Ballard High theater to perform the One Act Play Festival this month

Meghan Walker Ballard

The Ballard High School Playmakers are putting on student-directed plays as part of the One Act Play Festival next week.

The One Act Play Festival, showing May 18-20 at 7:30 p.m. at the Ballard High School Earl Kelly Center for the Performing Arts (1418 NW 65th St), includes five plays, each directed by one or two student directors. The play series is about “what happens when reality is called into question.”

Here’s more about the five student-directed plays (from Ballard Performing Arts Boosters Publicist Karen Clark):

BHS senior Elliot Jakupcak directs Sure Thing by David Ives, a comedy that follows two strangers in a
coffee shop who navigate a conversation with something no one else gets: the chance to start over when you say the wrong thing.

Ella Papineau, also a BHS senior, directs The Yellow Wallpaper by Cameron Colwell and Georgia
Drinan. Based on the chilling short story by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, this play follows a new mother
confined to her bed as she tries to make sense of the figure she keeps seeing in the pattern on her
bedroom walls.

BHS senior Autumn Bailey directs The Support Group from Hell by Jeffrey Harr, a dark comedy that
follows a teen who joins a support group with members that are far more strange (and possibly
supernatural) than she was expecting.

BHS junior Izzy Rampersad and Milo Palmer, a BHS senior, co-direct The Hallmarks of Horror by
Peter Bloedel. In this “whirlwind tour of horror tropes,” as the playwright describes, scientists attempt
to explain what makes scary movies as scary as possible. The resulting demonstration is much more
ridiculous than intended.

For the finale, we’re treated to a new play, Up, All the Way Up?, written and directed by our own Rose
Champion, a BHS junior. This play follows a woman in the late 19th century as she writes the obituary
for the peculiar and mysterious death of a millionaire on a mountain.

Tickets for the One Act Plays are available online and are $20 for adults, $15 for senior citizens, and $10 for students. The total performance time for each night’s show will be 2.5 hours, including a 15-minute intermission.