The EHS One-Act play is back and better than ever! This year’s play is a thirty-minute play based on Jane Austen’s, “Sense and Sensibility”. Every year, the one-act play is entered in a competition against other schools in Minnesota, and Eagan’s play made it to the state competition! To gain some perspectives about what it is like to be in this highly competitive event, I caught up with a couple of actors in the play to see what their thoughts were.

Q1- Who is your character in the play and what do you like about them?
Q2- What do you enjoy about the One-Act play experience?
Q3- What is difficult about being in the One-Act play?

Gwen Lindahl

Q1: I play three different characters in this show, but the two most prominent ones are Lucy Steele and Fanny Dashwood. Both of them are villains of the story, Fanny being the one who kicks the main character and her family out of their house, and Lucy being the woman to whom the main love interest is secretly engaged. What I like about my characters is that there is nothing to like about them! It’s been great getting to expand my acting abilities by playing a character who isn’t nice all the time.

Q2: The one-act experience is amazing because it is a smaller cast who you really get to know over the course of rehearsals and we have a great time. Because there are so many rules the one-act has to follow, it means we have to be creative with our props, costumes, and acting in order to tell a story within the time limit. This is a challenge but is also one of the most fun aspects of the play.

Q3: The most challenging part of the one-act (for me at least) is definitely the time constraint. We have to finish within 35 minutes which means our director has to carefully calculate what needs to be included and what can be cut if necessary. It’s tricky dealing with last-minute changes but all the actors and our director, Mr. Sorenson, are amazing at being flexible, and in the end, the final product is definitely worth the hard work.

Annika Sorensen

Q1: My character is Marianne Dashwood. I like the fact that she’s not afraid to show her emotions and she never keeps what she’s feeling inside.

Q2: I love doing the one-act play! It’s a bit higher stakes because of the fact it’s a competition. Everyone in the cast is hilarious and it’s so fun to be doing a comedy with such naturally funny people.

Q3: Unfortunately Covid has made the play harder than it needed to be because two of our cast members had to quarantine and we had to replace them with other actors; it’s really sad when something like that happens but you learn to be more flexible.