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“The theater, the theater, what’s happened to the theater?” Danny Kaye asks in White Christmas. Well, Mr. Kaye, the theater is alive and well at Berean Christian High School.
Berean’s drama students are performing The Boarding House Reach April 29-30. The students have been rehearsing the show for three weeks and will give three performances over the weekend: Friday at 7:30 p.m., Saturday at 3:30 and 7:30 p.m.
Three weeks is not a long time to prepare a three act play. Drama students, Luke Wessel (Jr.) and Mia Hardwick (Sr.), attest to the long hours. “It’s a lot of hard work,” says Luke. “But in the end it’s always so exciting when we get to perform it.”
According to these students, Mr. Kerr has built a theater program at Berean that students are proud to be part of. They agreed that he is like their benevolent overlord; he demands a lot from them, but he has earned the right to push them to meet high expectations.
For Mia, acting serves as an intellectual exercise. She enjoys watching the story come together. She also loves public speaking, and theater has given her greater confidence in front of a crowd. “My improvisation skills are way better now,” she says. Thinking on her feet is a valuable skill for a public speaker.
Luke loves developing the characters in a play. The work involved in breathing life into a character that first exists only on the page is exhilarating for him. He says that it’s fascinating to watch all of the actors bring characters to life as they work through rehearsals. It’s fun to discover how the characters interact with one another in ways that you can’t always see on paper. “When it’s all done, it’s like we’ve created a sculpture together.”
Performing on stage requires the acceptance of vulnerability. When you are working together to make that sculpture everyone has to trust one another. It’s a lesson that Mr. Kerr works hard to teach his students.
“Mr. Kerr is always telling us to support our scene partners,” says Luke. The goal is for every actor to work selflessly to make the other actors look great in the scene.
“Sometimes Mr. Kerr just tells us to simply be better,” Mia says.
The students in the drama classes are a tight group. They have to be if they are going to trust one another on stage. An environment like that, where everyone accepts their own vulnerability and trusts others to help them be their best, is a great environment to build strong relationships. Luke and Mia say that the drama program is like a family.
Mia says, “I joined drama for the acting, but I stayed because of the friendships I’ve made there.”
A basic exercise for every actor learning to perform a character is to ask themselves what the character wants. What is the character’s motivation? The exercise caused Mia and Luke to reflect on their own motivations.
“It’s given me a bigger perspective on what’s important in my life and forced me to examine my motivations,” says Luke. Working in theater reminds them that their motivations should be centered around bringing glory to God not around personal gain.
Mia does not plan to continue acting when she goes to Cedarville University next fall. She plans to become a physical therapist. Nevertheless, she admits that she was curious to know if the school had a theater program. It does, and who knows, maybe she’ll find herself on the stage again some day.
The Boarding House Reach is about Lucas, a thirteen-year-old boy with a nose for trouble. He has a driving desire to buy the bicycle of his dreams and designs a scheme to get it by renting his parents’ house to various strange characters while his mom and dad are away on a business trip. Everything goes according to plan until it doesn’t.
Buy your tickets in advance https://bchsarts.ticketleap.com/boarding-house/details