One Act Festival arrives

When Delano students take the stage at the Delano One Act Festival on Saturday, Jan. 20, they will have an opportunity to sharpen their skills just one week before competition begins at Monticello.

 

Saturday’s performance on their home stage is “a place where we can really put our best foot forward and show what we can do,” said junior actor Kelli Carroll, who plays the role of a teacher in Delano’s presentation of “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time.”

 

“We still have quite a ways to go, but for where we’re at I think we’re OK because we have our festival coming, and one more week of fine tuning to make everything better,” said Carroll.

 

The play by Simon Stephens tells the story of a 15-year-old boy with autism who sets out to determine who killed his neighbor’s dog.

 

Junior Gabe Otto plays the main character, Christopher, and said the opportunity to portray an individual with autism has been an enjoyable challenge.

 

“It shows the kind of world that he lives in every day, what happens to him and what he thinks about and how ordinary things are portrayed much differently in the mind of someone with autism,” Otto said. “There are certain mannerisms you use. It’s hard to explain, but you just have to feel for it. It’s pretty cool. I’m having a lot of fun with it.”

 

Carroll plays Christopher’s teacher, Soibhan, who serves as a narrator by reading a book written by Christopher.

 

“The book itself just shows how things are different through the way it is written and how I read from it,” she said. “It shows how teachers have to behave differently when they’re dealing with children with autism compared to kids who don’t have autism.”

 

Delano is the first school to perform at the festival on Saturday, taking the stage at 9 a.m. Other schools participating include Rockford, Glencoe-Silver Lake, Centennial and Orono.

 

Preparing a one act show

The cast began preparing for their show in mid-December. One act productions differ from conventional fall and spring shows in that they cannot exceed 35 minutes, and they are Minnesota High School League competitions.

 

“With one act, since it’s a competition, there’s a degree of stress that we don’t have with the other plays just because we want to go far,” said Carroll. “One act is always a rough process because you really have to fine tune the play, so we really work on diction and projection. We work on emotions, how we react to certain things, and we make sure that’s always one constant picture and nothing is broken in it.”

 

“The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time” presents an additional challenge in that it is typically a longer show that must be edited down to the proper time. Editing must be done carefully in order to preserve the story’s coherence.

 

“We can’t just talk faster because we need to make sure the audience can understand us,” said Carroll. “So it’s a big process and it’s difficult, but it pays off.”