Yoh Theatre Travels to Scotland
Nineteen Woodstock Yoh Theatre Players and five chaperones including director Marcia Bender stepped off a plane in London on July 29th ready to perform and take in the sights of the United Kingdom.The Players spent two days in London during which they experienced the London Eye, climbed all 528 stairs in St. Paul’s cathedral, and saw Tony-award-winning show Kinky Boots in the West End.
Next, the students traveled by bus to Edinburgh to begin the central purpose of their trip: performing at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. The Yoh Theatre Players were one of over forty-seven thousand theatre groups performing in the city this August, twenty-four of which were American high school theatre groups like Yoh.
Woodstock students stayed in dorms on the campus of the University of Edinburgh along with fifteen other American high schools through an organization called the American High School Theatre Festival (AHSTF) which was responsible for bringing Yoh to Scotland.
Junior Haley Symonds says that it was a “pretty amazing experience, getting to share theatre with people from different places, learning stories, making friends.”
Through the AHSTF, the Yoh Players saw a variety of shows including, among others, Romeo and/or Juliet, a performance of Shakespeare’s classic play where the audience gets to choose what the characters do, and Peter and the Starcatcher, a theatrical adaptation of the Peter Pan prequel book telling the story of how Peter and Neverland came to be.
Beyond high school shows, Yoh students were often free to travel in smaller groups to whichever shows they wanted to see. Students saw original musicals Voldemort and the Teenage Hogwarts Musical Parody, Six (about the six wives of Henry VIII), and Hot Gay Time Machine, a show called Heimatmann about the true story of a German man who tried to kill Hitler, and a simulated plane crash show called Flight that took place inside a shipping container, and many other performances.
All of the performers were very friendly and open to talking with the students after their shows. WUHS graduate Maggie Burns (class of 2018) named the trip a “life changing opportunity,” saying that “being in such a new place with so many people who are all connected by the Fringe Festival and the performing arts was incredible.”
Burns went on to say “being able to bring one of our shows to perform really showed me new aspects to theatre beyond what I’ve experienced in the past”.
The Players gave four performances of Bakkhai, a Greek tragedy by Euripides that the students also performed as part of their regular 2017-2018 season at WUHS. Before performing, they set foot on their stage only once, during their two-hour tech rehearsal where they learned how to manipulate the curtains and be safe backstage while light technician and WUHS junior Nora Zonay worked with AHSTF tech guy Matt to set all the lighting for the show.
The students were also able to work on aspects of their show in practice rooms at their dorms, and were led in rehearsals by Ms. Bender several times between each performance. For each show, the Players were allowed into their space fifteen minutes before showtime to set up the set, then they would perform, then have about twenty minutes to strike the set, put everything away, and get back on the bus to their dorms.
The young actors stayed busy eating, sleeping, seeing shows, and performing during their two weeks at the Fringe, and in the words of sophomore Riley Chynoweth, “I think everyone can agree that this has been one of the best experiences in our lives.”