For many theater students, Lenaea is the highlight of their year. It’s a theater festival that takes place every year in Sacramento. Last year, Lenaea had about 83 schools in attendance from states in the Western part of the United States, like California, Nevada, Oregon, and even Alaska. Students from each high school can submit performances that include one-act plays, monologues, duo scenes, musical theater scenes, or even set or costume designs. Lenaea is unique because it’s a blend of an interstate competition and a series of workshops to help high school theater students improve their skills.
Each student or group of students who perform must stick to a time limit. Once they’re done presenting, a few judges will score their performance afterwards and provide them with constructive criticism and new ideas to incorporate into their performance. Students can also walk around the festival and watch other students’ performances. However, Lenaea also has a competitive element because students can win awards for their work. There are the gold, silver, and bronze (or first, second, and third place) awards. There is also the respondent’s choice award, which is given to the person or pair of people whose performance the judges especially liked or who they thought improved their performance after hearing the judges’ advice.
Isabel Holmes, a senior at Montgomery, won a silver award at this year’s Lenaea for her monologue. The monologue was an excerpt called “I Ate the Divorce Papers”, from the play Goodbye Charles, by Gabriel Davis. Isabel described her experience performing this monologue, and said, “The character I played, her husband files for divorce, and it’s just this whole moment of confrontation. She’s like, ‘I’m not going to send the divorce papers.’ And she’s just completely heartbroken, there’s just these ups and downs, the little jokes within the monologue. But it was fun. It was something that I’ve never really done before.”
Isabel has been doing theater since she moved to Santa Rosa when she was in elementary school. Her first play was when she was eight years old, and she fondly remembered, “I was just like Villager Number 3 in the Emperor’s New Clothes, or something like that. It was just a local theater thing.” She’s remained dedicated to theater ever since then, and has enjoyed participating in a theater summer camp in Healdsburg that requires auditions to join. At first, when she was deciding which electives she wanted to take at Montgomery, she considered taking a band because she plays violin. However, she said she ultimately decided that theater was a “chance for me to continue acting, and just developing my skills further. And I mean, it’s something that I love to do.” She started in the drama class as a freshman, and joined Drama Production as a sophomore, where she and the other students in the class worked together to create a play to perform for Montgomery students, teachers, parents, and other community members.
When asked about her experience in the drama program at Montgomery, she said, “Drama has definitely been one of my favorite classes over the past four years . . . [the program] doesn’t really have a lot of funding . . . We get all our money for the next shows just from ticket sales, so we have a very limited budget. But everyone is incredibly dedicated and really talented. We’re all just a big family, working together, having fun. But we’re able to get things done at the same time. So even though it can definitely be very tiring and a lot of work, it’s always enjoyable, no matter what.” One of the most stressful times for a Drama Production student is tech week, which is the week before the opening night of their show. During that week, Isabel said that she and her fellow students are “at school basically until 8:00 or 8:30 at night, just nonstop rehearsal every day. [It] leaves not a lot of time for homework or other responsibilities, and it can definitely be very stressful, but it’s just always worth it. It’s just one of those things that can completely wear you down at times, but we just keep going back to it.”
For Isabel, drama helps her to escape from her troubles and lessen her anxiety. She said, theater is “one of the few things that I do that helps with my anxiety.” Her performance anxiety worsened a lot after the 2017 Tubbs and Nuns fires in Santa Rosa, and especially affects her during or before tests, cross country races, or track meets. She acknowledged, “It gets pretty difficult sometimes.” But, she said, “As soon as I step onto the stage, it’s completely gone. I’m becoming a new person, a new character with a whole new life. I can leave any outside troubles just out in the stands. It’s honestly crazy to me. You know, occasionally I’ll get some butterflies, and that’s normal. But I just don’t have stage fright when I’m acting. I can just let go, and I never feel embarrassed, no matter how weird a character I may be playing. I just really enjoy it.”
The Lenaea festival this year was the first to ever be held virtually because of the pandemic. Lenaea typically happens in the first weekend of February, from Friday to Sunday. Normally, students at Lenaea walk around the festival to see each other’s performances and find delicious food. Isabel remembered, “It’s so much fun, just being there and that environment, because there’s so much positivity and excitement and just energy all the time. And I don’t think you lose every aspect of that with the virtual Lenaea. I think they did a really great job organizing it.” The organizers of Lenaea created a whole website this year that students could use to RSVP to events and student performances. Each of these events or performances was a separate Zoom meeting. Students recorded their performances beforehand, and the judges watched and scored them. During the Zoom, they played back the video so that other students could watch the performance, and they gave the students who submitted the video feedback on their performance and suggestions on how to improve it. Isabel admitted this year was “a little more difficult, because Lenaea had definitely been one of [her] highlights in high school in general.” However, she still enjoyed the festival this year. She said, “Lenaea, just every single time I’ve been, it feels like it truly encompasses the idea of theater in general. They really understand the connections that you make in theater, just how fast you become a family with all these amazing people who do so many other things, but you all have this one thing in common. It’s just an amazing festival. I’m sad it’s my last year.”
Isabel has thought a lot about whether she’ll do drama in the future when she goes to college, and has considered taking theater classes or even minoring in theater. She wants to study pre-med for her undergraduate degree, and then eventually enter into medical school with the hope of becoming a doctor. Even if she’s not able to study theater in college, she absolutely wants to do community theater whenever she can. She was adamant when she said, “It’s definitely a part of my life that I don’t want to leave behind in high school.”