Heading To State

A week from today Rep. Theatre will be opening its fall semester show. The show will run for two days, Thursday the 26th and Friday the 27th, and will begin in the West auditorium at 7 pm. The play the class will be putting on is the Neil Simon play Fools.

Fools is a comedy/farce about a school teacher who is hired to teach in a small Ukrainian village that has been cursed with chronic stupidity for over two hundred years. The play was actually written as part of Simon’s divorce settlement with his wife. The settlement said that Simon had to written a play for his ex-wife and that she would receive all the profits for it so he wrote a play that he thought would never succeed. Fools is now one of, if not his most successful play.

Although putting on plays is nothing unusual to this group of talented students, something made this one unique. That thing being a very special invitation. On the day of the solar eclipse, the students in Rep. Theatre were informed that they would be given the opportunity to take their show to State.

Every year, in Wichita, thousands of high school students attend the Kansas State Thespian Conference. It’s a three day event in which students can attend workshop, compete in individual acting and tech events, and see shows performed by other high schools. Each year, only about five or six schools are chosen to perform at the conference. This year Shawnee Mission West was chosen. This is an amazing opportunity for Rep. Theatre and SMW Thespians as a whole. The Rep. Theatre class is currently hard at work perfecting its perform for its opening night here at West and its show on January 6th at State.

Although the conference is not a competition, it’s still exciting to know that no matter how the year goes for other sports and clubs, West will still have a group of students headed to state.