New to school this year, Unified Drama follows in the footsteps of Unified Sports to make theater more approachable and accessible to students with and without disabilities, regardless of experience.
“I think it’s important for everyone to have access to theater,” junior Adrien Nolte said. “It’s a really good way to experience the arts.”
Unified Drama provides an opportunity for people with less experience to start theater without as much pressure.
“I don’t think theater should be intimidating and Unified is a good open way for anyone to join theater,” Nolte said.
For junior Killean Patton, the Unified show provided a way to share his love of theater with those who haven’t had the chance to experience it.
“I love drama, I love performing arts, I love doing theater,” Patton said. “And I wanted to sort of contribute to the community and help people get into theater.”
Rehearsals for the play were only one hour, three days a week. The shorter time set aside for the show, while making it lower-pressure, also constrained the show slightly.
“We simply don’t have a lot of time for this show, because we’re doing so many shows this year,” Nolte said.
The show was also written by the students during rehearsal, contributing to their time constraints.
“There are not a lot of shows that we do that are written during rehearsal,” Patton said. “The closest thing is the One Acts, but those are still written by other students and then they send us those scripts and we perform them. This is different because we were writing it while we were doing it.”
The show was also similar to the One Acts structurally, made up of multiple shorter shows including musical interludes, puppet shows and more.
“The only way I can really compare it to something is One Acts, with how we have the entr’actes almost,” junior Indigo Freeman-Burnett said.
Though there wasn’t as much time, that allowed for the show to be less stressful.
“It’s a lot less intense than, say, your average play that we do here,” Nolte said. “It’s only three days a week, only an hour after school, so it’s a lot more of a relaxing show to do.”
The lack of pressure fostered a closer community and more focus on connections and having fun.
“Everything feels very welcoming and we’re all a very tight-knit group,” Patton said.
For Freeman-Burnett, the Unified show’s slower pace provided an opportunity to focus on what draws her to theater.
“I feel like it can be so easy to get caught up in, like, ‘okay, these are my lines and this is my costume and this is what I’m doing,’ and I think it was just really cool to get back to the real part of theater with the community and the connections and just being able to spend some time with some really great people,” Freeman-Burnett said.
Though the community is an important part of all theater performances, Unified’s goal of a more accessible and welcoming way into theater led to more focus on that element.
“We focused more on team building and community than I feel like we sometimes do,” Freeman-Burnett said. “I mean, we always focus on that, but it seemed emphasized in a different kind of way, because there were people that were new to the department.”
Patton felt that the show fulfilled its goal of building and expanding the theater community.
“That was kind of the whole point of Unified, is bringing people into the theater space that maybe haven’t done it before and being inclusive,” Patton said.