Quinn were in charge of the gruesome makeup.
“Generally all the patients had to look very sickly and not well kept. And then we had one patient that was a burn victim and we covered half of her body with realistic looking burns and scars. It’s very intense for one actor and moderately intense for the rest of them,” Carroll said.
Feedback on their performance was solid. He says they immersed the audience in their story and the characters felt realistic, despite being far from ordinary.
“We had a bunch of patients in a psychiatric facility and they felt the actors were playing the parts incredibly well. The judge was very impressed with the ensemble character work,” Carroll said.
They’re planning to perform it for a hometown crowd in Elmira either at the end of March or the beginning of April.
