My experience with theater

In high school, you certainly will have different opportunities to pursue various extracurricular activities, right? This can range from math, hockey, frisbee, literature, swimming, to things like cooking and writing books. Today, I am going to share with you about my personal experience with theater as an extracurricular activity, as well as telling you guys about what I have learned from being involved in theater.

First of all, my chance to get into theater comes from the theater team of my school, which I started to participate in from 9th grade. So basically, in my school, there are a lot of different clubs, but apart from that, there are things called teams that represent the school - look at them like varsity soccer and something like this. And scrolling through the list of things that I can join, I took particular interest in this, despite the fact that I hadn’t had experience with acting before. And just like that, I signed up for the club, and I didn’t expect that there was actually going to be an audition in order to get into this theater team.

On the casting day, let me tell you, there are a lot of people - the majority of them are kids smaller than me, anyways (my school is from elementary school to high school). If I remember correctly, I was actually the last one to cast for the theater team, and by the time I got into the audition, I had waited there for nearly an hour and a half. But basically, when I got in, there were two people - a Vietnamese female and an English male - who asked me if I would like to act in English or Vietnamese, and I said that I would like to do that in English. And the prompt was that there was a TV, and I was handed the remote control. The first time, I would act like a typical person who went home and opened the TV. And for the second time, I would do the same thing, except that I was in an angry mood. It lasted only for approximately 5 minutes, so it wasn’t that stressful, honestly. And I got in!

In the first year, the theater team had 8 people (and then a boy left and 2 new girls came). I had to admit this: it was literally my favorite part of going to school. We did a ton of activities there: acted with people with only a topic given, practiced laughing and crying, etc. Apart from that, it was really my home - the people there were extremely nice, and they were very enthusiastic when it came to acting as well. We weren’t participating in any contests really, so all the time it was about having fun and interacting with others.

The highlight of the club came in April 2023, when we hosted an all-school event where we would perform 7 (or 8, I don’t remember (short plays). Basically, there is a theater team for elementary students and another one for middle and high schoolers (I fall into this group), and we would work with each other to create plays that were roughly 10-15 minutes in length. In my play, it was actually a comedy - there were to be 2 college students who were owners of rooms for college students who wanted to rent them, and there was a girl who came. I didn’t actually remember the plot, but at the end of the play, the girl was actually a fraud, who had used the attraction of the two college students (male) towards her in order to steal a motorbike. Even though the play was only about 15 minutes, we actually had to prepare for that 3 months in advance! The most difficult part of this comes from the part that I had to remember the script, which took me, literally, a couple of months. Apart from that, we have had to do a lot of practice in how to speak fluently and where to move on the stage - we can’t just interact with one another in the corner of the stage, right? And with that, the day of the event has come, and honestly, it was a very nice experiment, to see over 200 people sitting far away watch and actually laugh at what we were talking about. I didn’t forget any lines (well, I messed up only 1 line, but hopefully no one noticed that!), but an issue that occurred was that my mic, which was supposed to be on my ear, kept falling down. Because of this, I had to act while still holding the mic uo, and by the time my play way over - basically, this was when I was going to run fast into the backstage, as in the actual play, I was chasing the girl who was running away with the motorbike - my mic actually fell onto the floor. But anyways, it was truly an awesome experience for me! Because of this, if you are interested in theater or any passions, please try to pursue them - you definitely will not regret your decisions!