MELFORT — Students from Melfort and Unit Comprehensive Collegiate will be headed to provincials after a win at the Region 7 Drama Festival.
This year the festival, held in Melfort April 12 and 13, also had performances from students from Porcupine Plain, Tisdale, Carrot River and Prince Albert.
Melfort Collegiate staged Dark Road, a drama written by Laura Lindgren Smith, a fictional story set against the events of the Holocaust.
Dark Road follows the character of Greta, a woman who worked as a guard in a women’s concentration camp in Germany.
As she takes her last meal before being executed, Greta reflects back on her time on the job to a reporter.
The audience gets to see the relationship between Greta and her sister, and as Greta’s tale evolves, she slowly sees the concentration camp prisoners as less than human – a dehumanization that eventually causes her to turn her own sister over to be killed for being a traitor.
In the final line of the play, Greta says: “There are monsters in us all.”
“I was looking for something to perform for this group, sort of stumbling about the play databases out there, when I came across this play,” said Dean Armstrong, co-director of the play. “And I liked the title and I read it, and I came to the last line and it grabbed me and didn’t let go.”
For Armstrong that line means it doesn’t take much of a nudge for people to find the darkness in them.
“I think this play is tied with there is a lot of hate to the world, and we can bring light to that hate as a way of maybe snuffing out that,” Armstrong said.
He wanted people to take away from the play that something like the Holocaust could happen again.
“Something 70 years ago could happen again easily tomorrow. Like the story of these women most people don’t know about, these stories deserves to be told. Not just because it’s the time of #MeToo and Time’s Up, but because as civilized as we think we are, we have habits, and habits are hard to die. So I think when we talk about it we bring it to light and then the odds of it happening again diminish.”
Jordan Ruiter played Greta in the play. She found the biggest challenge for her playing the character was to “build” her.
“I’ve never played a role that goes to the dark side. I’ve always been the lighter character, but I have to find a different part of me I normally wouldn’t go,” Ruiter said. “My character in the play is an evil character. She went to the dark side, and that’s not the type of person I am.”
The message Ruiter wanted people to get out of the play is that nothing should be forgotten.
“It’s a play about reminding you that it can be easy to lose yourself, but it’s important never to and keep your true yourself.”
