By Jimmy Liu & Brandon R, staff writers
Bringing back a student run play for the first time in over 10 years, the Drama Club put on the production, “THE ILIAD,THE ODYSSEY, AND ALL OF GREEK MYTHOLOGY” by John Hunter and Jay Hopkins, performing 3 consecutive days, March 17-19th. The play was open to the entire community, with only a 5 dollar ticket fee.
The show was performed with 11 actors, where the play doesn’t have a specific lead or main character, everyone was playing multiple parts/characters which made this a really fast play, where actors had to switch to different costumes in a short amount of time and also have to remember the lines of multiple characters. “It was extremely fun, this was a wonderful experience and I hope I can do something like this again,” said one of the actors, freshman Mat K.
“The show was better than I expected! Student director, junior Connie H. could not speak highly enough of all the people who worked so hard to make the play possible. She said, “I am super proud of all the actors and super thankful to all the crew people that helped out. The actors performed 3 amazing shows that the audience loved. I know the actors worked their butts off for this performance and I have to say that they delivered with their act.”The lighting, the acting from the actors,and the props really brought together an amazing show,” said Mia Ly, a member of the props team.
While Galileo students could take a lot of the credit for how smoothly the play ran, a number of people were there to help with many of the unseen things. Other people who helped the play a success were Malachi & Sal, from the Futurama program, who helped out with the lights and sound. Additional help in these areas were done by an outside group called “The Women’s Audio Mission”, the design of props were by Jamon, another Futruama worker,and lastly this show was funded by Telegraph Hill Neighborhood Center (TEL HI).
The whole play lasted about 99 minutes, which told the story about the Trojan war, conflicts between Greeks and Trojan, as well as the story of the Greek hero, Odysseus, and his journey. Jamon said, “I like the show in general, it’s a show with a lot of work and we’ve spent a long time writing lines, designing props, making costumes, and it’s a fun and interesting process.”
After two months of working on all kinds of exquisite performance props, backgrounds, costumes, and about two months of training and practicing, students in the drama club were able to make really nice costumes, props, backgrounds and everything can be seen on the stage.“It’s a really dynamic, fun process we’ve made, everyone gets to meet new people, work together and continue to develop this program so that we will continue to give our best show to the audience,” said Jamon.
“I’m so proud of anyone who’s involved in this play, I love how people work together to bring up the final product, and I’m proud of them pushing through the difficult moment. The biggest thing I’m proud of is the fact that most of the students didn’t know each other before they started this process and they now have created a community,” Viva Freedman, who is a part of Futurama and directed the play.
Viva pointed out that the aim of the play is to build community, teach skills such as public speaking and technical skills like designing props, operating technical equipment and also creative expression, so people can learn to express themselves more.
“I think the show went really well, there’s a lot of people who came to the show on Friday, Saturday and Sunday. Everyone had a lot of fun and everyone contributed should be really proud of themselves.” said Viva, “I wanted to say thank you to everyone who’ve come to the show and it’s the first show ever that drama club had planned, we’re all excited and I hope people who came consider to be in the play next year.”
