Who's the Dictator?

Caitlin Goh

On Tuesday, September 6th, a group of twenty high schoolers performed a rather short but extremely unique piece of drama in PenangPac. The title of the drama was “How to Build a Dictator.” So, who’s the dictator?

The play started out with Mr. Sasse sitting in the middle of the stage, frozen. Everyone gathered around him with puzzled looks on their faces. “What’s going on? Are we supposed to do something?” said Shoko Tezuka (12).

 The drama then continued on with a party where a bunch of surveyors came out to interview people. At this point, many people were startled and felt confused about the questions being thrown at them. The survey started out with a plain, simple question—“What is your name?”—which led to other personal questions. An English teacher, Debbie Chinn, asked, “Why are they being so nosy?”

Some of the following questions were also thrown at them: “Do you use Facebook or Instagram? What is your favorite ice cream flavor? How important is privacy to you?”

The play then resumed with Kimberly Horton and Justus Goh confusing peoples’ minds and making them feel unintelligent. The crowd had to choose between the color chartreuse and spring bud, and moved to the side of the room according to the color preferred. About 90% of the crowd didn’t know what the colors were. Nevertheless, the crowd moved accordingly without knowing what they were choosing.

At the end of the drama, a few girls came out to reveal information they’d found about the selective people from the surveys. The researchers selected some of the people who took the survey and searched them up online. They tried their best to find whatever information they could find from Facebook, Instagram, etc. Everyone was shocked about the things that had been revealed.

“It was indeed interesting to know that Mr. Tompkins has skinny dipped before” said Kylie (12). The researchers worked hard backstage gathering all the information to reveal and embarrass the audience. As Megan Chang (12), a researcher said, “It was a lot of pressure to have to make sure we got enough information and that it was good, but we ended up having more time than we expected to research, and it was a full house so we had a lot more people to do research on. It turned out great!”

When the show ended, everyone walked out with a smile on his or her face. “It was an unique experiment. The whole process was totally unexpected and the revealing part was LIT,” exclaimed Peter Kim (11).

So what is the message from the drama? The message depends on how the individuals interpret it. It is what they’ve got out of the play.