Photo Credit: Sami Dickerson. Anastasia Zitco, playing Mary-Louise, cuts the hair of Paige Wilcox, playing Norma.[/caption]On Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, December 5-7, the OHS theatre put on a witty, student written play called Hairapy Sessions. The play had a small cast of talented actors, a great set, and wonderful hair.
The stars of the play were two women: Barbara, played by Lauren Asbury, and Mary-Louise, played by Anastasia Zitko, who own a hair salon together in New York. They help many people in their hair salon including a girl named Susan, played by Magaly Asuncion, and a 60-year-old woman named Norma, played by Paige Wilcox. Regulars in the salon are Peaches, played by Morgan McCallum, and Evelyn, played by Olivia Herrera, who are best friends. There is also Kathleen, who works in the salon, played by Meghan O’Shaughnessy, Norman, the handyman, played by Austin Davie, Jo-Ann, who lives above the salon, played by Nycol Lyons, and Dominick, Susan’s husband, played by Hunter Moser. Haylee Burton, a manager for the backstage crew, said, “The show was a huge success and very fun to work! The cast was full of incredibly talented people.”
The actors that played the main characters, Asbury and Zitko, really invested time into playing the characters and it paid off. They played the characters with spunk and great accents. They took you to New York with the way they played their parts. Some of the best performances came from characters that had smaller parts, like Lyons, who was hilarious throughout the whole play. Wilcox, who played Norma, was fantastic at playing a woman so much older than her real age.
The set, which was different from anything Orange has ever seen before, was intriguing. It is called a “thrust stage,” and it helped the characters to be personal with the audience. The characters would often point out someone from the audience to ask them for their opinion. The stage was on a section of the normal stage in the OHS auditorium. There were chairs on three sides of the stage and a small center set. The furniture made you feel like you were in a real hair salon. There was a cash register, hair dryers, and a nail station. They had real seats that would come out of a hair salon and a place to put all of their hair products, which were used many times in the play. Asbury commented, “I think that the stage is fantastic because you can see the audience’s reaction and you can interact with them.”
The make-up and hair department was a huge part of the play. The hairstyles that the girls wore took hours to fix. Asbury commented, “My hair takes an hour, which is an inconvenience.” The hair and makeup departments helped to pull the New York setting together. Because of the hair, you could tell the girls were in a salon having their hair done. The make-up department was also able to make Wilcox and Davie, who played Norma and Norman, look much older than they were by dying their hair gray.
The best parts of the play, that were performed by Lyons, were accomplished using a microphone in the booth. She had to sound like she was above the salon and the sound department pulled this off very well.
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