On Saturday Jan. 31, for the first time in years, Manitou Springs High School participated in the One-Act competition. The cast performed “A Human Write” at Pikes Peak State College and the MSHS team won the Best Ensemble Award, which was one of four specific awards given out.
Indigo Bates (10) played a chorus member and the love interest in the piece, Janice. “I basically threw myself into a real life scenario where someone was approaching me and confessing their love to me, and I happened to also secretly be in love with them,” she said.
The protagonist is known as The Writer. Each chorus member in the show represented a different thought within The Writer’s head and their director, Ryan Reed, gave the chorus members the opportunity to develop a unique trait for themselves. “The group had collectively agreed my trait was love since I was the love interest,” Bates said.
The group rehearsed at the SILC building for a few weeks, and eventually moved into the District 14 auditorium for rehearsals as the show approached. “Rehearsals were a lot more engaging than what I’m used to, but at the same time a lot more stripped back since there were only 10 of us,” Bates said. “We were constantly on stage and constantly blocking. It was a big change from “Cinderella” where you’d be moving only a little bit and be off stage at some points.”
Bates feels that the involved rehearsal process was beneficial but also stressful because she was always on stage.
Lilliana Sanders (9) played a chorus member in the One-Act as well. “I just went with how I felt in the scene and tried to connect to how I felt while still playing a character,” she said.
Unlike most scripts, the script for “A Human Write” did not have specific lines labeled for particular chorus members nor was there a particular required number of chorus members. Instead, each line for any given chorus member was simply labeled “chorus” meaning that the cast and Reed had to work together to assign lines.
The cast, alongside Reed, identified each beat, also known as a shift, when the feeling of the scene changed and assigned lines based on each beat. “As we went on we got chunks and we assigned each chunk its own beat,” Sanders said. “I think we had somewhere around 20 beats that we sectioned out.”
Kyle Blasi (12) played the protagonist, the writer. “I was the physical embodiment of all of the other voices, and my character was struggling to come up with a story,” he said.
Blasi enjoyed playing this role because it was unique to what he had done before. “I’m still a fairly new actor, and the only roles I’ve done in the past have been big, elaborate, goofy and over the top,” he said. “This was a chance for me to do something a lot more nuanced and to play more of a serious character. I really appreciated the opportunity to do that, and I think it stretched me a lot as an actor.”
The group was praised for their fluidity as a cast. “If one person messes up then it really screws everybody else up,” Blasi said. “Every line builds off of itself, other lines and every person builds off of each other, so my favorite part is how we function as a team.”
Ultimately, the group’s only goal was to create a good piece of art that they could appreciate. “We saw the competition as kind of a cherry on top,” Blasi said. “We decided to not worry about that so much in our production process and just have fun with it. I think that our attitude towards it benefited us, and I think that we saw more of a wholesome picture with the completion of the project in the end.”
