Hi! I’m Rachel Anderson. I’m a senior here at Homestead. I enjoy everything fine arts-related. I play the clarinet, piano, and sing. I also like to read and spend time with my dog. I wanted to take the One Act Competition class because I saw the past year’s productions and I am friends with people who were in the class and I heard the fun stories they had. This is my first time in One Act. I had never taken a theatre class before this, but I was involved in mainstage productions. It definitely is what I thought it would be.
This year we are doing a devised piece. We started out finding the medieval moral play Everyman. We really liked the message it gave and decided to make our devised piece and base it off of Everyman. For the first couple of weeks, we had different groups work on different aspects of the play. Some people would work on the script, while others would work on blocking or movement ideas. Over time our play kinda just came together and we would pick and choose which things we wanted to keep in the play.
Everyman is about a character named Everyman. Everyman kinda represents all of humanity, he isn’t really the best human being to anyone and is very flawed. One day God decides he is done with Everyman and that he has to die, so he sends death to Everyman. The entire play is Everyman running around trying to escape death and along the way, he finds what really matters and what doesn’t. It has been a really fun show to create because there are so many different directions we could take the blocking, the way we act, and adding in different elements of movement. I’m one of the five senses and we are basically clowns in a way, so I really enjoyed working with the other senses and bouncing off different ideas with each other.
I think one of my favorite memories of One Act is when we went to our first competition. I thought it was really fun! We drove up to Manitowoc in a bus and performed our show, then we all sat outside and ate pizza. It was really pretty and relaxing, we sat overlooking the lake. We also got to watch other high schools perform and it was really cool to see what other people were doing.
I think that this year’s class is very different from last year’s. I personally wasn’t in One Act last year, so there are a lot of new people in it this year. We are also doing a different type of show. Everyman is definitely a movement-based show. We are dancing and flipping, and doing tricks a lot, which I think adds to the show in a really interesting way.
Tell us a random fact about yourself.
I don’t like cheese. It’s disgusting.
Act Out 