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It’s Friday, April 8, the night of Student Productions. Room M05, Ms. Shana Prentiss’s room, is all but silent. All the actresses and crew are in shakedown, a process to loosen up and get ready for the show, which outsiders are not invited to participate in. The chants and cheers coming from the Commons are barely audible from the drama room.

Soon the first show, And Then There Weren’t Any, will start, and the room is filled with people getting ready for their shows. Sound crew begins prepping for the show, and run crew set up the props. The seniors who wrote and directed the five short plays are sitting in the first two rows in the auditorium, waiting.

Girls start coming back into the room, breaking the silence. A mixture of actresses and crew do hair and makeup. The original makeup crew was moved to sound crew because not enough people signed up.

That seemed to be a universal problem for the crews. Only two people signed up for run crew, the crew that moves props on and off stage between scenes.

“The actors helped out when they could,” junior Kate Needham, one of the run crew, said, “but Anna [Leach] and I were each responsible for one side of the stage all on our own.”

The general consensus is that Student Productions are different from regular school productions, especially for sound.

“It’s more difficult because there are around fifty people, and ten mics,” sophomore Menley Brennan, from sound crew, said. “You need a big sound crew, so if a lot of people don’t sign up it’s harder. We have a really finicky sound system. When people leave cell phones on, it messes with the wireless sound system. It cuts out the mics on stage.”

Freshman Libby Torres said that Student Productions are different from other productions because they are entirely student-run. There was no makeup crew, so actors had to do hair and makeup themselves.

Glitches that might seem like large problems to people outside of theater are run-of-the-mill to experienced crews and actors.

“All of tech is about working out problems,” Needham said, “figuring out what the light and sound and set changes need to be and working them into the shows. It always takes a couple tries to get right.”

Student Productions aren’t limited to theater people, according to several crew members. They can see it as both a good and bad thing.

“People who do Student Productions aren’t usually in regular shows,” said Brennan, who also noted that it could add stress, since many actors don’t know much about makeup and sound.

“Most of the people on stage in Student Productions aren’t involved in theater otherwise,” Needham said, “I think Student Productions are less a project of the Theater department than a project of the whole school.”