Theatrical Design Contest

With theater season in full swing at Snyder High School, the theater department is working not only on One-Act Play, but students have also recently submitted their projects for the University Interscholastic League (UIL) Theatrical Design contest.
Snyder theater director Clark Reed said Snyder was entering a full slate of 12 students. This year, they will be Jaden West, Keylee Wagner, Caitlyn Crane, Anna Hanley, Emmah Hilburn-Herrera, Jaqulynn Craig, Collin Mitten, Maria Martinez, Isabel Rocha, Alex Monroy, Gillian Crist and Joseph Stark.
Participating students create plates for one of four different areas of design — set design, marketing design, costume design or hair and makeup design. 
They can also submit one group project that spans all four categories.
Each design challenge requires a different number of plates to be submitted, each plate featuring different design aspects. 
The set design category requires only four plates, costume and marketing require five, and the hair and makeup category requires seven separate plates.
Reed said that UIL judges would score each design project using a rubric to gauge how well they responded to the prompt. Any project scoring high enough to be placed into the “superior” category will advance to the state competition. 
Reed said that there were around 600 entries statewide.
“The UIL, every summer, puts out a new prompt,” Reed said. “They say, ‘This is the play that you’re going to hypothetically direct,’ and they set a set of parameters up around this play, and then you have to design based on those prompts.”
This year, Reed said, the prompt is to create designs for the Spanish Golden Age play Life is a Dream.
“Take Shakespeare, put it into Spanish, and then translate it back to English and that’s kind of what we’re dealing with,” Reed laughed.
Reed said that he and his theater students made a project of determining who would enter designs as official submissions. They spent most of the fall semester creating plates, and in December, Reed picked what he felt were the best projects to submit.
“Once I’ve decided who’s going to enter, they come up once a week after school and we finalize and polish and get it all ready,” Reed said.
Reed said that the deadline to enter was last Saturday, and he said they should learn whether Snyder has any state qualifiers by early March.
Because there is not a set number of projects that qualify for state, Reed thought that his students’ submissions had a good chance at qualifying.
“We’re really excited,” Reed said. “We’ve got some really good stuff.”