playbill vip

 “Listen to the voices of those you love, and if you’re lucky, you’ll hear them forever.” Robert Harling

        It is my great pleasure to welcome you to Nordhoff High School’s production of Steel Magnolias. 

        Nordhoff High School in Ojai, California, is the smallest comprehensive public high school in Ventura County and perhaps in all of Southern California. Nestled thirty minutes inland from the Pacific coast and ninety minutes from Los Angeles, Ojai has become a unique community that has brought together citizens from the working class, ranchers, new age gurus, middle class intellectuals, and the monied and Hollywood elite to form a small artist's colony in the Southern California foothills. Due to limited development caused by a restrictive geography and a subsequent increase in the cost of living, the enrollment of Nordhoff High School has declined from 1400 students to less than 700 in the fewer than ten years. Our challenge has been to provide meaningful performance opportunities for students who wish to enter the entertainment industry in an era of cuts and declines.

        We offer one section of theatre, one in stagecraft, four in dance, and four in music. Thankfully, the Ojai community and school district are passionate supporters of the arts, and the Nordhoff High School Theatre, Dance, and Music programs have grown when the rest of the programs in the district have shrunk. We are thrilled to be invited to perform at the International Thespian Festival as "the little school that did!" It is my hope you enjoy our production as much as I enjoyed producing it for the stage. 

        Much of the preparation for this show originated at last year's festival. I was lucky to gain insight from workshops that improved my understanding of how to better prepare a cast and crew for a compelling stage production. The students were asked to explore their characters by using a diverse toolbox of methodologies developed by the 20th Century Masters including Stanislavsky, Hagen, Brecht, Grotowski, Artaud, and Brook. Direct thanks goes to Rochelle Sanders whose three day workshop at the festival taught me how to introduce students to the Rasaboxes technique which we then used to identify, isolate, and develop emotional responses on stage. Thanks follows for Tim Grant from The Denver School of the Arts who introduced the strategy of using a Myers-Briggs assessment for student actors who then developed their role and took the test again as their character to identify their strengths and weaknesses as it related to their character. Immersion is a proper adjective to describe the process, and we are excited to share with you the result.

      I invite you to lose yourself for a few moments in our salon. Listen carefully to the stories, the jokes, and the friendships that travel across time and space to give us all the understanding that we are not alone in the best and the worst moments of our lives.