Co-Curricular Theater
We offer two co-curricular theater productions each year, open to all students and rehearsed after school.
Our repertoire is akin to regional theaters, such as Berkeley Repertory Theater, focusing on new and inventive work and classics reimagined for today, rather than drawing from the canon of Broadway shows more typical of High School theater. Our approach is often non-traditional, bringing to the community a multi-layered theater experience that expands the audience and performer’s understanding of what theater can be. The productions are frequently connected to English or History department curriculum or themes and usually cross-disciplinary, integrating movement, visual art, and live music performed, arranged, and often composed by students.
Some examples of productions are The Grapes of Wrath with music, visual imagery, and text highlighting connections between the Dust Bowl refugees and more recent refugees of economic, political, and environmental crises. Another example is a production of Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 by Anna Deavere Smith about the verdict and uprising following the trial of officers in the Rodney King beating. The rehearsals incorporated conversations about race, empathy, and social justice topics around race, ethnicity, and identity. Plays from the classical canon (including Shakespeare, Moliere, and Greek Theater, among others) are also explored, often in a contemporary context. Every other year, the winter theater production is a student-directed One-Act Play Festival, with short plays directed by advanced theater students.
In keeping with the school’s progressive mission, the co-curricular theater program at MA enhances and connects with the curricular program giving students a place, and the forum, to express their learning from any class or discipline, to address what they are reading in the paper, to explore their philosophy or spirituality, their sense of justice, their sense of wonder, their sense of humor, and to ask big questions.
