In the News: NHS drama group selected to perform in Scotland

The Newberg High School Players have come a long way since seeing an adaptation of French playwright Moliere’s “The Imaginary Invalid” in Ashland last year.

The drama group will have gone a lot farther by the time the 2013-2014 school year kicks off, as it has been selected to perform the play at the world-renowned Edinburgh Fringe Festival in Scotland in August 2013.

While it will be a homecoming for NHS theater director and Edinburgh-native Drea Ferguson, the students are in for a once-in-a-lifetime experience.

“They will have their eyes opened, because the festival takes over the city,” Ferguson said. “Since I’m from there, I know exactly what they’re going to see. They have no idea because basically every 15 feet on the royal mile there’s a performer all day and all night.”

The NHS troupe will be performing as part of the American High School Theater Festival (AHSTF), a program that has been selecting and sending groups to perform at what is billed as the largest performing-arts festival in the world since the 1990s.

The selection procedure is so competitive that schools must be nominated just to apply to the program.

For Newberg, that process began two years ago when Ferguson was accepted to teach a workshop on how she teaches Shakespeare at a Coalition of Essential Schools (CES) conference in San Francisco.

Akin to the process made famous by the film “The School of Rock” starring Jack Black, Ferguson has the students form a production company, designing each show from the ground up and doing all the various jobs needed to do so as if it were a real-world, working situation.

After the conference, CES nominated Newberg, but Ferguson felt the financial situation at the school and the economy overall made it unfeasible to pay for the expensive package that the AHSTF puts together, and therefore she didn’t apply.

CES contacted Ferguson again a year later, coincidentally during rehearsals for “The Imaginary Invalid” this winter, announcing a second nomination and encouraging Newberg to apply.

Never expecting to be chosen from the numerous schools across the U.S. and Canada, Ferguson was doubly surprised when she received the news May 7 that the troupe had been accepted. Word came about a week earlier than Ferguson anticipated the organization would announce this year’s winners.

“So to be chosen as one of the schools that goes is quite an honor,” Ferguson said. “I was quite discombobulated when I got the phone call.”

Performing the play again in Scotland just made sense to Ferguson and the group because it features a lot of Scottish jokes.

The two-week trip will feature a two-day stop in London and accommodations at Edinburgh University during the festival, as well as plenty of tours and sight-seeing opportunities, including admission to the military tattoo – percussion-based military musical performances featuring countries from all over the world – at Edinburgh castle.

“Every single corner of every single café has some kind of performance going on, Ferguson said. “We’re lucky we’ll have a theater we’re performing in. We get four shows at the venue and then one show in the open air on the royal mile. That’s going to be the one the kids never forget.”

The group received permission to travel at the school board meeting in May, which allows Ferguson and the students to begin fundraising for the trip.

The only scheduled fundraiser at this point will be the troupe’s summer play in the last two weekends of September, which will feature a performance of the comedic whodunit “The Night I Died at the Palace Theater.”

By: Seth Gordon, Newberg Graphic