Senior Play Sum-Up

By WCA Senior Evie Fordham

After countless hours of preparation, the Wake Christian Academy Senior Play (and fundraiser for the Senior Trip to New York City), You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown, opened on Thursday, January 28. Despite their busy schedules balancing work, school, and sports, almost all of the seniors of Wake Christian contributed in some way, from the actors who started practicing at the beginning of the school year to the other contributors, like the stage crew and costumers, who brought the rest of the play to life.

The teachers in charge of the play start planning it while the seniors who star in it are still juniors. Senior Sponsor and psychology/sociology teacher Barbara Williams said that the teachers “take a survey” of the juniors to find out what kind of participation the play will have the next year, then consider the kids’ personalities and try to find a play that’s the right fit.

She explained, “We found that You’re A Good Man, Charlie Brown had so many different personalities included in the play that just fit right in with the personalities of the Class of 2015.  It is such a fun play, and as we discussed… the class…, we had a great feeling that YAGMCB would be a good fit for this fun-loving class.”

Once the play was cast, the real job began as director Tom Wilson, who had played the part of Charlie Brown during his own high school days, worked with the actors. One of the main challenges to perfecting the play was “to get over the obstacle of young adults playing little children,” said Wilson, “I spent a lot of time saying, ‘No, you don’t look silly’ or ‘Be more like a little kid.’ Once we got past that point of ‘What will my friends think?’ and everyone in the cast [embraced] their inner child, we [were] able to let go and have fun.”

According to Wilson, although he wanted to make the show fun and entertaining, his main hope was that “the cast would have fun and make lifelong friends and memories,” which the students can certainly attest that they did.

Lily Gregory, who played the part of Lucy, stated, “My favorite part was probably interacting with our class because we grew closer together with everybody, and I got a lot closer with people that I hadn’t really talked to.”

When showtime came, many of the actors realized just how much fun it was to be under the spotlight. Gregory said her best memory was “the performances because it was cool being in front of an audience. All the teachers had told us how… we’d have so much fun once we got out on stage, but I didn’t really believe them until we actually got up there. Having people watch you and see all that you had accomplished was great.”

Elizabeth Slaney, who played Marcie, also felt that the performances were her favorite part of the experience, recounting, “I think it was a lot of fun to see the audience’s reactions when they really started enjoying [the play]. That was really rewarding.”

Trey Russell, who portrayed Charlie Brown, said that the “elementary schoolers” were his favorite audience out of the six the seniors performed for. He explained, “They were probably our best audience because they were the most excited!”

The performances didn’t always go perfectly, but the cast learned how to deal with typical problems like mic troubles or technical difficulties. One of the assistant directors, Kiara Rhodes, who enjoyed her position from which she “had the opportunity to see [her] classmates go from the rawest moments to the best performance,” is especially proud of the way the cast handled moments of crisis.

She said, “My best memory was probably the… afternoon [performance for the high schoolers] when the play went totally wrong but… the cast was able to pull it off and make it really enjoyable.”

YAGMCB sold 718 tickets, a number that rivals many of Wake Christian’s former senior productions.

But despite the amount of money the seniors earned toward their trip to New York City, to many of them it is not nearly as valuable to them as the lessons they learned about theatre, hard work, and each other, plus the priceless memories they made. Trey Russell may echo the sentiments of the other seniors when he summed up, “My best memory was just the whole thing.”