From left to right (faces seen), Freshman Paige Hutchison, Senior Tori Sykes, and Junior Swetha Nair act out a scene from “Five Stages.”
By: Maira Ramos
Theater Director Kaila Schwartz and a company of seven MHS students will fly to Scotland this August to perform at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, the largest arts festival in the world, Schwartz said. The month long festival features around 300 different performances each day, and the MHS students will be performing four times, she said.
The students will be performing an original piece titled “Five Stages,” Schwartz said. During their brainstorming sessions last fall when they came up with ideas for their script, everybody was interested in the five stages of grief, she said.
“I know that it sounds really dark, gloomy, and depressing but it really isn’t because each stage of grief doesn’t always manifest through tears,” Schwartz said. “We’re showing how grief and loss are dealt with differently. When we think of grief, we immediately think of somebody dying but actually it can be more than that.”
The play will be a devised work, meaning that it doesn’t have a linear plot and will be a collection of shorter pieces that are connected by an overarching theme, Junior Megan Hutchison said. They are still in the writing phase, so they’re not ready to perform yet, though they will be, she said.
“I can tell that we’re all going to be nervous,” Hutchison said. “But more excited than anything.”
Each person going on the trip wrote two to three pieces about his or her own experiences with the five stages of grief, which are denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance, Senior Erik Hart said. The pieces were all put together to create one uniform work, he said.
“This is like a culmination of all the knowledge I’ve gained from taking theater four years in a row,” Hart said. “[It led] up to this one event to test my skills in a country that’s way different than what I’m used to, in a place where I can show off to the millions of people that show up.”
The writing process involved a lot of personal time, Senior Tori Sykes said.
“We really got to channel our feelings on paper,” Sykes said.
For those who are planning to go into the acting business, the opportunity to perform in this festival means the world, Hutchison said. It makes them memorable when they audition for different parts, she said.
“Some of us are lucky enough to say that we’re trying to go in the business, and the business is hard,” Hutchison said. “But if you have something like this on your resume, it’s just like a one-up for you.”
MHS’s Parent Teacher Student Association (PTSA) has donated a total of $1,050 to go toward the trip, but the theater department still needs to raise more money, Schwartz said. The total cost of the trip is $50,000, she said.
“We have been trying multiple means of raising money,” Schwartz said. “We’ve had a GoFundMe campaign, we have asked people for financial support, we have gone out to solicit donations, restaurant fundraisers, we [had] a dinner auction. We’ve also had donut sales and all of the concession sales this year from all of my performances went to the Fringe [Festival].”
Representing Milpitas on an international stage will be a memorable experience for everyone, including herself, Schwartz said. The theater space that they were given is perfect for what the students will be performing, she said. They will also be working with professional technicians and professional equipment.
“We are creating, producing, designing, and performing a show of our very own,” Schwartz said, “Which I think accurately represents who we are as a school and community.”
Junior Swetha Nair didn’t think that her parents would allow her to go on the trip because they tell her to spend her summers doing activities that would help her academically, Nair said. Although she doesn’t think that she’ll pursue theater as a major, it will still be a big part of her life, she said.
“They’re giving me validation for how much I care about theater, and they’re saying that theater is a valid thing to love, which wasn’t a message I was getting from them in the past,” Nair said. “I’m so glad to be able to go on this trip.”