Come, If You Can Find It
February 7, 2008
By: Min Qiao <mqiao@hilite.org>
The drama department premiered its annual winter production last night. This year’s play, “The Secret Garden” will continue with showings tonight and tomorrow.
Sarah Williams, lead actress and senior, said that this year’s play is based on the classic children’s novel by Frances Hodgson Burnett. “(The play) is about a 10 year-old girl who is sent to live with her uncle after her parents die,” Williams said. “It’s a story about how she grows as a person and to learn more about herself and how to treat other people.”
Director Maggie Cassidy said that this is her first time directing a play and said she had much difficulty picking a script. She talked with the Behind the Scenes Club, a parent-teacher club here that works on the drama productions, and both agreed that they would like a play that people of all ages would enjoy. “‘The Secret Garden’ is one of my favorite stories,” Cassidy said. “It has some light characters who have a dark experience, but then through friendship and love, they finally overcome their difficulties.”
The plot goes something like this: a young girl named Mary Lennox who lives in India and loses her parents, so she must move to England to live with her uncle. While living there, she befriends a robin. This robin then helps her discover a secret garden, but the plants in the garden looks withered and dead. In the meantime, Mary discovers her cousin Colin, who is sick. As Mary brings the garden back to life, she also helps Colin to heal.
One of the unique things about this play, according to Williams, is that the entire play is done in a British accent and one of the characters is actually a bird. In order to pull this off, Williams said that they have a puppet representing the bird and have an actor play the voice of the bird.
“There is a lot of work that goes into a production like this,” Cassidy said. “You have to choose a play, which takes a long time, and then the casting is also very difficult and then rehearsals.”
In fact, the director and the cast are not the only ones hard at work here. A huge part of the success of this play depends on the technical theatre crew, which handles everything from the props to the lighting and basically does everything the actors do not.
“We began working on this since before winter break, and we stay after school every day to work on the set,” Natalie Cappucci, stage manger of “The Secret Garden” and senior, said. “(Initially,) it was everyday ’til 5 or 6, then (as the performance draws near,) we are here ’til 9, and then the week of performance we are here ’til 10 with the actors. It’s a lot of time; we basically spend the night here.”
Cappucci said that something that is unique to the set of this play is that the set is especially elaborate for “The Secret Garden.” There is a two-story set, which is usually reserved for big productions like this, a garden that revolves around and, of course, a bird.
“My job, specifically as the stage manager, is to coordinate what goes on and ‘this needs to be built today or this needs to be done today or this is how it’s going to look or this is how it is going to be built,’” Cappucci said. “ Then during the show, I sit in the audience and I have a headset to call all the cues for the lights, the music, and, like, fly in the curtain.”
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