This summer a select few students in the triangle, including one from Northwood, will devote a large portion of their time to studying theater and performing a play at PlayMakers Repertory Company on the UNC campus in Chapel Hill.
Northwood acting and tech classes have been going to see shows at PlayMakers for several years. The company usually has a nine-play season. When the season is over, they devote their time to camps for young actors and tech students.
For middle school students, there are weeklong classes on the fundamentals of acting, stage combat, Shakespeare, improvisation and more.
For high school tech students, there are classes and apprenticeships available to teach scenic design, lighting, stage management and costuming.
The longest camp offered at PlayMakers is their Theater Intensive camp, which runs this year June 18 – July 22. The program centers on the production of one show, which is presented to the community in the Paul Green Theater at the end of the camp. Theater Intensive is an audition program for high school actors only.
Henry Stokes, who has been in Theater Intensive four times, said that in the past, auditions for the show were held during the school year, four to five months before the rehearsal started. When the summer’s show is a musical, actors are to sing a song, learn a dance, perform it, and read short sections of the script on the spot as part of the audition process.
Stokes was in PlayMakers productions of Oliver!, The Music Man, A Midsummer Nights Dream and The Mystery of Edwin Drood.
In Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Nights Dream, Stokes played Lysander, a lead role. For this show the cast started out meeting for four hours a day.
“For the first week… we had a crash course in analyzing Shakespeare… you see which syllables are stressed and which ones are unstressed and that can give you an inclination to what a character’s objective is and also what Shakespeare wanted the lines to mean,” said Stokes.
In addition to the four hour afternoon session, as a lead, Stokes met for rehearsal for three hours each morning.
“We were getting together, we were doing a little script analysis on our own. We were also getting up on our feet and reading through and just really playing around with the scenes and the language…you need to be comfortable with Shakespeare so you can really give a good and honest performance,” Stokes said.
As the camp progressed Stokes said that rehearsal time increased. They would start returning to the theater for more rehearsal from 6:00 until 9:30 and sometimes later than 10:00.
Senior Olivia Griffin performed with Stokes in the same company for the past four summers, with a break one summer when the camp wasn’t running. She compares the camp to a job.
“The only thing they’re not doing is paying us,” Griffin said. “It’s one of the hardest things I’ve ever done; it’s harder than high school theater by far.”
Griffin says she loves the Theater Intensive experience because it helps her meet additional dedicated people.
“When you’re at PlayMakers you’re around all the people that are doing theater because it is a passion. It’s something they want to do when they get older, it’s something they love to do, it’s something that makes them who they are. So it is just really cool to get around all those people who have the same dreams and the same goals as I do,” Griffin said.
Griffin thinks that being around all of these new people has helped her grow.
“It makes you work harder. You see people that have been training for this stuff ten times harder than you have, or go to schools that have way more opportunities than Northwood does,” Griffin said. “Being around those people who are obviously better than you… you just want to push yourself, you want to get to their level.”
Griffin auditioned for, and got, a large supporting roll in this summer’s comedy, Urinetown: The Musical. “Which is actually how it sounds, yes. It’s about a time when there is a tax to pee,” said Griffin.
After the camp is over, Griffin will study theater and minor in dance at UNC Greensboro. Stokes currently plans to begin next year at NC State for mechanical engineering and minor in acting or dance. Both say that the camp has influenced what they have decided to do after graduation.
– By Quinn Kerscher