Frequenting Fanatics: Seniors Laney Rupp and Delaney McDermed produce their own plays through East’s theater program

“You have a deal.”

Then-kindergartener Delaney McDermed had just completed her daily business deal underneath the playground — the Silly Bandz trade. With her arms barely visible under the colored hamburger and panda shaped bands, she’d trade them with her classmates for as long as it took to get the best bands possible. 

And it wasn’t just Silly Bandz either. First-grade McDermed traded Bath & Bodyworks hand sanitizer. In second grade, it was Rainbow Loom bracelets. 

Now, senior McDermed is directing her own self-written Frequent Friday based off of her elementary school trading. 

“What I wanted to show during the play is just how kids take themselves so seriously,” McDermed said. “To be honest, I don’t think I’ve ever been as old as I was when I was in elementary school. I was like a 42-year-old lawyer when I was a child.”

When it came to her Frequent Friday — a play that the seniors in the Advanced Repertory theater class direct themselves — McDermed knew she wanted to write her own. She spent weeks deciding what she wanted to write. She filled her notes app list almost daily with ideas, from Disney channel parodies to a knockoff medicine commercial. However, none of the ideas stuck out to her. 

Until she remembered the Silly Bandz trade.

It was perfect — she loved the idea of doing a parody-style show. So, she decided to combine a mob-style movie and her elementary school experiences.

“We grew up in this era where consumerism was such a big part of our childhood,” McDermed said. “It’s interesting, the way that just rolls with being a child and taking yourself too seriously and the way that those things become props in the games that you play as a kid.”

She wrote the play in a span of a few weeks, adding new lines and jokes every time they came to her. She has previous writing experience, writing short stories for fun and planning out a children’s book show for her junior year theater class. Compared to writing stories, McDermed finds playwriting to be a much more enjoyable process. 

“[Writing stories is] so drudgery and awful,” McDermed said. “And you have to write all these descriptions, [which is] miserable. When you’re writing a play, it’s really immediate and it feels much more active to do. I feel I’m much better at shaping something that I’m proud of when I’m writing a play.”

McDermed was impressed with each and every audition, seeing something in each candidate that would fit well for her show. Some people nailed the Furby impression included in the script, while others had a flawless nerd voice. But she was only able to cast eight out of the 20 that auditioned. 

“It’s a shame I can’t cast [everyone],” McDermed said. “I was really impressed. But you really have to narrow it down to ‘who do I know is reliable? Who can memorize these lines? Who will bring the energy this character needs?’” 

You can watch “Kindergarten Mafia” in the little theater after school on December 2.

Instead of giving instructions to her cast and crew backstage, senior Laney Rupp stood in awe of her cast as she watched her Frequent Friday play out. She was much more focused on watching the last — and best — performance her cast had ever done.

Before she started any of her directing duties, Rupp spent hours flipping through stacks of scripts in theater teacher Tom DeFeo’s room. She chose not to write her own, instead wanting to find a script that fit her humor. Once she started laughing out loud while reading the script for “Hard Candy,” she knew it was a perfect fit.

“I probably don’t have the most mature sense of humor,” Rupp said. “My favorite part of the show is when one of the actors’ pants falls down, and I just find that absolutely hilarious. I pretty quickly knew that this script was a good fit.”

She knew parents in the audience may not find the jokes in the show that funny, but for Rupp it was more important to have a show that was entertaining for students. 

“The whole point [of Frequent Fridays] is getting students involved in theater,” Rupp said. “I’m sure the adults there won’t find it as funny, but it’s more student-based for me.”

Rupp had no previous directing experience, so she wanted to rely on cast members who were strong and experienced actors. They had to be willing to embarrass themselves too, whether it’s playing multiple outlandish characters to having their pants fall onstage. She finds her cast hilarious, cracking up at every joke and nuance. 

The directing process was a little nerve-wracking for Rupp. Since she had acted in Frequent Fridays all through high school, she worried about not living up to directors for previous shows she’d been in.

She’s been able to rely on other theater members to help with whatever she needed, especially with programming lights. Rupp also used her other Frequent Friday experiences to create her show, using directing techniques she liked from previous shows and incorporating them into her own.

“I’m trying to do my best but I feel like I’m still learning myself,” Rupp said. “I always looked up to the seniors and I thought that they were doing such an amazing job and [I thought they] had everything figured out, which obviously I’m sure they didn’t.”

Standing backstage watching her fully-polished show, all of the hours spent rehearsing, finding costumes and planning out lighting were all worth it. Her show had turned out even better than she wanted.