Gilroy
– The senior play is shedding its life-support apparatus this
season as it completes its third year after being revived from
near-death.
Gilroy – The senior play is shedding its life-support apparatus this season as it completes its third year after being revived from near-death.
A group of about 60 Gilroy High School students – including 30 senior cast members – will be putting on “Damn Yankees,” a musical about a manager that sells his soul to the devil in exchange for his baseball team winning a pennant.”
The senior play represents a triumph for former GHS students Ethan Stocks, producer and drama teacher at the high school, and Dennis Beasley, the musical’s director. The pair revitalized the play after it was halted from 2001-2004, after a 21-year run.
A Tradition from
the Start
The play was the 1979 brainchild of Jim Maya – then the drama teacher – who wanted to add an artistic event into the traditions associated with the final year of high school. Twenty years later, when Stocks was a senior in the class of 1999, the senior play was part of the annual highlights.
There was “the senior prom, the homecoming and the senior play,” he said. “It was that type of thing.”
“The senior play used to be the hottest ticket in town,” said Beasley. “If you didn’t have a reservation, you didn’t get it.” Even buying tickets “was crazy – there were people lined up hours before the show began.”
However, in the years following Beasley and Stocks’ graduations, the numbers of students participating in the senior play declined until – in 2001 – the event was canceled.
“There was just this revolving door of drama teachers at that point,” said Beasley. By 2004, just three years later, the students “had gotten used to the idea that they didn’t have a senior play.”
The Beginning of the End
This mindset of life without a senior play would not last long.
A year after Stocks graduated from UCLA, he was looking for work and the news that the senior play was no longer running brought him back to Gilroy as the new drama teacher for the 2004-2005 school year.
“I was familiar with the senior play and was disappointed that it had fallen by the wayside,” Stocks said.
Stocks called on Beasley – who had participated in three senior plays as part of the crew and starred as Seymour in “Little Shop of Horrors” his senior year – to direct “Annie Get Your Gun,” which capitalized on the predominantly female group that auditioned.
While attendance was not nearly equal to that of the play’s heyday, it was enough to encourage Stocks and Beasley to follow up with “The Pajama Game” in 2006 and with “Damn Yankees” this year.
The increasing cast size is a good sign, Stocks said.
“This is the first year where I felt like we had a good group going in,” he said. Though the play might not have more than a 100 students auditioning for it, as happened in the ’90s, “we’re slowly but surely getting it back to that place.”
Something for Everyone
Besides tradition, the senior play is popular for its inclusiveness, said Beasley. Unlike other productions, the play welcomes all academically eligible seniors to be a part of the cast and other similarly qualified students to be a part of the orchestra or crew.
This year’s play includes members of the choir, orchestra, track team and soccer team. Whatever their background, Beasley likes to make their experience memorable.
“I try really hard for everybody to have at least a little moment on the stage,” he said.
Students have taken advantage of the play’s inclusiveness, as many of them have not been in a production since they were in middle or elementary school.
“Half the people haven’t acted,” said Ann Marie Guenther, who plays several roles. She joined the play because she “wanted something to do with my extra time.”
In contrast, Victoria Sanchez – who also plays several roles – got involved, despite a lack of free time, in hopes of continuing a Gilroy custom.
“My mom wanted me to do it because it’s a tradition and she did it when she was in high school,” said Sanchez, who last acted at Rucker Elementary School.
The sense that the senior play is indeed a school tradition despite a four-year lapse is increasing.
“I saw the senior play last year and it was just one of those senior things I really wanted to do before I left my high school career,” said Matt Chavez, who plays Rocky in this year’s play.
The End of a Beginning
The senior play opened Thursday night to a crowd of nearly 100 students, parents and teachers and was as much a premiere as a finale.
For many of the students, it was their first time on stage.
“Once they finally get in front of an audience, they get it,” Beasley said. “They’re all like little kids, all excited about the fact that they’ve got this show.”
Attendance typically rises with each performance, he said.
“By next weekend, we’ll hopefully be selling out,” he said.
This set of performances of the senior play will also be the last for Beasley – “at least for the foreseeable future,” he points out.
Beasley – who has been connected with seven senior plays and helped to produce both high school and community productions in Gilroy since 2005 through the Odyssey Theatre Company – has applied to graduate schools and will likely quit his post later this year, he said.
“I hope I have done the tradition justice as The Senior Play marches on into the future,” he writes in his director’s notes.
For Johannes Seitz, who plays a ballplayer named Suhovik, the play has provided exactly what he wished for – “To go out of school with a good memory.”
