Mercedes Blankenship

Grover Middle School Proudly Presents... was a piece about a middle school drama club that (after spending too much money on the previous semester's production of A Streetcar Named Desire) is relegated to producing a low-budget, royalty-free show entitled Planet!: The Musical!, much to the chagrin of its director, Ms. Jodie Medini. We follow the production from its announcement through auditions, callbacks, rehearsals, emergency understudy replacements, and the final performance. Along the way, we get to see the duet between the star-crossed lovers Mars and Jupiter, the (in retrospect, inappropriately suggestive) song performed by Venus, and the eleven-o-clock "Rose's Turn"-style number performed by a 12-year-old who's already a character woman. And when one of the cast members gets a concussion during football practice right before the performance, the Stage Manager/Director's Assistant/Prop Boy/Understudy/Swing, Jimmy, is forced to go on as one of the Asteroids at the very last minute! We end the piece on Planet!: The Musical!'s opening number, appropriately titled "(It's a Show About) Space!"

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This piece was created in collaboration with 4 of my classmates, in a process that was part brainstorm, part discussion, part improv, but which would most accurately be described as "goofing around." We enlisted other members of our Capstone class as performers, and I encouraged them to make their own choices about who their middle schooler was — some of my favorites included the one using far too much vibrato, the one doing the choreography strong and wrong, the one aggressively correcting their castmate's choreography mid-performance, the one enthusiastically holding their prop sign backwards, and the one who was crying the entire time from stage fright. Although we spent the entire piece poking fun at it, this piece really was a sort-of love letter to the silliness of low-budget, low-stakes educational theatre and the importance that it holds in the lives and minds of those producing it. Those sorts of productions are the starting point for so many theatre professionals, and thus, they have a very special place in our hearts.