It’s been almost a decade since Roaring Fork High School invited the public to enjoy a play in its auditoria — the school’s auditorium-cafeteria hybrid. With little funding for these types of extracurricular activities, it took a passionate group of students to revive a theater club at the high school.
“It’s kind of just turned into a whirlwind,” director Sam Stableford, a senior at the school, told an audience of arts advocates at the State of the Arts Symposium hosted by Carbondale Arts on Oct. 11. Stableford was approached with the idea of starting a theater club by Vianne Camara, a Stage of Life (SoL) Theatre Company alumna and actress in Thunder River Theatre Company’s recent production of “What the Constitution Means to Me.”
“Having theater as an option is really, super important,” Stableford emphasized, noting that not all high schoolers are athletes, and unless youth have the opportunity to see a play and act, they may never discover those talents within themselves.
“The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” a faithful adaptation of Washington Irving’s classic American ghost story, is presented in collaboration with SoL but it’s being produced, costumed, designed and created entirely by the students. In order to pull this production off, they raised more than $5,000, including a $1,000 grant from the Rebekah Lodge. The theater club will now rely on revenue from this play to fund the next.
You have three opportunities to catch the show: Thursday, Oct. 17 at 7pm; Friday, Oct. 18 at 7pm; Saturday, Oct. 19 at 2pm. Tickets at www.bit.ly/RFHSplay
