Teenage actress in play
By Christian Moody Editor
From the September 21, 1994 edition of The New Castle Record
How many women have dreamed of finding Lancelot? How many actually find a valiant prince in shining armor? The purposefully vague answers “most” and “few” works for these questions, but what does the search for
Lancelot do for women? That’s the question posed in a new play being performed at Virginia Western Community College this weekend, and starring Craig County High School junior Maggie Stebar.
Maggie, 16, has one of the five featured roles in the play “Looking for Lancelot.” It will be performed in Whitman Auditorium Sept. 23 through 25 at 8 p.m. Admission is $6.
“In the introduction t says ‘We’re looking for Lancelot, but what we find is ourselves,” Maggie Said.
The play is about three generations of women who struggle to find love and success, but who manage to discover themselves.
For Maggie, this is her first chance to start on a path toward fulfilling a dream.
“I have wanted to be an actress for a long time,” she said.
It will be likely be a baptism by fire. She has only counted her lines through half of the play, and there are 213 to that point. How many lines she actually has to memorize is likely between 400 and 500. Not bad for a first performance on a main stage before theatre aficionados in the Roanoke Valley.
With only five characters, each has an integral part in the play. There are two acts and eight scenes, running a total of two to three hours in length.
To handle a part of that length, Maggie said repetition is the key.
“I’ve been working one scene at a time,” she said. “Repetition is the easiest way. Studying doesn’t help a whole lot. Sometimes I get someone to read off lines to me.”
She said rehearsals have been going on for well over a month, and they are getting more and more intense as time dwindles toward the show.
Will she be nervous when she’s standing in front of the audience the first time Friday night?
“Very nervous,” she said. “But when I get up there and start going, I forget all about it.”
That wasn’t exactly the case when she auditioned for the play. Maggie said her aunt saw an advertisement seeking actresses 16 to 17 years old, so she decided to audition.
“I was scared that I wouldn’t be able to read it,” she said. “I was afraid that I wouldn’t get it, and I really wanted it.
“I thought everybody who walked in was obviously better than I was.”
Not so. About 10 girls read lines from the play in a cold reading when Maggie was there, and she said several others auditioned at another time.
The director, Bart McGuillion, chose her and one other girl for the parts as the youngest two of the five characters. Maggie’s character, Gloria, has her mother, her grandmother, her best friend and her mother’s best friend to interact with in the play. Props are minimal-it’s a play of dialogue and introspection more than scenes and action. The play was written by Roanoker Joyce G. Kernodle.
Earning a part in the play was exciting for Maggie, but it also added another task in a long list of activities she is involved in currently. In addition to traveling to Roanoke four to five times a week for rehearsal. She has been working on another play in the high school drama department, running with the newly formed cross-country team, and doing her homework. She manages to stay busy.
This weekend, Maggie hopes people in Craig County won’t be too busy to come watch the play. It has been a lot of work, but if it turns out to be a success, it will all be worth it.
And maybe this is the premier performance for one of the country’s great actresses of the future.
