Acting

CLASSES

Conard Drama has acting classes for all levels! Acting 1 is open to any student (grades 9-12), and serves as the pre-requisite for Acting 2. Students in their 3rd and 4th year of acting class will take SPS (Specialized Performance Study), which is our most advanced acting class for juniors and seniors. All acting classes have a benchmark performance project: Acting 1 (magazine project in class), Acting 2 (children's theatre and historical figure day), and SPS (fall play, spring fictional character day).

SHOWS

Conard Drama provides numerous performance opportunities for students. All are audition based and competitive. In the fall, we have the fall play every October and our Ten Minute Play Festival in November, which is a great place for beginners to get involved. In the spring, we have the Conard Musical in March and the spring play in May. Any student may audition for our festival and spring play, but only those enrolled in a performing arts class (music or theatre) may participate in the musical.

ABOUT OUR ACTING TEACHER:

MS. HUNTER PARKER is an award-winning theatre director who has produced and directed numerous productions up and down the East Coast, including off-Broadway. Recent favorites include Les Miserables, Frozen, Footloose, Next to Normal, and The Last Five Years. She enjoys acting too, most recently performing as Barbara in August: Osage County at Chestnut Street Playhouse. After earning a BA in Acting from Virginia Tech (Go Hokies!), she completed a national tour in children’s theater, worked briefly in Los Angeles, and returned to her home state of Virginia to begin teaching and directing high schoolers, where she was recognized as both Teacher of the Year and Regional Theatre Director of the Year during her tenure. Hunter received a fellowship from The University of Georgia (Go Dawgs!), and relocated to Athens, GA to earn her MFA in Theatre. She’s worked for many esteemed nonprofits, including Hartford Stage, Virginia Repertory Theatre, and SPARC (Richmond, VA). Locally, she’s taught at Hartford Stage, Eastern, and Hall High School before coming to Conard in the fall of 2021, where she teaches acting to freshmen through seniors, advises the Improv Clubs and Thespians, and directs the Fall and Spring Plays along with the Conard Musical. In 2022, she was honored to receive the Stephen Sondheim Award for Best Direction of a Musical (Footloose). In 2023, Conard won the national United States of Frozen contest which allowed her to conceive and direct the inaugural production of Disney's FROZEN the musical in the state of Connecticut. In the summer of 2025, she was able to take 20 Conard students to the UK, where they premiered an original student-written comedy called MURDER AT CAMP HARMONY at the Fringe festival in Edinburgh, Scotland to rave reviews. Her passion for theatre and social justice has taken her to rural Tanzania for the past fourteen years, where she is the co-founder of New Hope School for Girls, a secondary boarding school that opened this past January. She resides in town with her sweet dog Berkley (@barkswithberkie) and is grateful to call West Hartford and Conard home.

Page updated

Report abuse