Setting the Stage: Theater upperclassmen spend over a year scripting, planning and rehearsing their own Frequent Friday shows

Then sophomore Grace O’Donnell had looked through countless scripts, but nothing was clicking. Next year as a junior, she would take the fourth class in the theater sequence, Repertory Theater, where she would begin developing her own Frequent Friday show to premiere her senior year.

She knew she wanted to direct a comedy, but none of the plays she scanned through stuck with her. And then she had an idea: to write her own script about her experiences as a babysitter. 

“It’s all my different babysitting experiences put into one show,” O’Donnell said. “I’ve been a nanny for three years, so it’s about all those horrible experiences that I’ve had.”

Apart from the three main yearly shows in theater, students in the Repertory and Advanced Repertory theater classes spend up to two years developing their own twenty-minute “Frequent Friday” shows.

Instead of performing on the sprawling auditorium stage, Frequent Fridays are set in the cozy “Little Theater.” Instead of expansive casts of more than 50 actors, it’s a tight-knit group of under 10. And instead of directors Brian Cappello and Tom DeFeo at the helm, the shows are directed, cast and found or written entirely by the students.

O’Donnell is one of the 15 Repertory Theater students this year. She turned in the rough draft of her script in January and is currently writing her working draft before getting feedback from her classmates in the spring. 

Her main character Mia babysits four children: Beatrix, a 12-year-old “influencer,” Holly, a well-intentioned yet disastrous nine-year-old, Blake, a seven-year-old hyperactive prankster and the two-year-old baby Clark. 

“I like to start by coming up with characters, and then creating where I want to start, where I want the middle to be and where I want the end to be,” O’Donnell said. “I just make a whole document of ideas I want to incorporate. And so I take all my ideas from there, and I just start writing dialogue.”

While O’Donnell is writing her own script, most students generally elect to adapt an existing script found either online or in DeFeo’s large script library. 

Junior Eli Moon is working on adapting the comedy “The Hungry Maze Game of Divergent Death,” a pick he submitted in January. Next year, the Repertory Theater students will move up to Advanced Repertory Theater, and will begin casting their actors through “blind reads,” where actors don’t get to read the parts beforehand.

“My freshman year, I was actually in six of the 12 shows,” Moon said. “Getting to see the process happen in so many different ways, seeing all these shows come to life and getting to know these great directors made me realize I really want to have my own show and have this great time with all these new people.”

Once a director has selected their cast list, they begin to have after school rehearsals and start to prepare props and lights for the show. For senior Hartley Graham and her show “Pizza: A Love Story” premiering this Friday, she casted her actors in November and has since programmed the lights and purchased a stained shirt and bathrobe as props.

Graham describes her directing style as fun yet strict at the right times. She starts her rehearsals with a question of the day because she believes that cast bonding will make the show better overall.

When the big day arrives, the cast and director dress up formally to school and invite their friends to the show. Before the show, the director gives a speech thanking the theater department and the cast, and then the show begins.

“If you’re not involved in theater or don’t know anything about it, I would definitely recommend coming to see a show,” O’Donnell said. “They’re super fun, and it’s something that we put a lot of work into. And so the more people are there, the more fun it is for us.”