When the annual Spanish V Honors plays were performed for the first time in March 2013, only a few seats in the Lindberg-Serries Theater were filled, Upper School (US) Spanish Teacher Rosario Sánchez Gómez said. This year, the seniors in Spanish V Honors classes performed their plays to a packed audience, with some students and teachers even standing because there weren’t enough seats left.
Seniors in Spanish V Honors classes were tasked with writing, directing and performing original plays entirely in Spanish. Dr. Sánchez Gómez designed the plays to solve a problem she sees every winter.
“The seniors, after they come back from winter vacation, and especially if they’ve already been admitted into a college, start lacking motivation,” Dr. Sánchez Gómez said. “It’s hard to make them excited about anything.”
She said the Spanish plays help ensure students remain engaged in class.
“I was thinking of something for them that they had to be involved in from the beginning until the end,” Dr. Sánchez Gómez said. “Knowing that there are going to be people watching from outside of the classroom, the objective is not to fail in front of them. If they have to write the play and then act in front of an audience, there’s no way to hide.”
Dr. Sánchez Gómez said those who do not understand Spanish can still follow along.
“Because it’s theater, and there’s so much acting, the audience can follow what is happening,” Dr. Sánchez Gómez said. “The plays are pretty intuitive and self-explanatory.”
Abby Brown ’26 played the lead in her group’s production: A fiancée at her bachelorette party in Las Vegas who fell in love with the chief of a cowboy gang. Performing took Abby out of her comfort zone, she said.
“Performing was just a big moment of pride. For me, it was a big thing to tell myself I can do these things that I’m nervous about,” Abby said. “What else can I do when I push myself?”
Ashleen Pierre ’26 played a detective tracking down the cowboy gang. She said the group considered audience members who could not understand Spanish when scripting the play.
“It’s in the props, the costumes and things that they’ve seen, so they can pick up on context clues,” Ashleen said. “We try to make sure the acting is good enough where you don’t really need to understand the words to know what’s going on.”
Ashleen said the work put into the production stayed with her the most.
“It brought us together because we worked so hard producing the show. We had a lot of fun together, making the play and performing to people who watched it,” she said.
Sylvia Kunst ’27, who takes both Spanish and French, watched her classmates in a new setting.
“I really liked seeing everyone’s personality come out during the plays and seeing that the people were enjoying themselves,” Sylvia said. “Everyone seemed pretty comfortable on stage, and everyone had their lines well-memorized.”
Sylvia said the language gap was not an issue.
“I got most of it by the end,” she said. “The plot is always unique and unexpected. I feel like not entirely knowing what’s going on makes the plays funnier, too.”
