Enjoy this story about Emma’s trip to the U.K. to perform a show called “Lucky Me” with her fellow Tabor cast members.
There is something so special about getting the chance to travel with your friends, especially when you get the opportunity to go to the U.K. for a week to perform a show that you wrote with an amazing cast. The black box play “Lucky Me” was written by myself and 11 other Tabor students during the first few weeks of the fall trimester. The play follows many different stories through an array of varied scenes that focus on the concept of luck. Having the ability to write scenes about our own experiences and perform in scenarios that our peers wrote gave us the chance to be vulnerable with ourselves, and eventually with an audience.
Each one of us wrote a “personal statement” that we presented as monologues which showed our innermost feelings about what luck means to us. Some were lengthy narratives about how a person grew up, while others commented on the importance of finding pennies on the ground. A few of our other scenes followed the story of two girls trying to make a decision, a group scene which demonstrated the unluckiness of dating, and we finished with an extravagant musical finale. At the end of the fall trimester, we put on three strong shows in the black box. The laughter and applause that we received on those nights made the strenuous creative process worth it. However, the journey did not end there.
After the winter season, the group started rehearsing again in preparation for our biennial drama exchange with Ellesmere College, a boarding high school in Wales. This trip consists of performing at three different high schools around the U.K. and visiting classes and living in the dorms at Ellesmere. So after our last Tabor performance on the big stage in the Fireman Center for Performing Arts, we geared up to leave for Dublin at the start of March Break. Upon arrival, we were all filled with excitement (and exhaustion, as it was a 7-hour flight from Massachusetts to Dublin) and had time to explore the city. After a day of fun, new food, and adventures, we ran through the play to get ready for our first show at Sandford Park School. We performed a shortened version of the show the next morning and it went swimmingly, as the audience laughed at our classic “American” humor and accents.
Soon after the show, we took a four-hour ferry ride across the Irish Sea to England. When we arrived, sleepy and hungry, we were transported to Ellesmere where we were greeted with food and friendly faces. We spent the next few days immersing ourselves in the school. We attended classes, ate in their dining hall, mingled with students, and eventually performed the show in their black box. The kindness that the students and faculty showed us at Ellesmere was truly one of the best parts of the trip. Before we left, we performed the show for a public day school in England, then took a bus to London early the next morning. Since we did not have a show to perform in London, we spent the day exploring the city and saw the West End show “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime” in the evening. Sadly, the next day we prepared to leave as we packed up our bags and flew home for the last week of vacation.
I remember being cast in this show in the fall and being so thankful that our director and mentor Ms. Hawley chose to include me in this incredible experience. As I recall our trip with my fellow cast members, we all agree that this opportunity was most certainly one that we will never forget. Tabor offered us this once in a lifetime experience to travel the world with our friends and put on a show that we wrote, created, and performed. I guess you could say that we’re all feeling pretty “Lucky.'"
