LC students experience the creative process

Students and staff are stressed out from too many mandatory achievement tests.

The tension opens the door for someone to save the day.

What if the supposed savior is actually a cobra snake disguised as a human with the ability to control the minds of others?

On Friday and Saturday, drama students at Lewis and Clark High School will play out this plot in a clever musical comedy written for them.

The show will be the world premiere of “Kelly the Destroyer Versus the Springfield Cobras.”

Not only will the cast of 26 students perform the play, but they were also enlisted to help refine the script in a collaborative teaching effort involving the playwrights.

“It’s been an amazing learning experience,” said Brie Cole, a senior chosen for the role of Kelly.

Not only are the students learning their lines, the songs and positioning on stage, but they also had a front-row seat in the creative process of writing, casting and production.

Cole acknowledged that development of the show was stressful because of the uncertainty brought by changes and refinements. She said she argued for more tension in the conflict between her character and one of the “cobra” antagonists.

With the show ready to go, Cole said, “The fun part comes now.”

The opportunity to stage a play for the first time came when Suzanne Maguire, production coordinator for the musical, asked a playwright friend of hers from college to write a song for LC students.

The friend, Katie Kring, said she and her playwright collaborator, Rob Hartmann, were working on an idea.

The two offered to develop the play for the LC drama program and work with the students in the process.

Hartmann is on the graduate faculty at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. Kring is a graduate of Tisch.

“We want to emphasize the power of arts education,” Maguire said.

Skills such as time management, communication, collaboration and problem solving are critical in student development, and the musical has offered those skills in this real-life project, she said.

The play itself fits into the dynamic.

The show opens at Cotesville Magnet High School on a Saturday morning when students are attending a mandatory pre-test day.

The principal hires a new educational consultant, Miss Hannah O, to institute the Springfield System, which produces excellence.

“Too much excellence,” the play’s promotional write-up says.

“As things get weirder and weirder and more and more students fall under the sway of Miss Hannah, Kelly and her friends are forced to discover the alarming truth about the Springfield System, before it’s too late.”

Miss Hannah changes the school mascot to the Cotesville Cobras. The principal falls under her spell for control over the school.

Kelly wonders why the school is so hot, and discovers that someone has turned off the air conditioning.

Kelly has a theory that Hannah has turned some of the other students into brainwashed cobras.

In probably the most playful part of the musical, Woodchuck, one of the noncobras, remembers a cobra outbreak in Springfield, Missouri, in 1953, which provides the segue for a delightful flashback of Springfield residents hunting the cobras.

Not surprisingly, the cobra plot for control starts to unravel.

Emma Lyons, a junior who plays Bee, said the cobras gain energy from stress and hyper-focus. The power of friendship and human touch is what undoes the spell.

Play director Greg Pschirrer said the score offers a wide range of sounds, including gospel, folk, ballads, jazz, a conga number and an Ozark Bollywood number during the Springfield flashback that comes off like a Hindu hoedown.

“It is a huge undertaking,” said Pschirrer, now in his 11th year at LC.

He said the play has the feel of a graphic novel or adventure comic.

About his students, Pschirrer said, “Watching something created from scratch and having input into something greater than themselves will have an impact beyond their high school years.”