This past weekend, The Niles West Theater Play Production class presented their semester’s project, which were all original plays written by the students of the class. The class gives its students the opportunity to write and direct their own plays and put them on in front of an audience, with the goal to get the stories that they want to tell out there, and to get it in front of an audience and to give this really cool experience to the kids.

In order to create this project, there was a long process. Students started by working with writing exercises and prompts. The students started at 1 person plays and worked their way up, up to 6 characters. All the writers had a common theme in their plays, a train. Now, in the show, each play is featured on a train or involving a train in some way, connecting all the shows together. There were also many sessions where students in the class all read each other’s scripts and gave each other feedback on their work to see what needed improving to make it just right.

“It was really a group effort, we did alot of check-ins throughout the process and all gave each other feedback, and let the playwright guide it so we could decide what feedback they needed in order to move forward,” said Theater Director Sam Rosenberg.

Overall, this class in a great opportunity for students to get their work out there, to practice writing and being an actor and to connect with their fellow peers on an artistic and emotional level. This class teaches students many team bonding a creative experiences. Although this class is a great chance to meet new people, most of the people in the class already knew each other from outside places such as theater. This was great because each student was already comfortable with the other, which made the whole writing process even better.

“I loved working with my friends and I feel like we grew closer because we were acting in each other’s plays and it was like they’re your friend but they’re also your director, so it was fun to work with your friends and have that dynamic.” sophomore Emma Shimon said. 

At the end of the show, Rosenfeld and the students all agreed that the best part of the performance aspect was making art with their friends. They all loved how positive and supportive everyone was to everybody’s works, and how they couldn’t have done it without each other and the community they built together to create this show. They were all proud of what they accomplished.

“I’m just proud that we were able to put it on because we get distracted sometimes in class, so there were some days where we were like uh oh we didn’t get any writing done. I think seeing it come all together was nice and I was just very happy that we were all able to write shows that we like, and we all have stuff we want to improve but we all have something we’re proud of,” junior Harper Hahn said.