Producing High School Theater

I began teaching in 1994 at a high school near Reading, Pennsylvania. In my years there I taught senior  English, Yearbook, and two section of drama for grades 10-12. I quickly realized that I would be much happier if I was only teaching theater-related courses. The school was not large, however, and the Principal was not interested in seeing the drama program expand beyond two classes and a few after school performances each year, and so in 1997 I accepted a position as a full-time high school theater instructor at Lake Howell High School in Winter Park, Florida.

Although Lake Howell opened in 1975, the entire school moved to a different facility for the 1996-97 school year while major renovations were completed on the LHHS campus. The night I arrived in Florida I was given a tour of the soon-to-reopen campus. My classroom was a 1300-square-foot carpeted studio with ceilings 25 feet high and a small office and storage room in one corner. The space had been intended as a music lab, but was graciously given to me as the new theater teacher. There were six large wooden tables still in their boxes, waiting to be assembled; forty brand new blue plastic stackable chairs; a brand new teacher's desk with a rolling desk chair; and a brand new computer and printer. It seemed like heaven.

The  auditorium, however, was a different story. In Pennsylvania I was the proud custodian of a 900-seat theater with full wings, a fly system, and incredible storage space for props, costumes, and set pieces. In my new Floridian home, however, the auditorium was one of the few buildings that was left standing when the rest of the campus had been demolished and rebuilt. As such, it had been used for construction storage and then as a drop zone for all of the furniture and supplies being shipped back from the temporary school used the year before. It had no wing space--when an actor walked offstage, he would walk into a concrete block wall. The air conditioning ducts for the entire building traversed the space where a fly system ought to be located. An enormous retractable band shell was onstage with no way to remove it because there were no roll-up doors built into the facility; students moving the individual towers of the band shell around had ripped many of the stage curtains.

Then I asked where the costume room was--or the prop collection---the makeup...and no one knew. There had been some costumes, but the administrators thought that maybe the previous drama teacher had taken them with her wherever she went. With some minor investigation, I learned that she did no such thing.  All of the set pieces, costumes and other items had been sent to Seminole County Surplus instead of being moved to our refurbished campus, and with the exception of one box containing two yellow wigs and a variety of clown costumes, Lake Howell Theater Company owned nothing.

My aim in this blog is to share some experiences I had in starting a high school theater company with very few resources, in the hope that some other theater teacher somewhere might find some of these ideas useful in building a new program or jump-starting an existing one. I have been so lucky to have a supportive administration, an enthusiastic and talented student body, great friends in the theater community, and a patient and helpful group of family and friends. Maybe this will be my chance to pay all of that forward.