Photos and Content by Claire Rightley // Editor-in-Chief

From April 20 to April 22 at 7 p.m., the spring play, “All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten,” will be held in the Hendricks Regional Health Performing Arts Center at AHS. This is Miss Caitlyn Spires’s first year teaching at AHS and the first play she directs at Avon.

What is the play about?

Spires: It is a bunch of different stories that are told from various life perspectives that teach, essentially, life lessons or experiences. Some of them are true stories, but essentially it’s just life skills or moments that happen in life and what we can learn from them as an audience.

What are your hopes going into the play this weekend?

Spires: My hope is that it is very successful and the kids feel really proud of their performance both onstage and offstage, and that also the audience really enjoys the show, that we build a good reputation amongst our peers, coworkers, and community, that we have a strong theatre department, and that we can do well both performance-wise and raise some ticket money, audience numbers, and all that jazz.

What has been your favorite part of the process so far?

Spires: I think my favorite part of the process has been transitioning from just knowing our lines to then creating characters with our lines. I’m watching these kids explore these various characters in situations and developing as artists and not just teenagers who have memorized some words, so it’s good to see the kids grow, as we have freshmen to seniors, so to see everybody becoming stronger performers throughout the process.

How do you feel with this being the first play you direct at AHS?

Spires: I’m really proud of it. I think the kids have done a lot of good work. We’ve built a really good set in my tech theatre class and we’ve done a lot with a cast of 25, and I have a student director plus tech crew is a good 30 plus kids, so I feel like it’s a good turnout. Everybody has pulled their weight, and I am excited and really thrilled that this is my first show at Avon.

Musifiki Mogwe, 12

What’s the show about?

Mogwe: There’s no specific story of the play. There’s many different stories, but each of them have the same theme. They’re using child-like elements to portray a bigger picture.

What’s your favorite scene?

Mogwe: My favorite scene would have to be Pigeons because of the compelling story about it. It uses such a simple thing like pigeons to tell a great story about a grandfather and his granddaughter and their relationship.

What are your hopes going into the play this weekend?

Mogwe: I hope that people enjoy it, and I hope a lot of people come out and see it. It’s different from our previous plays.

Jess Ferguson, 10

What’s the show about?

Ferguson: [It’s] basically just life lessons and how the things you learn when you’re a child affect who you are when you’re an adult and what kind of person become.

What’s your favorite scene?

Ferguson: My favorite scene is Fathers and Sons because the way that’s it’s executed looks really, really nice to me. Everything about it just has a really deep meaning. It’s just a really beautiful scene, I think.

What are your hopes going into the play this weekend?

Ferguson: My hope going into the play is that everyone is super successful and a lot of people come out to support it and that everything just flows well and goes really nicely.

Emma Carbone, 12

What’s the play about?

Carbone: [The play is about how] there’s a lot of things we learn in kindergarten and a lot of things that children just find to be common sense that we kind of abandon as we get older, like kindness and respect and being gentle and that not everything is really a problem.

What’s your favorite scene?

Carbone: My favorite scene is Briefcase because it’s really fun when Josh flips me off and everything bad happens to his character.

What are your hopes going into the play this weekend?

Carbone: My hopes are that we can fill the seats and that people come and see it and support the arts. I hope that everyone who comes and sees it gets something out of it, learns something.