PLAYWRIGHTS

JEREMY WALTNER  – PUBLISHER

“The question is not, ‘What should be happening in my life?’ but, ‘What is happening in my life?’ The present moment, the present set of circumstances, the present relationships in our lives — this is where God meets us and gives us life.”

Those powerful lines help set the stage for “Pandemic,” an original one-act play written by Menno students Kyle Kyriss, Kaelea McCoy and Laura Fischer, with direction and encouragement from their teacher, Betsy Knodel, last spring. It was created as part of their Play Productions class, written largely in real time during the months of March and April, as the coronavirus pandemic was dramatically and shockingly altering the way of life around the world.

While it may not have been the intent initially, “Pandemic” is being presented for this year’s one-act competition through the South Dakota High School Activities Association; a cast of 17 will stage a local public performance of the 35-minute play at Menno’s city-school auditorium this Friday, Jan. 22 at 7 p.m., and at the Region 1 competition in Sioux Falls next Wednesday, Jan. 27.

Menno is one of six Region 1 schools vying for two spots at the state festival in Brookings the first week of February.

Play Productions class at Menno High School was in full swing when, in March, South Dakota confirmed its first cases of COVID-19 — and its first death. It wasn’t long until schools suspended in-person instruction indefinitely and not long after that until South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem ordered schools to learn remotely for the remainder of the school year.

“None of us really knew what to do,” said McCoy, a junior at Menno. “It was a very new experience, and we all struggled a lot. There were a lot of emotions throughout all of it — and trying to not fail school, that was a big part of it, too.”

It wasn’t long into their remote learning reality that Knodel suggested her class work on a play about what they were experiencing as it unfolded.

“You have to have something to encourage you to write, and for us that was Covid,” said Kyriss, a senior. “That’s what kicked it off for us.”

The collaborative effort started in March with a Google Doc shared among the three.

“We each would start a paragraph at a random spot and then would see where it took us,” said Fischer, a junior. “The script ended up being about our personal experiences with Covid; it really affected each one of us differently, so when we all got together and talked about it, we had all the different emotions.”

“To start with, it was, ‘Let’s just write,’” said Knodel. “And when we got further into it, it was more, ‘Let’s think about this a little more and maybe adjust how we’re going to put this together.’”

Kyriss, McCoy and Fischer all say there was a lot of emotion behind the writing, because much of the dialogue was crafted based on what they were feeling at the time and the anxiety of the unknown.

That very first quarantine from school hit hard, said Fisher — “a lot harder than if we were quarantined right now. We have already gone through the motion so, now, it would be like, ‘Oh, we’re quarantined again.’ But the first time, it was scary.”

“We all know people who are considered at risk,” said McCoy, “so a lot of (the challenge) was just trying to find ways to stay connected with our friends and family without putting our people in danger.”

Kyriss notes that heightened concerns about Covid from his parents made an impression and prompted the humor-leaning writer to take a different approach; “That made me write a lot more dramatic,” he said.

The “Pandemic” script pulls from personal experiences, Facebook feeds, news reports and comments from Noem, who is portrayed in the play by junior Bridget Vaith. Audiences will meet younger children, teenagers, middle class working families, a special needs mom, group home worker, doctors, paramedics, teachers and residents confined to a nursing home. Fischer, who is the only writer who does not appear on stage, said putting the script together from a broader perspective “definitely made us think about things a lot harder.

“Some parts of it are more emotional than others,” she said, “and there are times, like from a child’s perspective, where it maybe doesn’t hit as hard. I think each of us had different feelings while writing it, but it was really neat to put our emotions into something like this — to express how we were feeling at the time.”

McCoy noted there is some humor, like a scene where students are at a party.

“I wonder if Shelby’s mom is going to let her come,” says one partygoer.

“Are you kidding me?” answers another. Her mom is not going to let her out of the house. It’s like a jail and she is the sheriff.”

“We had to put some comedy in it to raise your spirts,” McCoy said. “We didn’t want it all to be gloom and doom.”

“Mrs. Knodel had suggested it,” she continued, “because reading through it was making us really sad and depressed — like, ‘Wow, things really suck right now,’”

But, mostly, “Pandemic” is filled with the punch of confusion, uncertainty and reality that the coronavirus packed and ends with lingering questions and a powerful last line spoken in unison by the entire cast.

Knodel noted how much fun it was to see her students develop the play — especially Kyle, who she noted has wanted to write his own script since he was a freshman.

“I was like, ‘I don’t have time to do this,’” she said. “That’s one thing that Covid did; it gave us time.”

Knodel says that the authentic nature of the writing during those first, uncertain weeks lends credibility to the script and helps illustrate just how many questions there were early on.

“This was right at the beginning when it was such an unknown,” she said. “Nobody knew if everybody who got it would be hospitalized or if it was different for every person. And when they closed the school down, everybody wondered how long it would be. Like, was this thing going to kill everybody off?”

Some of the script was amended this past fall and, in the final news report toward the end of the show, the reporter is giving an update on the number of cases.

“There are now 18,748 active coronavirus cases in South Dakota,” the original script reads. “The state reported 543 more deaths, bringing the total since the start of the pandemic to 621.”

Those numbers will be updated in real time with each performance.

“Pandemic” is presented largely chronologically, with news reports serving as scene breaks throughout the show. All of it makes for a production that Knodel said the students, school and community should feel proud of, as hard as the subject matter may be.

“It’s pretty unique,” she said of students writing their own script. “Other schools have done it, but those are schools that have some pretty big theater departments.

“These guys were great; they put a lot of time into it,” she said. “I’m proud of them.”