Arts & Entertainment

Inver Grove Heights Students Perform in "The Land of Oz"

The Awesome Children's Theater provides enthusiastic young actors and actresses with a challenging theater experience.

Rivianna Zeller isn’t playing your average theater role.

Her character, “The Gump,” is a conglomeration of old furniture — including a couch, stuffed moose head and a broom — that can speak and fly. It’d be a difficult character for any Broadway-trained actress to get into. But Zeller, 11, isn’t a professional actress.

A sixth-grader at Laura Jeffrey Academy in St. Paul, Zeller is one of 17 students taking part in The Awesome Children’s Theater (ACT) production of “The Land of Oz,” a fantastical play written by L. Frank Baum, the author of “The Wizard of Oz.”

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“The Land of Oz” picks up where “The Wizard of Oz” left off. The Scarecrow, endowed with a brain, is now the ruler of the Emerald City. But General Jinjur, who is leading an army of women in revolt of the city’s predominantly male leadership, threatens his reign. Caught in the middle of the fight is Tip, a young boy who escaped from the witch Mombi and journeyed to the Emerald City, only to find it overrun.

For the past 14 years, ACT has annually performed a dramatization of one of Baum’s “Oz” books, according to ACT Director Rudd Rayfield, who also leads the Simley Theatre Guild. Tailored for third- through eighth-grade students, ACT gives younger children a challenging, rigorous introduction to the world of theater.

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The group holds five performances each year. Students meet for at least two hours a day over the course of a three-week rehearsal schedule. During rehearsal, Rayfield drills into the students the basics of acting, including stage direction, blocking and line delivery. But ACT takes students one step further — allowing the students to delve into set construction and difficult-to-portray characters.

“I’ve done shool plays before, but we didn’t have very many rules,” Zeller said. “They didn’t explain very much, so you kind of walked around stage and yelled out lines."

In ACT, Zeller and fellow actress Bailey Watson said, Rayfield helps the students dig into the details of performing.

“We learned a lot about upstage and downstage,” said Watson, referring to stage directions. "We had more lines than other school plays and we have to memorize a lot more.”

Watson, a sixth-grader attending Inver Grove Heights Middle School, wants to pursue acting in high school and beyond, and likes the advanced lesson in theater she is receiving from ACT.

The challenge of ACT also attracted 11-year-old Catherine Link, who plays General Jinjur.

“I like this role because it’s different from some of the other roles I’ve had. I’m not this sweet little girl like Dorothy. I like [Jinjur] because she has some really strong views and she’s acts on them,” Link said. Plus, Jinjur gets to “lock people up,” she joked.

The group, Rayfield said, is about more than acting and stage direction.

“This teaches valuable life lessons, it teaches kids to be able to be comfortable talking with other people, it teaches them to stand up in front of an audience and speak loudly and clearly, it teaches them personal discipline and it teaches them that when they make a commitment, they need to follow through with it,” Rayfield said.

“I hope they take away a love for theater and that it’s something they have found enjoyable and fulfilling,” Rayfield said.

The play debuts at 7pm on March 3 at the Simley High School Auditorium and runs through March 4. Tickets are $3 in advance and $5 at the door. Contact the Northern Dakota County Tri-District Community Education office at 651-306-3633 to purchase tickets or get more information about the production.


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