With new renovations sweeping Park by storm, the theatre club has been one of the clubs hit the hardest. The main space for club activities, the auditorium, is in a construction zone and hasn’t allowed the club to practice or use the auditorium for the school year. They have had to adapt and use different rooms around Park in order to keep up their practice. With summer on the horizon, construction at Park is ramping up even more since the school will be vacant. The area by the auditorium is one of the main focuses of construction right now and has forced the club to clean out much of their props and other builds.
Junior thespian Julia Lorenzen said having to move all the props was tough but it was good for clearing out room and will prepare them for next year.
“It was really frustrating and made this year really difficult,” Lorenzen said. “But I think it gave us an opportunity to clean out our space. Starting next year, it’s going to be a little difficult to get the show going because we still have more to do. I think it’ll be good and next year, we’ll make a lot of progress.”
Junior thespian Sela Myers said it will be good for the club to clear things out and clean up the auditorium.
“I think it’ll get things started for next year and it’ll be beneficial for the program. It was just kind of cleaning up everything. It was a bummer that we couldn’t use the space this year (though),” Myers said.
According to director Jodi Schifsky, the club has gotten used to moving and adapting throughout the year.
“Well, we’ve done a lot of moving this year. We’re actually pretty good at it by now. And most of what we were moving in the last few weeks was putting away things that we weren’t able to properly store but we also had to clean out a lot to make room so we can move around in our storage space and make better use of it,” Schifsky said.
Lorenzen said having to move stuff from the back rooms was a little sad because some of the senior legacies might be removed.
“There’s a lot of stuff that I had never seen before, stuff that we had never used. I’m not really worried about about that, but it is a little sad to see like the back rooms in the shop might get like, demolished or like painted over because there are some, like senior legacies painted on the wall there and that would be really sad if those got removed,” Lorenzen said.
Schifsky said going through all of the rooms brought back memories of past students and plays and was a little sad having to move everything.
“We had all these shelves that were just stuffed full of things and brought back a lot of memories of past plays for the students and for myself,” Schifsky said. “But now it’s much more organized. We don’t have the same space to store things but everything is organized into these giant bins thanks to the efforts of our amazing students who really put in the work.”
Myers said it won’t be that big of a deal because they will be able to move everything back once construction is over.
“(It won’t be as sad) because I think that was the task, was moving everything and I think there might only be like a couple of things still to move so it won’t be hard to put it back,” Myers said.
According to Schifsky all members of the club have really put in the work and effort this year while having to deal with all the changes and lack of dedicated space.
“There was a lot this year for us to deal with and they were troopers all the way. But now we hopefully will be able to come in next year and take our space back and use it to its full capabilities,” Schifsky said.
