Living & Arts

Drama Board lights up stage with "Written in the Stars"

In print | November 13, 2008

High school musicals have long been written off as cotton candy fluff: sweet, sticky and fading quickly from your mind the second they end. Writer and director Charles Inniss ’09, however, is bringing a new flavor to the genre with the opening of “Written in the Stars” tonight at Lang Performing Arts Center, 8 p.m. A student-run Drama Board production, “Written in the Stars” centers around the life of high school senior Eddie Holman, a new transfer student at a performing arts school. Like many an aimless teen before him, Eddie is “trying to find his place in the world, trying to find his destiny,” Inniss said. The path to discovering Eddie’s destiny is far from smooth, however. Struggling both at school with the bullying Coventry Rat Pack and at home with his distant mother, Eddie must also deal with personal demons from his past.

Things begin to look up for Eddie when the most popular girl in school, Amanda, befriends him. This being high school, however, things are rarely so simple. Throughout the play, Eddie continues to be plagued by his alter ego that Inniss says “feeds on Eddie but at the same, is his comfort food and makes him feel comfortable.”

With this darker element to the play, Inniss makes sure that “WITS” isn’t your typical saccharine high school musical. He keeps a balance of the fun “light-hearted high school triteness” but without compromising the “psychological and often very, very dark” nature of the play. The result is a production that features comical scenes starring the viciously giggling Gossip Girls on the dreaded first day of high school but also has room for dramatic scenes like Eddie’s tense conversations with his mother.

Musical and Vocal Director Gerrit Straughter ’09 worked with Inniss to compose scores that alternately get your toe tapping and complement some of the more serious tones of the play. Straughter characterizes the music of “WITS,” which ranges from Eddie’s lightly orchestrated ballad “Wishing and Wondering” to the quirky, upbeat “Coulrophobia,” as “a Motown Michael Jackson Stevie Wonder kind of thing.”

The dancing was equally important to Inniss, who enlisted the help of Carmella Ollero ’09 and Kaitlin Smith ’10 to choreograph his scenes. From the Coventry Rat Pack’s brusque and forceful moves to the Gossip Girls’ showy numbers, choreographers Ollero and Smith ’10 created dance scenes to perfectly complement the music and the characters.

Although Swarthmore College couldn’t seem more different from Coventry High School, Inniss is confident that the audience will relate the characters and themes of the play. “Everyone can see a bit of them in this show. This idea of your destiny being written in the stars, it seems intangible. But really, you have a lot more control over your own destiny than you think. It’s there for you to grab,” Inniss said.

“WITS” was a “grab it” moment for Inniss, who first dreamt up the musical in his junior year of high school and is finally bringing his vision to fruition. The performance of “WITS” will be a workshop production. This is typical of the first staging of original material. “The workshop opportunity allows the director to focus on the elements he thinks are most important to him, in this case, the music and dancing,” co-producer Laura Wolk ’09 said, “[This] means that other elements are scaled back.”
Inniss kept the set and the costumes minimal in order to place more emphasis on the theatrics of the show. Sets are merely suggested by a chair or table and often, personalities are denoted by a single clothing item, such as outcast Eddie’s conspicuously bright red cardigan.

Keith Benjamin ’09 who plays Eddie, described himself as “the polar opposite” of the play’s protagonist. “Eddie is vulnerable but he attempts to compartmentalize his issues so that people just see someone who is okay,” Benjamin explained, “Yet at the same time, he is trying to reach out and hopes that someone will grab his hand.”

To prepare for portraying Eddie and their characters, Benjamin and the cast underwent rigorous theater exercises. “We would try and walk like the character, sound like the character and really think about every aspect of the character—even how they smell,” Sunny Cowell ’10, who plays Amanda, said. Cowell also modeled Amanda on girls from her high school—“super fly, stylish and with a lot of attitude.”

Inniss also focused on getting the actors to personally invest in their roles.

“I always tell my actors I’d much rather them not know their lines at all but have a feel for what the character does,” Inniss said, “If you feel your character, you’ll know how to act in a scene.” Taleah Kennedy ’10 credits Inniss’ direction for helping the cast flesh out the characters, even one intended for comic relief like her character—the requisite snotty girl.

“With all the characters in the play, there is a sense that there is another side to everyone,” Kennedy said, “It’s really cool to try and explore that and implement that ever so slightly in what you do onstage.”

All this tireless work in perfecting the play is so that Inniss can achieve his primary goal for “WITS”: to put on a show.

“When I see the audience leaving, I want them to be saying, ‘That was a great show.’ Not, ‘That was a great student-written show.’ Or, ‘That was a great workshop production,’” Inniss said, “I think that if I do my job right, we’ll get that.”