The Swellesley Report

For months, Wellesley High School’s black box theater became a 1920s Appalachian coal-mining town. In the play “Fire in the Hole,” union organizers are hanged, families suffer tragic losses, and the mining company controls nearly every aspect of life. This 30-minute one-act by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Robert Schenkkan is Wellesley High’s entry in this year’s Massachusetts Educational Theatre Guild (METG) competition, a statewide festival judged over multiple rounds.

Wellesley did advance, moving through the preliminary round at Wellesley High on Feb. 28 and into the semi-finals on March 14, performing alongside programs that had succeeded at their own preliminary sites weeks earlier.

METG works differently from a standard school production. METG companies prepare a single judged performance rather than multiple shows. This puts extra pressure on students and rehearsals, as there’s little room for mistakes. Director Skylar Grossman, who also oversaw last fall’s production of “Legally Blonde: The Musical,” has been working with the company since early winter, with a cast of more than 50 students.

The subject matter added its own layer of difficulty. “Fire in the Hole” is drawn from Schenkkan’s “The Kentucky Cycle,” which won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1992 and was nominated for three Tony Awards. The story follows Mary Ann Rowen, a mother who has lost four sons in the mines. When union organizer Abe Steinman arrives, she must confront betrayal and the challenge of leading her community.

The script is dense with period detail and moral weight, and compressing it into a 30-minute stage production while keeping the emotional logic is the kind of work that asks a great deal from young performers.

Behind the scenes, the technical crew faced their own set of demands, building a period world from the ground up with costumes, set pieces, and sound that had to be read clearly in a single unrepeated performance. Students working in tech and production carried responsibilities that extended well beyond a typical school show, considering creative and logistical sides of the production simultaneously.

This year, Wellesley also hosted the preliminary round for the first time since 2019. Alongside preparing their own entry, students organized and ran a competition site for five other schools. The hosting crew was drawn entirely from students across all four grade levels, none of whom had done it before. Grossman reflected on what that required: “This preliminary round was a standout for WHS… Even with the snow-day setbacks, hosting a successful site and moving on from the preliminary round is a massive feat.”

The weather-related issues he mentioned were significant. A benefit performance scheduled for Feb. 27 was cancelled when a storm closed the school, which meant that when the company finally performed “Fire in the Hole” in front of an audience, that audience included the competition judges. A rescheduled free performance was held on March 13 at Wellesley High, followed by a question-and-answer session with cast and crew, giving the community a chance to see the production after the competitive season had already begun.

The semi-finals, held March 14, brought together programs from preliminary sites across the state, each having already demonstrated enough in their first showing to keep going. For Wellesley, getting there meant navigating a storm cancellation, a hosted competition, and a subject matter that required the cast to inhabit a world and a set of stakes very different from their own.

Despite challenges, Wellesley High’s Dramatic Arts Company excelled and is advancing to the METG finals to be held March 26-28 at John Hancock Hall in Boston.

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