Lillith Dunn
eSomethin staff
With all six performances being sold out, the 2025 Winter One Acts show was undoubtedly a success. Over the six performances, three one acts were put on – a comedy, a drama, and a musical.
The Drama: “Perfect”
Directed by Seth Ermie, “Perfect” was a moving play about accepting one’s flaws.
“My one act . . . was about a girl named Bethany. It followed her life from she was like four years old and then ended [at] 18 years old. The premise kind of follows that her parents told her her whole life that she was perfect at everything she did.
“As she started to realize that no one’s perfect and that she’s not perfect, she developed kind of a large instance insecurity with everything that she did. . . . But in the end, she realizes that it doesn’t matter, if she’s not perfect because no one’s perfect,” explained Ermie.
When selecting these one acts, directors have little to no restrictions, aside from the shows being school appropriate.
The reason Ermie chose this play was simple.
“I wanted to choose something that would be relatable to not only the actors who are in high school, but also be something that’s relatable to adults,” Ermie said.
Selecting this show was only the beginning, though. Each play required a large amount of preparation in order to be successful.
According to Ermie, “Before the casting process, I had to block out the entire show. [This included] what the set would look like, where people would move, and all that stuff before I even had a cast, so I did that on my own time.
“And then, based on that and the characterization I had given the characters . . . I used that information during auditions to see who would be best fit for these roles.”
After the show’s conclusion, Ermie considered Winter One Acts to be a success.
“I think overall, my . . . show was outstanding. I was really proud of [everyone’s] work.”
The Comedy: The Rules of Comedy
Directed by Lily Streicher, “The Rules of Comedy” was a hilarious show about what is and isn’t comedy.
According to Streicher, “My one act . . . taught the audience what is considered funny and what is not funny. After the cast established the rules, they applied these rules into the play Hamlet. Hamlet is one of the most well known tragedies so it is a challenge to make that funny. My cast consisted of two narrators, a dramaturg who is an expert in literature, characters from ‘Hamlet’ and our ensemble who were referred to as comedians.”
Streicher said, “I have always been drawn to comedic shows because I would like to think I am a funny person. . . . I eventually stumbled upon ‘The Rules of Comedy’ and I fell in love with the irony of the show.”
Setreicher would not face the challenges of directing her One Act alone.
“Luckily I was not alone in [directing], I had one of my best friends as my assistant stage manager, and we worked on the show together. I focused on blocking and character work while CJ [Birt] mainly worked with tech and our crews,” she said.
After all of their effort, Streicher was incredibly proud of her cast and crew.
“I think our show was wonderful, my cast did an amazing job taking what CJ and I worked so hard on, and making it a beautiful and hilarious show. I would change nothing about it, it was perfect in every way.”
The Musical: The Guy Who Didn’t Like Musicals
Directed by Dominic Navarro, “The Guy Who Didn’t Like Musicals” is an amusing mix of traditional plays and musicals.
“[The one act is] about this guy named Paul. He doesn’t like musicals, and he lives in normal life. . . . Then one day a meteor hits the town’s theater and starts infecting the town with a musical disease and turns everybody into singing dancing zombies, and their goal is to infect everybody in the town.
“Now Paul becomes the hero of the story and has to save everybody from this virus, and he ends up losing basically all of his friends to this disease and then he ends up going to the theater himself and actually loses to it as well.”
After two years of impressive plays, Navarro wanted to challenge himself.
He said, “I think for me, I’m always trying to one up myself. So I thought that the next challenging thing would be a musical and I also like, really love, the comedy in it, cause it’s not a typical musical either.”
Like Streicher, Navarro had help working on this ambitious project.
According to Navarro, “We started pretty early with [planning] because we . . . had to take a two hour script and cut it down to an hour. . . . Then I actually asked two people to help me out with this; specifically Sydney Wolfinger and Jacob Nahhas. [Sidney] did choreography and Jacob did all of the music directions.”
Navarro deemed his musical, along with everyone else’s One Acts, a hit, despite the show’s inherent difficulty.
“I think the Winter One Acts as a whole went really well this year. I think it’s especially a pretty difficult show to do because it is all student done. So, when we are doing it, it was very little adult interaction, which, I think, it is nice ‘cause we get creative freedom. But it also makes it more challenging because sometimes I’m just kind of thrown off into the deep end.
“I would say my show specifically also went very well. [I’m] very proud of it. I hold myself to a high standard . . . but I am very proud of how the final product was
The Set:
Moxie Jarrell, the set chair for Winter One Acts, worked incredibly hard behind the scenes to make sure the show was successful.
“Basically I help design and make all of the set pieces and I handle everything from run crew to set crew . . . and manage back stations,” they explained.
In order to create the tear-jerking drama “Perfect”, or the ambitious musical “The Guy Who Didn’t Like Musicals”, Jarrell and their team put in hours of effort to make the director’s visions a reality.
“Winter One Acts is a bit of a more unique show because it is completely student run, so I don’t have a lot of contact with, the teachers who might usually run it. . . . What happens is a month and a half before the show is scheduled, I meet with all of the directors and they give me project sheets and we talk over design elements and stuff.
“Then you take a couple weeks to go and build everything. . . . Then, once everything’s done and set, we do what’s called spiking, which is basically just marking where everything goes on stage. . . .Then we actually start rehearsals and running, and that’s usually about one or two weeks and then we have show week, and that is two weekends in a row,” Jarrell said.
Overall, their team’s hard work paid off.
“It went fantastic,” they concluded.
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