Krissy Zhu ’28 (left), Natalie Giancola ’28 (middle), Allison Lee ’28 (right) performed in Dramalabs.
A woman sells her memories to a devil-like figure. Children of the Darling family sing songs about a boy named Peter Pan. On Friday evening, Dramalabs, a student-led theater production, showcased four plays to the Andover community: “No Refunds,” “Peter Pan,” “A Brief Argument of Time,” and “A Piece of Monologue.”
Dramalabs allows students to independently write, direct, and perform short plays. “No Refunds” by Jeannie Kang ’28 examined memory, sacrifice, and regret through a supernatural lens. Performer Annabelle Zhang ’29 played the grandmother of Nyla, a young woman forced to abandon her college plans to care for her ill grandmother.
“[Nyla] gave up her chances to go to Columbia [University] for her grandma, and she’s really frustrated… and in her dreams, she sees a devil, and the devil is like, ‘you can sell me all of your memories of your grandma, and I will pay off all your student debt,’” said Zhang.
Throughout the production process, performers met only four times over a week and a half. Bruce Ru ’28, a producer in the Theater and Dance Department, noted that this short timeframe posed a meaningful challenge.
“[The tech rehearsal] was one day before the actual show. So to be able to pull everything off, pretty much on the second try, was definitely the biggest challenge, but I guess that’s the point as well, right? In a professional performance setting, whether you’re a musician, an actor, [or] director, there’s always going to be situations where you have to turn something in pretty quickly and make sure it’s a high quality,” said Ru.
Ru also emphasized the program’s role as an accessible yet rigorous entry point for experimenting with theatrical production.
“The great thing about Drama labs is [that it is] one of the most… unique, but also low-stakes, opportunities to practice theater at Andover. So, the director begins the process by finding a play. That could either be an original play, you could write one, or you could get one from Andover’s theater library,” said Ru.
Natalie Giancola ’28 in another scene.
This winter’s Dramalabs expanded the scope of what the program could accommodate, most notably through a student-produced musical adaptation of “Peter Pan,” directed by Allegra Lee ’27. Anastasie Sycheva ’29, who starred as Wendy Darling, highlighted the challenges of coordinating rehearsals among busy students and supporting cast members with varying levels of vocal experience.
“As [Andover] students, we’re all really busy, and so, we all had to kind of text to figure out different times to meet throughout the week. It was also difficult because some of the members of our cast hadn’t had too much experience with singing, and our [production] was a musical… A big thing we focused on was the songs, rather than the scenes with words,” said Sycheva.
Despite those challenges, Sycheva said the process was rewarding. One of her favorite moments came during a scene in which Wendy and her brothers turn a stolen shirt into a treasure map, much to their father’s frustration.
“Wendy, Michael, and John, we were able to kind of laugh at Mr. Darling, and the audience found it really funny,” said Sycheva.
The program also featured “A Piece of Monologue,” a twenty-minute solo performance by Marty Wong ’28. Ru noted that the inclusion of both a musical and an extended monologue reflected the program’s growing flexibility.
“Marty’s monologue, pulling off 20 minutes of solo work like that, takes courage. So we definitely expanded [the] Dramalabs concept, and really showed that any kind of act could possibly be staged here, no matter how ambitious it is,” said Ru.
For audience members, the appeal of Dramalabs extended beyond the performances themselves. Crispin Black ’28, who came to support his peers, said that watching them take creative risks onstage was both entertaining and inspiring.
“Just seeing my friends perform made me really happy because I get to support them doing something they’re really passionate about. I think the most inspiring part is that people are just willing to perform these plays and are able to have fun with them and that they don’t really care what anyone else thinks, and they just go out and have fun,” said Black.
