Great Bend High School’s theater club will serve food for thought with the dinner theater production, “Dark Road.”
Seniors Aaron Miller and Ashtin Heath are the directors of this all-school play, which can be seen Tuesday and Wednesday, Jan. 24-25. A meal of spaghetti, garlic bread and salad will be served at 6 p.m. each night in the GBHS commons area, with the play to follow in the auditorium. Tickets are $10 per person or $15 for a couple, and may be purchased from cast members or at the door.
“The seniors are in charge of everything,” Heath said. They chose the script, recruited more than two dozen students for the cast and technical crew, and designed the set.
A student production is a GBHS spring tradition, but adding a dinner is something new. The serious content of “Dark Road” is also a change from recent years, where the producers have favored one-act comedies.
“We haven’t done a serious play since my freshman year,” said Miller, who noted that this play has a powerful message about the choices that allow evil to become ordinary. “It follows two sisters during World War II in Nazi Germany. One of the sisters gets a job as a guard in a concentration camp. The play follows her descent into evil.”
When Greta, a young girl living in Nazi Germany, reads that the nearby women’s concentration camp is hiring guards, she sees it as a chance to find her place in the world and provide for her sister Lise. But soon, according to the synopsis from playwright Laura Lundren Smith, she learns the reality of her duties, and so too does she learn how to justify her crimes, heading further and further down the dark road laid by the Third Reich. Kind-hearted Lise is shocked at what her sister becomes, and though the two drift apart, their fates remain inextricably and dangerously linked.
Cast members are: Aaron Clark, Jadon Ward, Gentry Schneider, Alyx Torres, Emilynn Fisher, Molli Banks, Bailey Banks, Geoffrey Pafford, Michael Harbaugh, Donovan Paden, KD Scherer and Patrick Heath. Faculty sponsors are Holly Johnson and Connie Claussen.
