School plays are something we are all familiar with, whether the students themselves are acting out these stories or audience members soaking in the performance. They are memorable experiences with hard work put into them. But what happens behind the scenes when creating these plays? When meeting with Mr. Kelly, director of the center of performing arts and upper school drama teacher, he unpacked the making of these masterpieces. Within SA, theater tech is a class offered to  SA students as a full-year class. This class provides students with many opportunities and things to do in class to help with the shows. Mr. Kelly states
“We have two tech theater classes,” Mr. Kelly states, “ which support most of the things that happen on our stage. From the productions to our assembles, these classes help assist those events”

Students can have control of what their focus in the class will be and they all work together to help make the plays possible. From organizing costumes to building the sets, students have creative freedom in this class. They acquire new helpful skills that one would not usually learn in school. Mr. Kelly when asked about this responded, saying,
“We have been using saws and drills all year but just yesterday I had to teach a kid to use a skill saw. They hadn’t had that opportunity yet. It’s individually geared towards interests and abilities”

Despite having only four shows a year, the time for building new sets is short. Yet the students and Dr. Kelly can build new and incredibly unique sets for each show. During these 80-minute class periods, the tech theater group works away on these sets. Despite being unrecognizable once finished,  the crew often uses past objects from sets and repaints them or ass on more to create new props for the plays.
“Re-using materials allows us to just focus on redesigning them instead of having to rebuild them from scratch”