2021 Virtual International Thespian Festival  

Monday Marathon June 21!

We were delighted to share Breathing Through Covid with you. 

Comments? Critiques? Please email Andrea Lee Roney

 roneya@npenn.org

Breathing Through Covid is an original production created by NPHS Theatre & Thespian Troupe 5464.  The show is a collection of impressions, experiences, and reflections on 2020 during the Time of Covid. 

It began as brainstorming sessions in July of 2020 with our students and the NPHS Theatre Staff. From these sessions, a list of general topics took shape. All students who auditioned for the show were accepted into the acting company and chose the topics that interested them. The casts met once a week in Google Meets and through discussions, dramaturgy, improvisation, breakout writing sessions, inspiration, and frequently shared individual work, discovered how each topic wanted to "breathe" in form, content, and performance. As we neared completion of the script, our technical crews joined us to select costumes, check the lighting, sound and recording equipment, and be "eyes" on the recording process. Our parent organization, the NP Theatre Guild, delivered ring lights and green screens/paper to the performers' homes for recording the scenes and segments. 

After recording, the editing began under the guidance of Noah Golden, graduate 2017 and founder/owner of Outloud Productions, with our student editors and stage managers. While a few pieces were recorded in socially distanced sessions outdoors at our high school, the rest were recorded by the students themselves in bedrooms, living rooms, backyards -- just as we have lived the past months. 

Our experiences and reflections may differ from yours. This is not a a show of judgment or persuasion. It is an effort to present life as we experienced over the past 10 months. It is an attempt to produce theatre as Shakespeare advises in Hamlet: "[for] the purpose of playing [presenting theatre], whose end, both at the first and now, was and is, to hold, as 'twere, the mirror up to nature." 

This is our mirror. 

The Knight Crier:  "NPHS Theatre to present Breathing Through Covid". 

Connor Niszczak (& Kaity Andrey)