THEATER CLUB
Election: Timely theme for young actors
By Katherine Lacaze
Seaside Signal
For its annual fall play,
Seaside High School’s drama
program will be undertaking
a critically relevant and time-
ly satire that explores one of
America’s most revered po-
litical processes, “The Elec-
tion.”
Director Lenore Morris-
son said she chose “The Elec-
tion,” written by Dan Zolidis,
because of its comedic take
on the contemporary politi-
cal scene and relevance to the
upcoming 2016 presidential
election, scheduled for Tues-
day, Nov. 8.
“All elections are sort of
the same, right?” Morrisson
said. “They say they’re go-
ing to run a clean campaign,
and pretty soon someone’s
SUBMITTED PHOTO
“The Bold, The Young and The Murdered,” the 2015 fall play,
featured the theatrical talents of numerous Seaside High
School students. Auditions for this year’s fall play, “The Elec-
tion,” will be held in mid-September.
running an ad, saying, ‘he’s a
puppy killer.’ It’s just kind of
ridiculous.”
At the start of “The Elec-
tion,” a disgraced student
body president resigns. Stu-
dent Mark Davenport, look-
ing to beef up his resume for
college applications, decides
to run for president in a spe-
cial election. He expects an
easy victory against his nerdy
opponent, Christy Martin,
whose platform is to elimi-
nate football, according to a
summary on the Playscripts
website. However, when
Christy gets backed by a Su-
per PAC with an unlimited
budget, Mark realizes the
race is on. To resist defeat,
he must accept “the services
of a slick professional cam-
paign manager with ques-
tionable ethics and a mil-
lion-dollar Super PAC of his
own,” the summary states.
Several of the play’s
themes are applicable to the
real world of politics at ev-
ery level of government.
Reading through the
script,
Morrisson
said
she found the play to be
fast-moving and “just ridic-
ulous.”
“I was chuckling,” she
said, adding the plot “gets
as crazy” as the current
presidential race between
Democratic nominee Hil-
lary Clinton and Republican
nominee Donald Trump.
She also hopes the play
will compel students to be-
come more aware of the
campaign and election pro-
cesses and the importance
of being critically thinking
and engaged members of
the public who take interest
in current affairs.
“I think the kids are go-
ing to have fun with it,” she
said.
The play features ive
main characters and numer-
ous incidental characters, al-
lowing Morrisson lexibility
with her casting decisions.
She can use a big ensemble
if many students show up to
auditions or cast each actor
for multiple smaller parts.
“Our unknown this year
is how many young men
we’re going to have in our
fall play, because we gradu-
ated a lot of our kids,” she
said. “The good thing about
this play is we only have to
have two males, the rest we
can change the gender.”
Because multiple reliable
theater participants were
graduating seniors last year,
“the theater program is to-
tally rebuilding this year,”
Morrisson said. One option
to address the loss of several
of the school’s staple male
actors was to choose a play
containing all female char-
acters, but Morrisson wor-
ried about “discouraging the
guys from going out” for
roles.
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