Get your act together : Students put on a show for BHS’ Winter One Acts

Bainbridge High School’s Student Run One Acts is one of the most attended events of the year for the school’s drama students.

The shows started Thursday evening and continue until this Saturday. Eight mini-plays are chosen out of 45 student submissions, where students write, direct, manage stage production and act the entire series.

The students have produced everything from dramas to romantic comedy.

Students Kit Patterson and Eli Pitasky are directing one performance called, “The Last One Holding Ze Gun,” written by Elsa Hager.

In this production, a large but kind Russian and a classic New Yorker rob a bank together and take two very different people as hostages. One hostage is an “elderly Brit” and the other is a “snotty middle-aged woman.” It’s about the two hostages and how their relationship evolves as they sit in the bank tied up together.

Although they have acted, Patterson and Pitasky have never directed a performance before.

“It definitely helps me understand the director at our school,” Pitasky said. “And it helps me understand the people you’re working with. It’s like putting ideas into a pot, mixing it together and pulling something completely different out.”

“When you’re acting, it’s hard to realize what the director’s thinking,” Patterson explained.

The students started pitching stories and casting roles in mid-December and have been working on each performance since. The One Acts provides them with one of their few chances to take an active role in the entire process of a production.

“It’s so rare these days to see an entire youth production,” said Dylan Lehotsky, who has taken a directing, writing and stage designing role in the production.

Lehotsky also wrote the comedic play “Keep an Open Mind,” featuring the most actors of all the performances.

It follows a young couple in the middle of a dramatic break-up where, written off the stereotypical strategies of a woman and man in a relationship, each character resorts back to their subconscious for advice on how to interpret the other’s feelings and words. Each of the two main characters are given an additional three characters to act as their subconscious, as they mentally discuss what to say and how to react.

Performances continue on

7:30 p.m. Friday and Saturday in the high school’s LGI auditorium. Admission for the show is $7 for students and adults, $10.

Contact Bainbridge Island Review Staff Writer Cecilia Garza at cgarza@bainbridgereview.com or 206-842-6613.

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