The Maniacal Scientist of Lapunta (Cadence Hallborg) shares a deviant plan surrounded by his army of robots on Oct. 20 in the Missoula Children’s Theatre production of Gulliver’s Travels in space featuring Eston Composite School students.
Kenneth Brown
of The Crossroads
Students at Eston Composite School (ECS) have experienced the thrill of working with theatre professionals to make a play happen in only five days.
Two professional director-actors from Missoula Children’s Theatre helped a group of students from ECS to learn and present a theatrical version of Gulliver’s Travels with a twist. The play was basically Gulliver’s Travels in space, a play conceived and written by Michael McGill.
It was not only a play because it was a musical and the actors performed their song and dance over two days including an evening performance on Oct. 19 and an afternoon performance on Oct. 20 in the school’s gymnasium. Professionals with Missoula Children’s Theatre also made stops in Kyle and Burstall in the region this year.
People attending the play on either day enjoyed dessert and refreshments before the performance, and then people made their way to the seats to be dazzled by colourful costumes and an enthusiastic group of actors.
The play ran for a little more than an hour.
Missoula Children’s Theatre professionals travel to schools across North America and about 15 other countries to work with students for five days to make the play happen. The students have to audition for the play on a Monday, and then they are assigned parts and given a practice schedule for the week.
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The two travelling professionals in Eston were LaDareon Copeland and Joshua Wood. Copeland was the director for the play and he was aided by four assistant student directors. Wood had responsibilities as a director throughout the week, but he also acted in the play. Wood’s character was The Invisible Force of Good, an important role to help keep everything together with such a short time for the student actors to learn the songs and their individual parts.
There were even two Gullivers to split up the role to make it easier to learn. Slade Irwin and Connor Glover played the parts of Gulliver, who ends up visiting three or four different worlds on his space travels.
Gulliver’s spaceship is broken and, even with the help of his artificial computing human JCN (Jason) played by Hope Colley, he is lost in space with no way of returning home until his ship is fixed. Gulliver needs help, but so do the creatures he meets.
As Gulliver and Jason are trying to figure out where they are in space, a planet not on the planetary charts, he meets the Aliens of Lilliput. It later becomes known that the Aliens of Lilliput are at war with the Aliens of Blefuscu. They are at war because the Lilliput aliens are green and the Blefuscu aliens are blue.
Over time, Gulliver meets the Houyhnhnm Horses, Yahoos, Robots of Lapunta and the Giant King, Giant Queen and Princess of Brobdingnag. The Horses and Yahoos share a planet and it is an arrangement where the horses are the intellectuals of the planet and the Yahoos, well, are Yahoos.
Gulliver has very different experiences as he is transported from planet to planet, all with the help of The Invisible Force. At the end of the play, Wood becomes The Visible Force of Good because everyone sees him.
The Robots of Lapunta are the creations of the Maniacal Scientist of Lapunta played by Cadence Hallborg, who has also been controlling where Gulliver is transported. The Robots do not have success with the things they create, so they crave something more. In the end, Gulliver and The Invisible Force help each of the groups with their problems using the message that everyone should appreciate each other’s differences.
After the play, Wood said he has been travelling with the company for nearly two years. He said it is a blast to travel to different places, and it is an amazing experience to use the arts to help make a difference to teach children life skills. He said the kids do a great job.
“Every week, I’m so impressed with what the kids can do because they go to school all day, and then they have two to four hours of rehearsal every night,” he said. “That doesn’t leave them a lot of time to memorize, but they all still come in by the end of the week and they’re memorized. It just blows me away.”
Irwin, the first Gulliver, said his decision to audition for the play was not too serious, but then he was cast in a lead role and he ended up enjoying the experience in the end. Irwin said he enjoyed working with the professionals.
Glover said he has been acting in musicals since he was five years old, so it was not a new experience for him. He noted that a friend dared him to audition because he was not planning on it at first, but he ended up as Gulliver and he had fun.
“It was worth it (and) it was good experience,” Glover said, adding that he had fun splitting the role with Irwin, and while it gets him back in the acting groove to prepare for a play this winter in Kindersley, he would encourage other students to try it in the future if Missoula Children’s Theatre returns to ECS.
Penny Jo Milton, a teacher who helped to bring the professionals to Eston, said it was fun having the visitors at the school and the students got along really well with them. She added that it was a worthwhile experience for everyone involved.
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