Chantilly Drama Competes For The Championship

Following two first place wins in two qualifying competitions, Chantilly High School’s drama department is going to Charlottesville to compete in the Virginia High School League’s theatre championship for one-act plays.

On Saturday, March 5 at the Piedmont Virginia Community College, eight schools will compete before four judges to become state theatre champions. Each school has had to place first or second at both a district competition and a regional competition to qualify for states. And there is plenty of competition.

“This is our most popular activity in terms of student participation,” said VHSL Theatre Coordinator Lisa Giles. Though she doesn’t have the exact numbers yet, she said that there were up to 128 schools competing in district competitions.

At Chantilly, thirty-two students make up the cast and crew of AP Theatre, the one-act play written by director Ed Monk specifically for this year’s competition. In the play, a student is taking the (fictional) AP Theatre exam, in which he is tasked with adapting three types of plays to modern life. The three types of plays are Bunraku, or traditional Japanese puppet theatre, Greek tragedy and Theatre of the Absurd. As the student is writing, the plays are acted out.

The play is about 32 minutes – three more minutes and they’d be disqualified – and made up of three short, 10-minute plays. Monk said he got the idea from watching another school perform at regionals two years ago.

“There was a group doing eastern theatre,” he said, “which deals with kings and princes and all that. I combined that with modern problems. These days, kids deal with things like prom and exams.”

Monk intended to use the play for the one-act competition, writing it to fit the time and format restrictions. It’s also the right audience for the content, he said. “At the competition, they’re all theatre kids and teachers, so they get the jokes.”

According to the VHSL website, the competition began in the 1931-32 school year. Today, the VHSL includes 312 public high schools with over 200,000 students participating in activities, with the goal of providing students with “an opportunity to develop teamwork and leadership skills [and] to learn the importance of sportsmanship ethics and integrity.”

Chantilly has been participating in the one-act competition for years, says Monk, with quite a winning record. They’ve won the district competition seven out of the last ten years, and went on to place fourth in the state competition last year.

“And we’re back this year,” said Monk. “But it’s all subjective, sort of like the Oscars. What’s better? A drama or a comedy? A small or a large production? It really depends on the judges and what they like at any given time.”

The four judges this year are Suzan McCorry, David Small, Terri Moore and Roman Allis. McCorry is the theater director of her school, and Small is the former theater director of his. Moore and Allis are both professionals out of Richmond and Williamsburg, respectively.

They will judge the performances on acting, directing, and the ensemble effect, or how the full cast works together to pull the piece off, said Giles. Each judge assigns a ranking (one through eight) and a score (from 70 to 100). The ranking is what counts; scores don’t factor in unless there’s a tie in the rankings.

“What I always say to the kids is, ‘Your goal is to do a better performance than you did last time,’” said Monk. “They performed better at regionals than they did at districts, and hopefully they’ll perform better at states than they did at regionals.”

Monk has been working with the actors to tweak a few final details before states, armed with criticism both positive and negative reaped from the judges’ feedback at the qualifying competitions. But he doesn’t seem too stressed about the outcome.

“Literally, whether the judges like it or not is out of our hands,” Monk said. “It’s an honor just to be able to go and represent the school.”