Wombat Stew and Cheer Up Chicken

By Packia Alagu Nagarajan

The Theater Arts class has spent the whole semester preparing to perform two plays to the elementary school. Both the plays were originally written as books and it was part of the class to turn those books into an enjoyable play for the kids. We spent a whole quarter of the class figuring out sound effects to use for all the howling wolves and growling bears, and the interval music. We also spent the other quarter of our class, cutting patterns, sewing bits together, unsewing and adjusting our costumes for the plays. For most of us in the class, this was the first time that we’ve been involved in any sort of acting so it was relatively hard to project our voices and be confident. However, with Ms. Geiman’s help, all of us were able to do well during the performance.

Wombat Stew started out in the outback of Australia, with a happy dingo trying to cook a wombat. To help the wombat from being eaten, all the animals of the forest come in to add inedible ingredients such as mud, feathers, slugs and bugs, flies, and gumnuts to the stew which poisons the dingo when it tastes the stew. In the end the animals end up saving the day and the wombat. 

Alyssa Kwok (12), a senior who acted out the role of the dingo, says she enjoyed being able to make the children laugh and be cheerful: “Of course, I can do that with any other role, but because I’m such a main part of the play, it’s almost up to me to make sure the children are happy. Since I love children so much, I wanted to make them smile and that was my highlight.” 

Cheer Up Chicken is the other play that we acted out. It’s a great book with Christian values that encourages children to think about others and teaches them about the concept of “passing it forward.” This book starts off with a visitor offering a live chicken to Father Gregory and instead of cooking and eating it, he passes on the chicken to a sick tinker who then passes it to a little girl whose dog had just passed away and she passes it to the beggar woman down the street who ends up giving the chicken back to Father Gregory. This book shows how the kindness you put out into the world always has a way to return back to you. This play required us to memorize more lines and cues, which were given out by the narrator throughout the play.

One person in our class had volunteered herself to be the narrator for both stories despite the fact that she was also involved in the HS drama production. Limey Chhor (12), says, “The key to manage DOZENS of lines is to know what is being spoken before your line. Reacting and moving to your own speech is just as important as reacting to other people's lines. Your character just comes alive through you once you put on your costume. It's like wearing another person's life. When I put on the safari outfit, I suddenly knew everything there is to know about this narrator I'm playing like where they go for work, what their life is like, what they had for breakfast earlier, etc. It's what makes drama interesting to me and possibly to others too.” She has done an awesome job at narrating the plays for this class as well as the HS drama production for this semester.

This class has taught us all the behind the scenes of a drama production on a relatively small scale in terms of our audience and the length of our plays. We all felt rewarded when we found out that we influenced the kids so much that they went to the library after the play and wanted to borrow the books that we recreated. If this doesn’t show the success of the play, then I don’t know what does!