VISTA Productions kicked off their 2021-2022 season during the first two weekends of November with The One-Act Play That Goes Wrong. Sounds thrilling, doesn’t it? 

As a freshman, this was my very first VISTA Productions play and I actually got the opportunity to be assistant stage manager to our amazing stage manager, Ginny Kraus. Throughout the month (and a half-ish) that we rehearsed after school, I met an amazing group of people and learned that, as time goes on, those people really become your family. It’s an amazing experience– learning, growing, (and basically perfecting) characters, props, and the entire show with such a close group of people.

Back in September, after auditions and before even working with the script, we started working through different types of characters. Our wonderful director, Wendy Short-Hays, had us running around the stage as if a killer clown was chasing us, or leading with our heads as we walked. Once we got our scripts, we practiced saying the lines showing different emotions. During tech week (and before), we started running the show from start to finish during our two-hour rehearsals and began really working with props. As time went on, we started finding things that actually went wrong in The Play That Goes Wrong; mustaches fell off faces, handcuffs broke while on stage, some fumbled lines, but the play went on. We learned how to adapt quickly, basing timing off of the audience, for example. Some performance nights had more of a crowd than other nights and the cast learned how to bounce off of a lot of laughter and work with not as much on other nights as well. The set that our amazing crew put together was composed of  3 main flats depicting a living room sort of space in a large house. At the end of the production, those 3 flats fall over due to the theatre company’s poor crew management. After each of the 6 shows, people came up to me afterward saying, “that ending was my favorite part!” and “I laughed so hard at the end!”. Hearing these comments and being able to tell the cast and crew what people said kept up morale in their part and cheered everybody up after continuously performing the same show over and over again.

Be sure to come and see VISTA Productions’ next show, Full Circle, on January 28th, 29th, and 30th!