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Welcome (or welcome back!) to the TST.
Welcome (or welcome back!) to the TST.
Hello. I'm Mrs. Rice, educator, and director of the Tractor Shed Theatre at Saint Stephens High School. I'm so glad you are here. This is my 20th year teaching & creating shows with teens at SSHS. Take time to take a look at our program. We have two websites - both are under construction due to a change in platform. So please pardon our mess.
The road to success started here jpeg for almuni D.Starkey.mp4We often joke in the theatre that this is our most high-stakes moment of the year: we have only four minutes to win over the rising freshmen and convince them to sign up for high school theatre!
We really thought the snow might scupper our efforts, but we were thankfully able to buy the show supplies (over $400!) and find just enough after-school hours to crew and rehearse properly.
The result was Super Mario Bros. performed in Kuroko style (Japanese "black theatre" based on Bunraku puppets).
The Riddle Ring is rated PG for thematic elements including death, robberies, the supernatural, relationship issues, and mild language.
We can't wait to share this unique, student-created experience with you!
Step this way!
Step this way!
To celebrate Mrs. Rice nearing her 20th year at SSHS, Spring Play Production troupes from the past three years have brought back some of their favorite shows:
Class of 2023 revived Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind (First produced in 2017)
Class of 2024 performed Greater Tuna (First produced in 2009)
Class of 2025 is bringing back the original play The Riddle Ring: Urban Legends Revealed! (First produced in 2011)
Join us for this thrilling, interactive production where the audience gets to decide which urban legends are true or false!
Opening Night – Thursday, May 15
Friday, May 16 & Saturday, May 17
Doors open at 6:45 PM | Show starts at 7:00 PM
$10 per ticket
Tickets will be pre-sold soon starting Monday May 12th. Limited availability at the door.
Spring Production 2024: Greater Tuna by Jaston Williams, Joe Sears, Ed Howard - Concord Theatricals - Shooting Stars & Tractor Shed Theatre
This week The Tractor Shed Theatre & Students Against Violence Everywhere Promise Club joins the nation in the Start With Hello Week. At SSHS, it is also Homecoming Week. Alongside the SAVE Promise Club, teachers, classes, clubs, and sports have designed kindness activities to share with our student body to help reduce social isolation. #startwithhello #sandyhookpromise
John Dewey: “We do not learn from experience … we learn from reflecting on experience.”
We had a wonderful year together creating fun and meaningful work! Check out our Yearly Reflection.⤴️
Poetry Ourselves
Poetry Ourselves
Two SSHS will be chosen to represent Catawba County Schools at the state level of the National Poetry Out Loud Recitation contest with their original work.
The National Poetry Out Loud Recitation contest
The National Poetry Out Loud Recitation contest
Judges: Tim Peeler, Lindsay Barrick, and Arlene Neal will choose the district winner who will move on to the semi-finals at the Triad Stage in Greensboro in Feb.
Fall semester 2022
Fall semester 2022
John Dewey: “We do not learn from experience … we learn from reflecting on experience.”
It's that time of the year...
It's that time of the year...
Fall Play Production has taken on the leadership of Students Against Violence Everywhere (SAVE) Promise Club and are guiding the school community in kindness activities from Sept 19th - Sept 23rd. Each year, thousands of schools and youth organizations nationwide participate in Start With Hello Week, a national call-to-action week dedicated to making new social connections and creating a sense of belonging among youth. St.Stephens High School has taken the pledge: If you see someone alone, reach out and help, start with hello. Kindness matters.
Fall Play Production has taken on the leadership of Students Against Violence Everywhere (SAVE) Promise Club and are guiding the school community in kindness activities from Sept 19th - Sept 23rd. Each year, thousands of schools and youth organizations nationwide participate in Start With Hello Week, a national call-to-action week dedicated to making new social connections and creating a sense of belonging among youth. St.Stephens High School has taken the pledge: If you see someone alone, reach out and help, start with hello. Kindness matters.
Our first show in our converted outdoor venue!
Our first show in our converted outdoor venue!
First show in our new converted space - Shooting Stars -Grimm Times is an original one act based on Grimm fairy tales with a modern twist and vintage vibe. Tickets go on sale Tuesday. Show runs Thursday May 19th through Saturday May 21st.
Fall Semester was full of new and wonderful things while navigating through a global pandemic.
"We do not learn from experience... we learn from reflecting on experience." ~ John Dewey
Check out our creative work and the making of our new Halloween show and venue - Shooting Stars! ⭐
Today marks the opening of our Tractor Shed Theatre Dewey's Bakery Fundraiser! Items must be purchased upfront at $10 each. Checks should be made out to St. Stephens High School. Cookies/treats will arrive in time for Christmas.
If you don't know about Dewey's, you are missing out!
THE DEWEY'S BAKERY STORY
OUR HISTORY
OUR HISTORY
At Dewey’s Bakery, we bake cookies to make every day a little sweeter for everyone.
We opened our first bakery in 1930 in Winston-Salem, North Carolina – where we’ve helped generations of families celebrate birthdays, holidays, life milestones, random Tuesday cravings, and everything in between. Now, we’re bringing our Southern hometown bakery deliciousness to people across the United States – because it’s just too good not to share.
At Dewey’s, we’re part bakers, part magicians. Whether we’re packing outsized flavor into our Moravian Cookie Thins or transforming bakery classics into cookie form with our Soft Baked Cookies, we add our own little Dewey’s magic to each and every bite.
Our cookies are simply exceptional, made with real ingredients – just like you’d find in your pantry. Outside of the kitchen, our team of dreamers, bakers and celebration-makers are committed to giving back to our local communities here in Winston Salem and beyond… because sweetness is meant to be shared.
OUR INGREDIENTS
OUR INGREDIENTS
For 91 years, we've carefully crafted our treats in small batches. Our Moravian Cookie Thins, Soft Baked Cookies, Crackers, and Cheese Straws are baked with clean, non-GMO ingredients - that means no preservatives, no artificial flavors and no synthetic colors.
Well, well, well what do we have here? A new thing for Halloween! Usually we create a Halloween Trick-or-Treating Extravaganza for thousands near downtown Hickory but this year, we are on our own soil - SSHS hoping to scare the middle and high school kiddos!
Well, what can I say about a year of teleworking during a pandemic? I loved every second of it!!! I made a full connection with 140 theatre students, created two original plays, countless film projects, graded 1000s of Classkick slides, viewed hundreds of Flipgrids, presented my screen hundreds of times, taught for 30 minutes on mute, taught for 40 minutes without camera (in which we dubbed it the podcast session), rocked bitmoji classrooms, became a pro at emojis in the chat, did a lot of personal and social education, and became a more 21st century and tech-savvy educator! 💫🎭💕
🎯Check out the amazing year we've had!
Auditions! This Thursday on Google Meet
Want to take theatre at the highest level at Saint?
Audition for Play Production classes for the upcoming school year.
Want to know more about Play Production classes - have a look around this site.
friday, may 21st@7pm
friday, may 21st@7pm
Did you miss the meet? Click the image below for more info. Questions? contact: thedoorexperiencer@gmail.com
St. Stephens High School’s Tractor Shed Theatre prepares for their third production set for the virtual venue.
Last spring during the emergency shut down, the motto “The show must go on (line)" was adopted and QuaranTEENS was written and produced. It gave the students a playground to explore quarantine in a creative way and served as a historical time capsule for their thoughts and feelings while living during a global pandemic. This school year, their fall production remained fully virtual. ctrl+c ctrl+v an original show fully designed and produced for the screen utilized over twenty digital tools. This show brought to life the creepypasta genre and gained acclaim when presented at the North Carolina Theatre Conference. Freshman Morgan L. & Senior Cameo L. were awarded the Exceptional Theatrical Achievement Award - Morgan for Stage Management and Cameo for Film Editing.
Cameo L. says, “I’ve never fully experienced layering sound and music on top of film until ctrl+c ctrl+v. It was a tedious process, making sure it is layered in a way that delivers or gives an emotional response to what is shown in the film. Wevideo was something I also had never used. It is a very simple editing tool on our Chromebooks, that once I learned was a strong editing program that I could bend to my creative ideas.” Cameo was recently offered a sizable scholarship to pursue her talents in design and theatre production based on her new found talent for digital work.
Theatre teacher/director Molly Rice navigates her students’ creative work for twenty-first century digital learning following the seven core skills - technical, information management, communication, collaboration, creativity, critical thinking, and problem-solving. “My students know how to produce a play for the stage but I wanted to make use of the moment and challenge them to learn to design and produce theatre in a totally different way.” Their upcoming show The Door: A Shared Experience, another original show, continues to push the boundaries of what can be done during shared time between the audience and performers in this new landscape and teaches students how to think outside of the blackbox theatre.
Photos from ctrl+c ctrl+v an original virtual play written from the creepypasta genre.
SSHS TST Registration 2021.mp4
Time to register for the 2021-2022 school year for theatre arts courses - join us!
Read about cameo & the judges here:
Read about cameo & the judges here:
Cameo L. is a senior at SSHS. She was chosen to represent SSHS in the National Poetry Out Loud Recitation Contest at the State-Level by three outstanding local judges. This year the contest will be virtual. Cameo submitted three videos of her reciting by heart poems from the Poetry Out Loud website. Cameo was on the video editing team for Ctrl c Ctrl v and also voice-acted in one of the creepypastas. After high school, Cameo plans on furthering her passion for theatre and will continue her study at Gardner Webb where she has been merited a theatre scholarship and the Dean's Scholarship.
Tim Peeler is a past winner of the Jim Harrison Award for contributions to baseball literature, Tim Peeler has also twice been a Casey Award Finalist (baseball book of the year) and a finalist for the SIBA Award. He lives with his wife, Penny in Hickory, North Carolina, where he directs the academic assistance programs at Catawba Valley Community College. He has published close to a thousand poems, stories, essays, and reviews in magazines, journals, and anthologies and has written sixteen books and three chapbooks. He has five books in the permanent collection at the Baseball Hall of Fame Library in Cooperstown, NY. His recent books include Rough Beast, an Appalachian verse novel about a southern gangster named Larry Ledbetter, Henry River: An American Ruin, poems about an abandoned mill town and film site for The Hunger Games, and Wild in the Strike Zone: Baseball Poems, his third volume of baseball-related poems.
Lindsay Barrick is a mixed media painter and printmaker who is passionate about the arts. She has been judging Poetry Out Loud for a decade and believes the program and its participants are incredibly inspiring. She is proud of all the students, teachers, and families who have worked especially hard during this unprecedented season.
Abigail Taylor is a writer, poet, performer, and visual artist. Abigail studied film and television production at Western Carolina University. She has been working professionally in video production and marketing for 8 years, and teaches film production and screenwriting at Western Piedmont Community College as an adjunct instructor. In 2018, Abigail founded Morganton Improv, a comedy improv and sketch comedy troupe based in Burke County. Abigail is also a lyricist and vocalist for the punk-mathrock band Fantømex, and the Americana trio Sycamore Bones, and most recently published poetry in the literary publication, Kakalak 2020.
st stephens celebration stars.mp4💫Celebration Stars: see the reviews!
Like scary stories and internet folklore? Watch our show here ↗️↗️↗️
St.Stephens High School NCTC entry.mp4Ctrl+c Ctrl+v is an original one-act play written by the cast, directed by Molly Rice. Stage-managed by freshman Morgan L. Produced fully virtual without gathering, in three weeks, stitching together files via Google Rooms in order to provide an abundance of caution during a global pandemic. Technology: WeVideo, imovie, Ipad screen record, cell phone cameras, headphone mics, copyright-purchased video stock, music/sound effects, Audacity, and Zoom.
Melly, bored one day, revisits an old creepypasta (Horror-related legends that have been copied and pasted around the Internet.) website where she ends up joining a Zoom that, let’s just say, holds her attention.
As we start a new school year, let's reflect on 2019-2020... fall semester saw a large and diverse group of Beginning Theatre Arts students who got to know themselves and others through studying personality testing and building ensemble activities. Some units of study included: Storytelling, Body Language, Pantomime, Voice & Diction, Improvisation, Concentration, Observation, & Memorization and the Otherness of Others. Fall Play Production took on projects and performances: Sandy Hook Promise Students Against Violence Everywhere Start with Hello Week, monologues/auditions, Halloween - Evil Idol, and a civic engagement original show called Shine - spotlighting the stories of our EC students. Spring brought Intermediate Theatre Arts students who focused on scene work and script analysis and before the pandemic shut school down - video projects. Spring Play Production accomplished S.A.V.E Promise's See Something Say Something week, TST LIve! and an original virtual time capsule - QuaranTEENS - which was premiered on YouTube. Click the photo to have a look.
2020 Spring Production
2020 Spring Production
We premiered our land-breaking original show on the last school day during the emergency shut-down. We spent many square-eyed hours on creating an intimate glimpse into the lives of ten teens in quarantine. See YouTube
Press play to see more about our first time in the virtual venue.
Press play to see more about our first time in the virtual venue.
Join our award-winning program for the 2020-2021 school year.
Watch this video of current play production students sharing why you should join us...
Welcome. This is our new place while the theatre is "dark".
Welcome. This is our new place while the theatre is "dark".
Project one
Project one
The Quarantine Diaries
Celebrating the Creative Spirit in Quarantine Time...
Celebrating the Creative Spirit in Quarantine Time...
MOLLY RICE·SATURDAY, MAY 2, 2020·
“I’m a high school senior and I’ve been dancing for 7 years. I’ve been a part of the tractor shed as the stage manager and loved every moment. In the fall I will be attending UNCW to major in marine biology and environmental science, with a minor in technical theatre.”
Natalie is a Summa Cum Laude Honor Graduate. She is one of the hardest working students I know. She has been my right-hand lady for years now and not only can she sing, act, and dance but she is an amazing stage manager. Natalie is super organized and keeps us all in check. She has stayed on with other seniors to create a historic original virtual play which will premiere live-stream on the last day of school - May 22nd.
Natalie spends her quarantine time reading, painting, dancing, and working out. Natalie created a dance video to “I Raise a Hallelujah” for her entry in the Hickory Playground’s Quarantine Diaries. Her dance video features her sister who is also a SSHS student. She also created a cooking video for the Creative Quarantine Mini Task Choice Board which was Project 2 in Spring Play Production. Check them out!
Natalie’s Cooking Video (Vegetable Dumplings!)
Looking for something to binge on Netflix? Watch TST alumni, Drew Starkey as Rafe in OUTERBANKS or in Ozark! Check out Drew's resume here>
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