After his final one act performance, his final musical performance, senior Eddie Mestre is beginning the final phase of his high school drama career by directing his own play for the SpringArts Festival. He has taken a path less traveled by creating an entirely new play, with original scripts and storylines.

“My play is about a couple- a guy and a girl- who are getting ready to rob an apartment and when they rob the apartment they realize that it is the home of the guy’s ex girlfriend,” Mestre said, “It’ll be fun for the audience, it’s a comedy, it involves a lot of physical comedy, so the entire time it’s this guy talking to his ex girlfriend while his current girlfriend crawls around the apartment trying to steal things without being noticed.”

Mestre went in search of two HHS alumni, both of which directed their own SpringArts play.

“I was in touch with a couple of my friends, Luke Gibson and Aubtin Heydari, who are both at film school for screenwriting and stuff like that, so they helped the process,” Mestre said.

They faced a problem with uncertainties in participation, which ultimately led to a complete change in production.

“Late on, we decided the [previous] idea we were going to use, which was like a whodunit, dinner mystery murder case, wouldn’t work, particularly because with SpringArts we don’t know exactly how many people are going to tryout and things like that, because it fluctuates, so we decided that a three person play would be a lot better and guarantee spots for actors,” Mestre said.

Inspiration for the play came from the desire to venture from the generic high school play.

“We were sitting down talking like ‘what would be really funny.’ I feel there’s sort of an aura of what a high school play is, there are certain stereotypes that go along with a high school comedy or a high school drama, and I wanted to break away from that and do something funny and obscure that I’ve never seen before,” Mestre said.

Mestre went into the auditions with some features of his play, such as mood, tone and audience participation, still left to be created. By collaborating with his actors, he can learn how to best get these things out of them.

“I think that if Mr. Swartz taught me anything, it’s that a director who really absorbs the actor’s ideas is probably the most efficient and most credible director, and he’s been a main influence on me and how I look at theatre and directing in general, so I think that munching off actors’ ideas and working with them, it’s a really organic process,” Mestre said.

Mestre hopes the audience comes out of the May 2 performance appreciative of the technical elements of his play as well as just having had a laugh.

“I want people to remember the fun and also the technical details. I feel like there will be a lot of technical details with the staging of how the girlfriend will be crawling around on the stage or how she will break the fourth wall and address the audience a lot,” Mestre said, “I want them to enjoy and notice the staging and how the lighting is set up to accentuate specific parts of the stage at certain times to tell the story.