trevordayschool

Stranger an Truth: Alice in Zoomland by Juliet W. '26 In March 2020, with our curtain call cut short and the pandemic providing a more dramatic real-world ending than the play itself, Trevor's 2020 MiniTerm was brought to an abrupt end. Nothing went back to normal, so the following MiniTerm—in 2021—could hardly be ordinary, either. is year, we would have to capture the unprecedented, full-on dystopian strangeness of this once-in-a-hundred-years event. It's often said that truth is stranger than fiction; but our challenge was to make fiction that was even stranger than the truth! anks to our incredible Middle School teachers and students, all of whom put so much hard work into the play, our production was the most unusual performance in Trevor's history. MiniTerm is a tradition at the heart of Trevor's culture and has always been my favorite part of the academic year. As much as I love acting and working behind the scenes on lighting and sets, writing is (and has always been) my passion. So, I was beyond thrilled to learn that this year's play would be created and written by students. e writers' room had about 25 kids (myself included), and we started the process by brainstorming ideas. Given that this was going to be a very different play in a very different year, we wanted our production to mirror many of the crazy aspects of quarantine. And, of course, that would mean telling the story through the world of online communication: Zoom. e play would have to be partly filmed over Zoom, but because we also wanted the story to be representative of the past year, we centered the plot around Zoom, too. e play's title made clear that we'd be doing our own take on Lewis Carroll's classic. In other words, prepare to leave the Zoom waiting room and enter Alice in Zoomland. You won't be falling down a rabbit hole—but, instead, clicking on the wrong Zoom link—as Alice does in the beginning of our play. From there, dream-like mayhem ensues. For the rest of the plot, you'll have to tune into the Vimeo production (https://vimeo. com/526299547 password: Zoomland). But I can share some things (from an insider's perspective) that you might not get just by watching. First, there's the joy of being creative as a team, a joy that brought us together, despite the screens separating us. And that teamwork made the play a success. One might think this an impossible feat when working solely via Zoom—but by creating a play that we could all relate to, we found a sense of solidarity that had been disrupted, but not lost, during these challenging times. 0 9 T R E V O R D AY S C H O O L n S U M M E R 2 0 2 0 – 2 0 2 1

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