Winter Break by Joe Calarco

High Schools Take Notice!

Jul 02, 2024

High school theatre is an invaluable part of the theatre environment as a whole. It’s where many of us ‘caught the bug’ or honed it into an art. All of the kudos and thank yous to the high school theatre teachers among us — it’s a thankless, time-consuming job, and you all are rockstars! With that in mind, I want to focus this first post of the month on a show that will work well in the high school setting, with a particular focus on that setting in my thoughts here. With that in mind, I give you: Winter Break by Joe Calarco!

This play was commissioned by the Educational Theatre Association, so it’s naturally positioned well to fulfill a lot of high school theatre needs — it has a large, flexible cast; all of the characters are high school age; the technical needs are flexible; and it tackles big topics in a grounded way that doesn’t feel cliche or trite. Calarco also wrote a companion piece called Spring Break, which follows these same young people and was commissioned for the 2022 International Thespian Festival, so if you like this one, there’s more where it comes from!

Winter Break is an episodic play made up mostly of vignettes performed by 2-3 characters at a time. It begins and ends with scenes that are primarily focused on movement but also include some dialogue (especially at the end), establishing and expanding on the characters’ relationships with one another. The characters grapple with issues of class, race, romance, and ghosts in scenes that provide juicy subtext and opportunities for big physical and emotional choices on the part of the actors and directors. Most of the sets can be represented by acting blocks or simple furniture, with the option to escalate with projections and flies if that’s something you’re into. The worlds of each scene do overlap, meaning there isn’t time for a traditional scene change in between each one (because no one wants to watch a 70 minute play with eight scene changes), but since scenes are small enough to use a small area of the stage, working around them to bring the next piece in should be doable.

Calarco has intentionally written this piece to have a bunch of tight, smart, two-person scenes with flexible identities, which is not only great for a show in the high school season, it’s also a wonderful asset for classroom scenes! There are a lot to pull from here — you could even structure an acting class around just this play and have each group choose a different scene so you’re all working with different pieces of the same text. This play should be on your shelf for that reason, if nothing else!

If the playwright is amenable, this would also be easy to cut for competition, since it’s already in small vignettes. Not having to travel with a big set is a great bonus there too!

Here’s some other helpful info:

Genre: Dramedy

First Production: 2020 (tough time, but you could totally do this on Zoom)

Cast: 19 actors of any gender

Casting Opportunities and Challenges: There is one scene that can be performed by a student who is Black specifically, but there’s an alternative version of that scene available for companies that can’t cast it that way.

Ideal Performance Space: Proscenium, just because the cast is so big. If you have a large black box, it would be great there too.

Technical Opportunities and Challenges: Lots of flexibility here. This provides great opportunities for student designers because it’s set in their world and they don’t have to come up with anything fancy, but they can explore a bit if they want to.

Ideal Production Company: Educational Theatre, Community Theatre

Passes the Bechdel Test: This depends on how it’s cast, but probably.

Themes: High School, Romance, Relationships, Racism, Coming-of-age, Death, College admissions, Education

Your Principal Should Know: One of the vignettes does talk about the racial identities of students singing a choir piece in Swahili. If you have a community that’s very sensitive to whiffs of Critical Race Theory, you might get an objection there. No one successfully kisses, which is always a plus for me when it comes to high school theatre, and you can cast it with an LGBTQ+ relationship or not, director’s choice.

Major Dramatic Question: What kind of person will these students become?

What was the writer trying to do? Were they successful?

Since this was a commission, part of Calarco’s goal was to write a play that would work well in educational theatre, and I think he was quite successful in that regard. It also reads like a play that’s trying to give young people some nuanced character work about big issues, which I also think it does well. It avoids some issues that high schoolers are typically drawn toward, like drugs and self-harm, and includes some that they might not see as much, like subtle class differences they may not always notice. The variety of topics felt refreshing to me. I think this play respects the young people it represents.

Why this play now?

Winter Break highlights perennial issues that come with growing up and becoming more aware of the world around you. I think it will be relevant and engaging for high schoolers for years to come. The playwright also encourages productions to “make it yours,” which allows students to update the wardrobe and music to fit their own unique time and place (though you should still get permission before changing any words in the script).

The Play of the Week

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