Every year, drama club puts in a huge amount of work to both the spring and fall plays in a very short period of given time. For DHS’ upcoming musical performance Fame, the work load will be no different. For every play put on by the DHS Drama Club, an entirely new set is built that revolves around the overall plot of the play, with the exception of walls and a few props that are used over and over again as plays come and go. Now that Spring Break is over, Drama Club must start building the new set with very little time to build it in.
“Because Central is such a busy auditorium, we’re only allowed to be on the stage for two weeks from the beginning of our production to the end,” DHS Drama Club advisor Amy Bushey said. “Literally, we will get the stage on Apr. 23rd and we have to have our set built to rehearse by the 29th.”
This gives the Drama Club just six days to build a brand new set consisting of two stories with rooms and two sets of stairs. Once the set is built, it will look like the overall interior of a school building. This set design, like all the previous sets for old DHS plays, was based off a close analysis of Fame’s script in relation to what the Drama Club wanted the setting to be.
“You look at the space you have, and you basically come up with a design, what’s going to work for the director in terms of the way they want to tell the story versus what materials you have and how much time you have,” Bushey said.
Once this is done, the Drama Club draws an overall picture of the setting, maps everything out, and then obtains all the needed materials for the set. After that, the entire set is built in one single weekend.
“It’s like putting up a house in one weekend,” Bushey said.
Thus, the overall biggest difficulty for the club every year is time and how little of it there is. However, that’s not the only difficulty. Much of the time, complications erupt between the overall materials and space given for the set and the director’s overall requirements for the set.
“The director has a vision, and it doesn’t always work out with the materials we have and the space we have,” Bushey said.
Bushey isn’t expecting any change in difficulty in putting together the school building set for Fame, and although Spring Break has only just ended and the Drama Club is only just starting work on the set, the club will have a lot of work on their hands in the upcoming few days.
