Getting light from the darkness

By NATE HUBBARD/Staff

Bland County’s theater team had no trouble remembering its lines or cues on the way to its first Mountain Empire District championship last month.
But remembering its prize turned out to be a more difficult task.
“Everybody just jumped up and screamed and cried and cheered and nobody got the trophy,” recalled Catherine Ensign, a Rocky Gap High School senior.
“We were just all standing in a circle and happy and we just forgot to grab it,” explained Ian Reed, a senior at Bland High School.
It’s understandable, though, that at the time hugs seemed more important than hardware.
The dedicated group has been working together for more than three months, auditioning, bonding and rehearsing and rehearsing and rehearsing – all while working with material that doesn’t exactly lead to cheery spirits.
For this year’s one-act play competition, Bland County – which eventually did manage to grab its first-place trophy – chose “A Thousand Cranes,” the story of a young girl in Japan who develops leukemia after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima.
“It’s got a great message,” said Cameron Burton, the team’s director. “It does have a message of hope, but it’s a deep subject and quite emotional. We hear a lot of quiet crying from our audience, quiet tears.”
Bland County was the host for the Oct. 30 district competition, held in Bluefield, W.Va., at the Summit Players Theatre.
As the coach of the host squad, Tiffany Carter, a fifth-grade teacher at Bland Elementary School, got to see the judges tabulating their results and knew before she came on stage to announce the scores that her team was victorious.
Not that Carter was about to give her team any hint of its success.
“When she came down from the tab room she obviously knew, but she was straight,” Burton recalled. “She was so straight that the kids were like, ‘Man, she looks mad. We must have done really bad.’”
“My principal jokes that actually the best acting job of the night was me behind that podium as straight as I could be to not give anything away,” Carter added. “But inside when I knew we had won upstairs I was like, ‘Whoooooo!’”
Grayson County and Galax were the other two MED representatives to field teams, with the top two performers at the district festival moving on to Saturday’s Region C competition at James River High School.
“The Mountain Empire District for theater is a very competitive district,” Carter said. “We find that they’re always very well polished and very well prepared with their plays. They’re tough to beat.”
In three previous district appearances, Bland County had only finished as high as second once and even then wasn’t able to go to regionals because it hadn’t expected to have to pay for the royalty rights for a second performance.
But the frustrations of the past few years only made this year’s victory even sweeter, Carter said.
“It was just a very poignant moment when I said, ‘Championship goes to Bland County,’” she recalled.
After working with more lighthearted material in years past, Burton and Carter said they decided to try a different tack in choosing the moving “A Thousand Cranes.”
“I think that the plays of a serious nature tend to be more competitive,” Burton said. “My experience in theater is that audiences typically love to laugh, but if people are coming to judge a play and they can feel themselves becoming emotional over a play – that’s strong.”
The director said she has instituted daily exercises to help the actors get comfortable with one another and the dark subject matter, while also making sure to incorporate other activities at rehearsals to lighten the mood.
Reed plays the role of Kenji, the character whose job it is to lift the spirits of the leukemia-stricken Sadako, played by Ensign.
“I’m the humorous character,” he said. “I’m the only character that brings the funny side to the play. And it’s kind of hard because I mean it’s a sad story.”
Nevertheless, Reed said he and his fellow actors haven’t had too much trouble leaving their gloomy emotions on the stage.
“You can’t dwell on it too much or you won’t be able to perform it your best,” he said. “A dark place is good for the show, but you don’t want to stay there.”
Two other RGHS seniors, Danielle Jennings and Kristine Morgan, were in fact in a dark place when they found out that the Bland County team had won the championship.
Jennings, who played Sadako’s grandmother, and Morgan, whose main role was a spirit that brought leukemia, had to leave the competition immediately after Bland County’s performance in order to help with the Senior Beta Club’s haunted house.
Jennings said she’d been anxiously checking her cell phone for word from the team when it finally beeped that a text message had arrived.
“I went outside, I looked at the message, I came back in and I cried,” she said. “And I smeared all my makeup.”
“We kind of hugged random people who didn’t even know what was going on,” Morgan added.
Bland County will perform the same play at this weekend’s regionals, competing with six other teams for a berth in the state competition in early December.
Just as in districts, the top two teams at regionals will get to continue on.
“A win would be nice, but I’m not going to expect it,” Reed said.
Burton added that she and Carter preach that the team should just focus on doing its best.
“We have a team motto and our team motto is: assume nothing,” Burton said. “Don’t assume going in that you’re the worst team there, but don’t assume that you’re going to come in and take the cake.”
In the few days they have left before regionals, the actors will be continuing to rehearse, perfecting as many little details as they can.
“It’s just keeping them on task,” Burton said. “It’s keeping them focused and polishing those places now where we have to up our game. At the next level, it’s harder.”
Nate Hubbard can be reached at 1-800-655-1406 or .