Last year, when Cedar Ridge High School was doing classes remotely, Evan Mitchell, the school’s drama instructor, approached one of his students with a project that would be both exhilarating and terrifying. Mitchell wanted Quinn Gilbert, then a junior, to write a full-length play.
“I knew she was a prolific writer,” Mitchell said. “She had written some small pieces in the past. I basically challenged her with this and said, ‘Look, I’d like you to write a show, and I think it would be really great for us to perform it your senior year.’”
Easy for him to say. But how did the student respond to this “challenge?”
“I had written short plays beforehand, but nothing was as impressive or daunting of a task as writing a feature-length play,” Gilbert said. “So, I was kind of freaking out but also incredibly excited.”
Every few weeks, Mitchell and Gilbert would talk by Zoom. Gilbert would send her instructor a new draft of the play, and he would provide notes, potential cuts, and suggestions. It took much of her junior year to get the play, called “Talia On the Path of Shadows,” finished and in its present form.
“It’s just a really beautiful piece,” Mitchell said. “The original plan was to perform it last fall and to take it to a theater competition and compete against other high schools, but then (the) Delta (variant) happened and pretty much shut us down. So we pushed it back to the spring.”
“Talia On the Path of Shadows” was selected as a winner of both the N.C. Young Playwrights Festival and the Burning Coal Kidswrite Festival. The former means it received a staged reading at UNC-Greensboro, as well as a publishing deal. The latter means it will receive a professional production at Raleigh’s Burning Coal Theatre Co. in late May. The first staged production will be at May 6-7 at Cedar Ridge High School.
Upon learning his student’s play had been recognized, Mitchell felt pride and was proud for Gilbert, but he also said he wasn’t particularly surprised the play won awards.
“I got to see and knew the quality of the show, whereas because I’ve read lots of shows and I’ve written plays before and I’ve seen lots of other students’ written work, I had more of a gauge of like, this is really, really good,” Mitchell said. “All the shows were great, but her show just just knocked people flat. The response to it was really, really incredible.”
Quinn, however, had spent a year wrestling with an animal of her own creation, and constantly questioning its merit. Her relationship with the play was counseling-worthy.
“I think it’s just the process of art,” Gilbert said. “You put everything into it and your soul is reflected in your artwork. You look at it, and sometimes you’re like, ‘Ugh,’ but I think there’s something very honest about the ability to create and put your talent and effort into it. I had moments where I was like, ‘I really don’t want to do this anymore.’ But at the end of the day, I’d always look back on it and understand it’s been a process and it’s been hard but it’s a labor of love.”
Mitchell said when Quinn found out her play had twice won awards, her excitement was unmistakable, even through email. “She was just ecstatic when she heard the news,” he said. “She sent me emails in all caps, ‘Oh my god! Oh my god! Oh my god!’”
Quinn was able to go to UNCG to see the rehearsal of students reading her play, and talk with them about the piece. Mitchell said the college students “gushed” about the play, which they called “a gift” and “awesome.”
“Talia On the Path of Shadows” is about a teenage girl on a quest to find her absentee father. The story is told in a fantastical way, jumping back and forth between the real world and her sort of fantasy-quest version of the real world. She searches for her father with her trusty dog at her side. And whenever a character like her mother enters or a principal enters, the dog becomes a puppet. Other moments, when she’s alone, she can transform and suddenly gets an epic sword and the dog becomes a human actor that she can talk with. Talia can talk with these other fancy characters and she fends off different beasts, but there’s kind of a real-world version of everything that’s going on.
“It’s a really fun show that balances both zany, wacky fantasy, comic book sort of elements and battles with lots of shadow puppets and big monster and then, which is an interpretation of very real conversations and relationships with her and between her and her mother and real world consequences to her actions,” Mitchell said.
He also said the play’s production is the most ambitious that he’s attempted at Cedar Ridge in his nearly six years at the school. The entire set of the show is a giant shadow screen that will have around 100 different shadow puppets projected on to it. Lighting includes overhead projectors and flashlights. Senior tech students were called in to help develop the lighting, which is key to the performance and the story.
“There are certain uses of shadow where it is a substitute for something much bigger, like there’s a school bus at one point in the play and we don’t want to actually have to build a giant school bus, so we have a shadow,” Gilbert said. “There are other parts of the play where Talia, the main character, is going through something really upsetting or intense, and these shadow creatures come out. They are representations of self-doubt and self-hatred, as well as fears and anxieties about the world. I think it was really interesting to use a shadow because, in a sense, it’s personal. But I also think it will look really cool on screen.”
Gilbert, who has been involved with theater throughout high school, also enjoys acting. She said acting will always hold a special place in her heart, but she would also love to spend the rest of her life writing plays. She said her intention is to continue to follow her interests in theater and history. Gilbert recently received an acceptance letter from UNCG.
The Cedar Ridge High School Theatre Company will put on two performances of “Talia On the Path of Shadows” at Cedar Ridge High School, May 6 and 7. Tickets are available only at the door.
