For the first time, Drama 2 is putting together a play that will be filmed by Mrs. Huth’s Art of Film class and potentially performed live on stage. The play in question is “Clue”. The play is based on the movie that’s based on the board game by the same name. Mrs. Dalcamo, the Drama 2 teacher, said that she has been trying to put something like this together in the drama program for a while and is very excited to finally take a test run.

The story takes place in the mid-1950s and revolves around six people who have been mysteriously invited to a manor owned by a certain Mr. Boddy. As per Boddy’s request, the six go by pseudonyms that will not reveal their identity. They include Colonel Mustard, Mrs. Peacock, Mr. Green, Mrs. White, Professor Plum, and Miss Scarlet. The six are accompanied by Boddy’s butler, Wadsworth, who seems oddly suspicious. Once it is revealed that the six have been gathered to ransom the blackmail that Mr. Boddy has on them for Boddy’s own butler, the lights go out. Chaos breaks out as gasps, screams, and thuds can be heard. When the lights come back up, Mr. Boddy is dead, and now everyone is a suspect. With the police on their way thanks to Mr. Boddy, the seven potential murderers embark on a mission to obtain the evidence proving their past crimes and prove their innocence to the crime a hand. This show is quite the rollercoaster, and Dalcamo believes it will be able to entertain everyone who sees it.

To determine who would play which part, Mrs. Dalcamo held auditions where the ten members of the class choose their three favorite characters from the play and performed as one of them in a scene, differing from the audition process of the musical. Mrs. Dalcamo explained why she changed the process for the play. “I know pretty much everyone’s acting skills in here and I could probably cast it without doing auditions. But I wanted them to be able to choose what they wanted to do and have those three choices and then be able to use those against the auditions.” Since there is no singing and dancing in the play, Mrs. Dalcamo said that she also changed the scoring of the auditions. The attributes scored on were stage presence, diction, expression, volume, gestures, animation, and risk taking.

Although most of the students in the drama class had already learned several of those acting skills during the musical, the play allowed for the students to go a step further with their abilities. They had been reading through Uta Hagen’s book, Respect for Acting, to learn skills such as utilizing the fourth wall, emotionally becoming a character, and object exercises. Dalcamo believes that the object exercises, in particular, are the most beneficial to the play. She said that the play is one of the reasons why she brought the book in to use in the first place.

After all their learning and practicing, Mrs. Dalcamo and the students are elated to be doing this production because of how fun it is. Dalcamo gave a very different reason for her anticipation: her students. “(They are) the reason that I’m so excited about this. Even just in reading through the play, how much I laughed throughout it, how I could see each person in different roles…I think that’s what excites me the most.”

To see who is proven the guilty party in Drama 2’s first play production, “Clue”, check this story for updates on when and where you can check it out.