Colony High students cap careers with dating drama

PALMER — The teenage dating scene can be fraught with drama. Fortunately for a few high school seniors, they get a chance to direct the show.

Every spring, the Colony High School Drama Club gives senior students with at least two years of high school theater experience the opportunity to individually direct a one-act show.

“Since I first watched senior one-acts freshman year, it’s been cool to look forward to being a senior,” said senior Makala Dishneau, who was last seen on the Colony stage as Mistress Ford in Shakespeare’s “Merry Wives of Windsor.”

The number of seniors who direct the senior one-acts depends on the number of qualified applicants and the runtime of a standard play (about 2 hours), as well as how the selected show is divided into acts or scenes.

Colony senior and Drama Club President Sara Main said she chose this year’s play — “Collective Dating” by VB Leghorn — primarily for its format. Each of the show’s 12 acts is a roughly 20-minute, one-scene vignette on specific kinds of dating, such as online dating, speed dating and even “Pre-Dating,” a portrayal of cavemen-like relationships.

The challenge was in finding enough actors for each director, without creating too much overlap. Each male actor was cast in two plays due to a lack of auditions, so the directors had to ensure they didn’t schedule one person to be in two places at once.

After nailing down who was directing whom in which mini-play, directors still had to deal with dropouts due to unforeseen circumstances. Props went missing, gear malfunctioned, but Drama Club adviser and media teacher Brian Mead wasn’t worried.

“The show goes on,” he said. “You figure things out, you troubleshoot, and those are the problem solving skills that we’ve been trying, for 12 years, to teach everybody because it’s going to happen. Something will go wrong, guaranteed.”

But things will also go right, as the student directors have already seen.

“It’s just really awesome to be able to take the advice and the tools that we’ve learned being onstage … and being able to pass what we’ve learned on to somebody new,” Dishneau said.

Working with inexperienced actors provided ample opportunity for bequeathing knowledge for senior director Ben Cappa, who said he purposefully tried to choose some non-seniors for his act.

“The challenge was not only finding that they have this ability to perform, but showing them also how they can harness this ability later on.”

Come “hell week” (the week before the show opens), Nate Sandidge — who was last cast as Master Page in “Merry Wives of Windsor” — said it’s “both scary and satisfying to watch everything come together.”

“You wanna get in there and get your hands on everything … but now we have to just almost let go all the way and let them take care of it,” he said.

“Let the actors be actors,” said Will Sandidge, Nate’s brother.

Who’s directing what

Ben Cappa — who got his start onstage in “Frankenstein” his sophomore year — kicks off Colony’s version of the Leghorn play with “Pre-Dating.”

The story follows the pre-historic man Nolo in his attempts to woo the pre-historic woman Nala with “art” — and fire.

“Needless to say, things go awry,” Cappa said.

Christian Dahl, who is typically found behind the scenes on stage productions, follows Cappa’s act with “Dating Service,” detailing the lover’s search for “Mr. Right.” The short features many plays on the word “right,” including the name of the matchmaker, Mary Wright, who dismisses a client simply for being left handed.

The next act, “Internet Dating,” is directed by Tucker Atkin, who is also often found backstage.

Rather than showing individuals alone in their rooms perusing the Internet for their soul mates in this scene, Leghorn presents five men and women as attendees of a seminar on developing an online profile. By identifying their own insecurities, the “students” learn how to present themselves honestly and find better matches, Atkin said.

Next up is “Speed Dating,” in which Main directs three couples — one is successful, two are decidedly not (at least by one person’s standards). She said there are various reasons a speed-dating relationship might not work out, and sometimes it just takes “fate intervening” to find love.

Nate Sandidge comes fifth with “The Drag of Dating,” directing four men with varying sexual preferences in their search for happiness.

That search ends, he said, when the characters accept themselves for who they are.

“You don’t need a relationship to be happy, and you shouldn't have to settle for anything that’s lower than yourself,” Sandidge said.

His brother, Will Sandidge — who, incidentally, dressed in drag for Colony’s “Midsummer/Jersey” mash-up of Shakespeare meets “Jersey Shore” in 2014 — directs “Blind Dating,” which he said has a similar message to the previous act.

Taking the phrase literally, Leghorn sets up a blind date between two blind lawyers, neither of whom know the other person is blind. While the female character has long since embraced her blindness, the male character takes the duration of the scene to do so.

The show takes a more serious turn with Dishneau’s “The Sacrifice of Dating,” in which the character Leslie finds “the perfect guy,” but remains unhappy when she fails to compromise with him.

Lastly, John Ryan Duffy — who played Shrek in the musical of the same name at the Glenn Massay Theater last year — covers “The Dating Game,” based on the ABC game show of the 1960s-1980s.

The humor returns as one bachelorette unknowingly signs up for the show (rather than a regular dating service) and struggles to keep to the canned questions and stilted script.

“It boils down to, you shouldn’t pretend to be someone you’re not just because you’ve been told to or just to make something work,” Duffy said.

The show opens at Colony High at 7 p.m. on Friday, April 22. Tickets are $10, $7 for senior citizens, students and military. To purchase tickets and for additional show times, visit colonydrama.tixato.com.

Contact reporter Caitlin Skvorc at 352-2266 or caitlin.skvorc@frontiersman.com.