By Annie Nesbitt ’13 Contributor

Unless you are a self-proclaimed theater geek, you have probably never heard of Arthur Miller’s play The Crucible. And, let’s face it, not many theater geeks have even heard of it. But this is what the CCDS Drama Department has in store for the fall play- and it will be amazing.

Mark Femia, director of drama and vocal music, has decided to put an interesting spin on the production: The Crucible will be staged in the round. Theater technician Glenn Lindahl will be building four sets of seats that will be placed in a square on the stage of the Keeler Theater. The play will be performed from inside the square. This is a big challenge for all actors, because it requires them to play to all sides. There is no possible way to look at everyone at once. Mr. Femia is making an audacious move by attempting to teach such a challenging thing to high school students.

After the cast list came out, we had our very first read through, which, as the name states, is when you read through the script with everyone speaking their own lines. It was very rough, and a lot of lines got completely botched, but we seemed to know what we were doing. A few people couldn’t be there, so Mr. Femia and Maggie Smith ’09 filled in for those missing characters. I must say, however fun that first rehearsal was, we are about to put on a very interesting production. The play is filled with suspicion, drama, lies, and paranoia, which are very fun and yet very difficult to convey.

The rest of the first week consisted of learning the blocking of the first scene, which is very long and introduces almost every single character. Since there are only five scenes in the entire play, it takes about three days to learn only one. Learning scene one started off with figuring out where exactly the stage entrances were, and then figuring out how to play to the audience. Once that had been established, we went to work on blocking. Again, for those of you that aren’t into theater and/or were never forced into an eighth grade musical, blocking is just working out all the movements of the people on the stage.

We are all trying to memorize the blocking and all of our lines, but so far (fingers crossed) everything is running smoothly. If you want to see how in turns out, come see The Crucible from October 28-30.

Photo By Ilana Habib ’11, Photo Editor

Slideshow Photos by Cast Members of The Crucible