It is dinner time, and everyone is seated around the table just like every other dinner. However, this dinner is different. One of the two daughters decides to spill a secret that she had been keeping. The secret is that she is a vegetarian. The family is in an uproar as her mother, father, and sister have a difficult time accepting her change of mind. This is a metaphorical comedy describing what it is like for a person to come out as gay.
“What You Eat” is a seven minute play written by senior Hayley Wenk and was the winner of the Best Original Play Award at the Virginia Theater Association Conference at the Reston Town Center on October 27.
“My friend, Ariana Kuhnsman, thought of the original joke when we were talking about DOMA in Government Class. We were teasing about how odd it would be if people had to sit down their parents and come out about every aspect of their lives, and the whole thing spiraled out from there,” said Wenk.
Her characters, played by junior Nick Regan, senior Mary Long, senior Rachel Mayman, and senior Kathleen Welch each had a metaphorical meaning behind them. Wenk’s characters had no defined names so that they could be relatable everyone.
“I played the father who seems rooted in his ways and is disgusted by “vegetarians” until the very end,” said Regan.
Wenk and her cast rehearsed nearly every Saxon Time and Late Wednesday in order to perfect their performance. With the added pressure of the Little Women musical, rehearsing became very stressful for them, however, they prevailed with cast bonding.
“It took about a week and a half working with the script for my cast to stop laughing at their own lines. Also, I tended to over-react every time we ended the show, since the last line is a real plot twist, and dance around the room praising my cleverness,” much to the cast’s amusement,” said Wenk.
Kathleen Welch added, “I feel like our friendship made us that much more dedicated to the show and the script, and we all wanted to do the best we could not only because the roles were so great, but because we wanted to do right by Hayley.”
On the day of the competition, when it was their turn to perform, the show was a hit with both the judges and the audience.
“Our judge said it was a funny show, but ‘it was six bloody minutes!’ His beef was that he didn’t know how the judges would be able to compare a six minute scene, which was more like a sketch, to a forty five minute play. But, we did pretty well, and we thought that the applause was enough, because the audience lost it during our show. One girl actually fell over onto her friend, she was laughing so hard. They even kept applauding after we left the theater,” said Wenk.