Winning A Drama

Take a leap of faith. That's all you need.

We started early, yes. Earlier than most of the other classes by at least a week. The theme for our first and last school drama competition was Mask/Essence, whichever we prefer to use. The proposed idea our director came up with initially was to divide the stage into 2 halves, using one section for "the present" while the other half would be for flashbacks. Somebody died, and somebody got arrested. The arrested suspect would be proved innocent later on in the drama. Slightly dry, if you leave it at that.

Well, our class rejected it.

So began our quest for a new storyline. We eventually settled with one, which was....amusing. Execute. Execute. That was the last thing we needed to do, until we finally thought we were perfect.

The stage was divided into 2 sections, one for flashback, one for the "present". 4 people were seated, 2 parents, their daughter and soon-to-be son-in-law enjoying their engagement dinner. Then, a mysterious police inspector turned up and accused each of them for being the reasons for pushing a girl named Eva to take her own life just 2 hours earlier. Scenes were frozen, thrown into flashback, and secrets were revealed. After making them feel guilty enough, the inspector left, while they pondered over their wrongdoings and regretted their past actions. Father, being skeptical, decides to call up the police headquarters to check if there really was an Inspector Kane. There was no such person. So daughter decides to check with the information centre if a girl had just committed suicide. No one committed suicide yet. Being glad that it was all a bluff, they continued to enjoying their champagne.

Minutes later, the information centre calls up. A girl name Eva just killed herself.

That won 5 Cengal the first place. Catch is, my class isn't 5 Cengal. We changed the script to one much lighter and less morbid, involving parents planning to divorce and their distressed son.

We didn't win, maybe because we had too many actors who were forced to play so many side characters. We didn't win, maybe because the storyline didn't link up as well as we'd thought; maybe the scenes were too fragmented; maybe the characters didn't act well enough, maybe we didn't portray a strong "cause and effect" concept. But then again, maybe we didn't win because we chose not to. We wanted to bend the rules to include more actors, actresses and crew even if it jeopardizes our script and storyline; we wanted to work with each other despite the hassle in numbers, just to bond together and have memories of each other in our sunset days. We didn't win, maybe because we firmly guarded our stand that each Batai-an has an equal portion of this once-in-a-lifetime competition and each of us should be involved, sacrificing group coordination. We ended up having a good time with each other, and no one was ever left out.

We were given a choice. It's a trade-off between winning and creating fond memories together. Our class chose the latter, and we walked away with something more valuable than 15 gold medals only given to cast and crew. We earned something the other classes would never have from this event.


We didn't win.

But it doesn't matter any more.