An act in which nothing ever seems to go right. Or- “The Play that Goes Wrong”. Hot off the press of one of Great Bend High School’s greatest productions, our drama team put together something great, and while you’ve missed the chance to watch it live, you can still see it before the One-Acts start rolling out. With a plot that both hooks and laughs, this play is bound to be enjoyable, even on a re-watch. 

“It is a play within a play. Which means that they’re (the cast) presenting a play, but it’s about the people presenting the play… Things fall off walls, the second story (of the set) drops, and walls fall down on the set,” said Holly Johnson, the sponsor for drama club here at Great Bend High School, and the person in charge of “The Play that Goes Wrong”. “We’ve been working on the concept for probably about a month and a half, but it didn’t really come together until my dad found a YouTube video that showed the back-workings of “The Play that Goes Wrong “.”

“The Play that Goes Wrong”, as mentioned, has a bit of fourth-dimensionality to it. First- there’s “The Murder at Haversham Manor”, a fictitious play whose existence ends outside of the confines of “The Play that Goes Wrong”. A classic whodunnit, with murder and betrayal, but it isn’t the focus of the actual play. No- instead, the viewer is watching a play in which the cast of “The Murder at Haversham Manor” has everything go wrong. 

“In the play within the play, my character plays the detective, but in the normal play, I’m the director of “The Murder at Haversham Manor”.” Anderson Luttrell, the Director of “The Murder at Haversham Manor” and one of the more involved cast-members, spoke on his character and more facets of the play. “I’ve mostly been making props, I’ve helped lift some heavy stuff…”

The crew behind the act have been putting in serious work to get this play up and going, hours every week going into the production.  

“We’ve been working on it since last December, the sets only been worked on for the past two or three weeks, because we’ve been constantly moving between rehearsing at the middle school and here because there’ve been a bunch of middle school concerts,” continued Luttrell. “On a normal week, practice is about an hour and a half, every Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday. Outside of practice we’ve had a tech-day where we spent about five hours on (the set)” 

That’s nine and a half hours a week, excluding school! An immense amount of effort and work went into the production, and it’s easily one of the more technically complicated plays our school has put on. 

While it’s too late to go and support the play live by buying a ticket and putting your rear in a seat to cheer on the students, you can still offer your support in a numbers-way by re-watching the live-streamed production of it on repeat.  It’s a good show, both technically and the acting talent that was put into it, and whether you want to help out and boost the confidence of some burgeoning thespians it’s still worth a watch.