'The Winter Guard Play': drama, danger with flags

Live theater should be exciting and even a little dangerous, according to Avery Deutsch, playwright of "The Winter Guard Play" currently being performed at Southeaast Missouri State University River Campus.

Seven people on stage waving, spinning and tossing flags to a choreographed dance routine certainly raises the tension level for the actors and the audience.

Deutsch said she wants her play to have that excitement and she is "very pro-something going wrong" in live theater.

The cast of "The Winter Guard Play" by Avery Deutsch perform during the world premiere on Thursday, Mar. 3, at Southeast Missouri State University's River Campus in Cape Girardeau.Submitted by Kenneth L. Stilson

The cast of "The Winter Guard Play" by Avery Deutsch perform during the world premiere on Thursday, Mar. 3, at Southeast Missouri State University's River Campus in Cape Girardeau.Submitted by Kenneth L. Stilson

"I'm very interested in theater that reminds you you're in front of something live and not sitting in a movie theater," Deutsch said.

Deutsch's play centers on a high school Winter Guard team preparing for a national competition. Winter Guard is a competitive sport using a combination of flags, sabers, mock rifles and other equipment, as well as dance and other interpretive movement.

Deutsch said the play was her first script and it was inspired by a routine that she saw on YouTube from a high school team in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania.

"I saw one of their performances and just thought it was pretty amazing," Deutsch said. "I'd never seen the art form before, and I was just really blown away."

While developing the play, a big question Deutsch said she had to consider was how feasible it would be for SEMO's student actors to learn to do winter guard.

"It is a super-hard sport, but I think because theses students have such amazing dance backgrounds they have taken to it quickly," Deutsch said. "They're doing some really hard stuff really masterfully pretty consistently."

Deutsch and the students worked with Trudy Giasi, coach of the Southeast Color Guard for SEMO's Marching Band, who choreographed the play and put the actors through a two-week winter guard boot camp.

"The Winter Guard Play" was the winner of SEMO's 2022 Lanford Wilson New American Play Festival Competition.

Ken Stilson, chair of the Dobbins Conservatory of Theatre and Dance at SEMO and the executive director of The Lanford Wilson play festival, said it was a "thrill" to give the play its premiere.

"It's kind of a special thing," Stilson said. "We do the festival in the summer, and then we get to take the winning play and continue to develop it for the better part of eight months. It's an exciting piece of theater and a unique coming-of-age story."

Stilson said the festival, now in its third year, was created to help solve a problem common to many theater training schools, including the Dobbins Conservatory. He said the majority of scripts available have a male-dominant cast but most theater programs are predominantly female.

"So, we recognized that as a real void in the scripts that were available when we're trying to pick a season," Stilson said.

The Lanford Wilson festival develops scripts that are specifically written for college-aged actors with at least 50% of the characters being female. Stilson said Deutsch's play fit that bill since her characters were all female high school students.

Stilson said now that "The Winter Guard Play" is up an running, he is looking forward to the next festival coming up in June.

"We've received over 500 submissions that we have to narrow down to the top five for the festival," Stilson said. "The top five will be developed over a six-day period and have staged readings. Then we choose the next winner."

Deutsch lives in Brooklyn, New York, but is currently pursuing an MFA in playwriting at the University of Texas at Austin. She said she is working on multiple script projects.

"One I'm working on is an adaptation of 'rometheus Bound' that is about a woman stuck in gynecological stirrups," Deutsch said. "So, we'll see what happens with that one."

"The Winter Guard Play" will have two more performances -- 7:30 p.m. Saturday, March 4, and 2 p.m. Sunday, March 5.

For more information about the play and performance times, call the River Campus box office at (573) 651-2265 or visit rivercampus.org.