PEABODY — Peabody Veterans Memorial High School’s Stage One will be performing in the final round of the Massachusetts High School Drama Festival this Saturday at John Hancock Hall in Boston, having now made it through both the preliminary and semi-final rounds earlier this month.
The Massachusetts High School Drama Festival is a statewide drama festival run by the Massachusetts Educational Theater Guild. Approximately 90-115 schools go through three rounds in the festival, where they present a 40-minute cutting or one-act play to be judged. The final round is whittled down to just 15 school productions.
“It is honestly the most inspiring celebration of student art and theater to ever exist — or at least that I’ve come across,” Stage One Director Stephanie Manning said. “It’s really just an opportunity for students to be in a theater for a day with other students who share the same passions as they do, and to really elevate one another as artists and to celebrate each other’s work.”
She added, “I can’t say enough about the mission of the Massachusetts Educational Theater Guild and what they aim to do for every school in Massachusetts, with their mission being to provide equitable theater education for all students, and for students to have access to theatrical experiences throughout the state during their time in middle school and high school.”
Stage One will be presenting “A View from the Bridge” by Arthur Miller, a classic piece of American theater. A former PVMHS Stage One member herself, Manning described Miller’s play as “a title that’s been on our list for some time, and we were just waiting for the right group of student artists to do it — and this year’s group of students felt like the right ones.”
The story follows a man named Eddie Carbone, who is an Italian-American immigrant living in Brooklyn, N.Y. He and his family welcome his wife’s cousins, who are also immigrants to the U.S. but do not have the proper documentation.
Manning explained that “the world is changing around (Carbone), and it kind of leads him to do some unthinkable things that we never thought this character would do.”
She added that the play was picked because it’s an opportunity to take something that feels classic and modernize it, but there’s also “a tremendous amount of social relevance to the piece today, with a lot of the social themes that we’re dealing with in our country. For us, we think that it’s important that theater always has some sort of messaging that it can share with the audience, or an essential question that really drives the audience to think about not only what they’re experiencing as a witness on stage, but how it then in turn ties into their own lives.”
Manning noted that the questions the audience are left with are: “What would you do?” and “Could we be doing more? Or are we all complicit in what’s going on?”
This production is made up of the following people:
For the cast: Alfieri is played by Erina Stanton; Eddie is played by Myles Fitzgerald; Catherine is played by Kaelyn Veltry; Beatrice is played by Emy Sousa Santos; Rodolpho is played by Yadiel Acosta; Marco is played by Matheus Muniz; and the ensemble includes Alin Alexandre, Logan Cerasale-Messina, Jonathan Parsons, Cat Quaresma, and Temperance Reed.
For the production team: Stephanie Manning is the director; Richard Carey is the producer; Stella LeDuc and Finn Bricklemyer are the assistant directors; Stella LeDuc and Levi Reyes are the understudies; Ross Titelbaum is the technical director; Allyson Bua, Alivia Frederick, and Victoria Weinberg are the stage managers; Conall Sahler is the fight choreographer; Olivia Dumaine is the intimacy coordinator; Yasnella Fernandez is the movement coordinator; Lili Evans is the fight captain; Paige Cerasale-Messina and Madelyn Dennis are the writing consultants; Emilia Drinkwater and Armando Taibot are the deck managers; Edin Alic, Andrew Boissonnault, Kenneth Silveira, Syd Topham-Williams, Alan Titelbaum, and Ross Titelbaum do the scenic design and construction work; Edin Alic, Patrick Stanton, and Sahelys Taveras do the sound design and operation; Levi Reyes and Damian Valentin do the lighting design and operation; Chloe Demissie, Alexis Aguilar-Munoz, and Susie LeCain do the costume design; Yaniell DeJesus and Tabitha Muise lead props design and management; Eric Ortiz and Angelari Macharia are the props crew; Izabella Pereira and Caroline Sargent do hair and makeup; Kendall Benvenuto, Ripley Bricklemyer, and Kiana Reid run special effects; Nathalia Sandaire and Kadence Sarat are the dramaturgical team; and Adam Bettencourt, Lillian Brokvist, Neveah Carderello, Jackson Deschamps, Nathan Dos Santo, Yanna Felisminoo, Eva Garzone, Rudney Gideon, Raymond Jolly, Manahil Khan, Dominic Martinello, Anna Luiza Maciel, Leanna Murcia, Jayden Medina, Bianca Nelson, Reid Pimental, Kaylee Romero, Alex Serpas Portillo, Mia Thomas, Jalissa Williams, and Angelica Yniguez are the running crew.
