By Madeleine Powell
Staff Writer
The cast of the Mira Costa Drama Department’s fall play, “Almost, Maine,” attended the California Educational Theatre Association High School Theatre Festival at Fullerton High School on Jan. 13-14, winning the Southern California Best Technical Staff and Best Ensemble for its performance of the play.
The CETA festival is an annual event that promotes high school drama programs in Southern California by providing students and educators with opportunities and experiences in theatre. Any high school with a theatre program can attend, but only schools that are invited perform at the festival.
Photos: Drama students perform “Almost, Maine” and rehearse for “Tonight’s Play.”
“It was fun meeting new people from other schools, watching other shows and taking the workshops,” junior Molly De- Simone said. “I learned that theatre is such a powerful art form, and that it can really change people’s lives.”
CETA sent judges to evaluate 53 high school fall theatre productions. CETA adjudicated high schools by sorting them into four regions and inviting the school with the highest score from each region to perform its entire show at the festival and compete against the other regions. CETA selected Mira Costa to perform for the Los Angeles region, and it won awards both for its performance as a cast with Best Ensemble and Best Technical Staff.
“[Being invited to perform] is a really big deal because this is our first time entering in the festival, and we got to perform our entire show,” DeSimone said. “Not a lot of schools get that on their first time.”
Visit the CETA High School Theatre Festival Website.
The Mira Costa Drama Department first presented “Almost, Maine” at Costa in the small theatre on a thrust stage, which is surrounded by the audience from three sides. The CETA festival uses a proscenium stage, which allows the audience to only view the play from one angle, meaning that the audience could only view the play from a screen instead of being immersed in the production.
“A lot of us have our backs to different portions of the audience during different times in the play,” senior Isabel Gray said. “We had to re-block [rearrange] it so that everybody was facing flat-out.”
“Almost, Maine” is a collection of eight individual vignettes, or scenes, that all explore the play’s central theme of love. The play also features a prologue, interlogue and an epilogue that discusses ideas about love. The Drama Department performed the play from Nov. 4-12 in the small theatre.
“It is really nice for us to be able to come back to performing [Almost, Maine],” Gray said. “The characters are still really familiar to us, and the performance was something we had a lot of fun doing. I am glad that the judges recognized all of our hard work from the past few months.”
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