Directing a flood of memories

"I hated high school. High school made me cynical. No, no. High school made me strong."

"High school was everything simple and understood, everything easy and happy. Everything here just got so complicated, so real. Sometimes I wish I could just go back, or bring it all here."

— "Is There Life After High School?"

In my first full-cast rehearsal for "Is There Life After High School?", a show about a group of high school graduates who return to their 10th reunion, I asked each actor what high school was like for him or her. Each harbored very strong feelings about those four years, whether they hated them, loved them, took an active role in them or simply observed. But consistently, the cast remembered high school as the time during which the first seeds of adulthood were planted.

Directing "Is There Life After High School?" has been quite a challenge, both logistically and emotionally. The musical opens tonight in the Wilcox Black Box. Rehearsals for the show began the day that the cast returned to campus — Sept. 8th — giving us exactly 20 days to prepare the show. Speeding our way through the production process has certainly heightened not only the pace of rehearsals, but also the intensity and emotional closeness each performer has recently felt to his or her own high school memories and experiences.

Though high school is an emotional subject for many people, I was initially concerned about the amount of time and energy I would need to invest in helping my actors understand the characters they portray, characters whose high school experiences might drastically differ from the actors' own teenage years. But sitting in meetings with each cast member, I realized that I did not have to say a thing; they found their characters within themselves, somewhere in the vivid scrapbook of high school memories and personalities that most of us carry with us.

In its most essential form, to direct is to listen, to repeat and to guide. I listen to what my actors have to say, what they want to express. I try to instill in them the courage to say the things they are afraid to say and to experience the feelings they find hardest, darkest and furthest from their own emotional experiences.

Within the framework of "Is There Life After High School?" I have also tried to give each actor the opportunity to be someone he hated, admired, wanted to know or wanted to be. Under the auspices of the theater or, more literally, under the bright lights of the stage, the actor becomes a tenet of himself as those memories and identities are revisited.

Until recently, "Is There Life After High School?" existed for me as a collage of my personal memories from high school. Acting as the cast's only audience this past week, I have begun to understand that while the show evokes cynicism, nostalgia, longing and anger within me, it does the same for my cast. For every emotional reaction awakened within me, there are both identical and opposite responses that exist somewhere within this unique production.

I found myself singing songs from the show as I walked across campus. At the end of rehearsals, I wanted the actors to continue performing. There is something implicitly comforting in the circularity of the rehearsal and performance process. The actors transfer an energy that is at once contrived and personal to an audience of ticket-holders who are instantaneously turned from strangers to friends as they share in this intimate experience of revelation. The audience, in turn, provides an energy that feeds the actors, ideally refueling and encouraging them to take greater artistic and emotional risks.

In "Is There Life After High School?" this circularity is strengthened and sustained by the familiarity of the show's characters and the authenticity with which the cast can bring them to life. The outcome is a kind of participatory experience for the audience, or for anyone who has attended high school in this country, as he or she is able to revisit those four "formative" years along with actors who are doing the same.

As all of the theatrical elements have converged in the last few days, I have come to realize how much this production now represents the personalities and experiences of the actors and even the crew involved. The show has ceased to be a staged reading, and has instead become a deluge of glances into the high school scrapbook of each of my actors. These glances have made me laugh, cry, hate, love and search. More than anything, however, they have made me realize that not only is it a director's job to listen, repeat and guide, it is what she must do if a true story is to be told, and if authentic theater is to be created.

Get the best of the ‘Prince’ delivered straight to your inbox. Subscribe now »

Giselle Woo '02 is a Pschology major from New York City. She can be reached at gcwoo@princeton.edu.

Princeton University Players presents "Is There Life After High School?" Thursday through Saturday at 8 p.m. and Saturday at 2 p.m. in the Wilcox Black Box. U-CALL PLAYERS for reservations.