The Packer Project/How It Was

Since I was little, my mom has been taking me to see on and off Broadway musicals and plays. I absolutely love watching theater and singing musical theater songs. Combining this interest with my strong passion for history and creative writing, in the summer of 2020, I decided to write my own documentary theater play using interviews from the Packer COVID-19 Oral Histories Project. (Documentary theater is theater that uses pre-existing documentary material as source material for stories about real events and people, frequently without altering the text in performance.) 

From July 2020 to April 2021, I watched hours of video footage, transcribed, and pieced together my short play. At first I worked solo on this project, but in January 2021 I started a second semester Independent Study with Ali Boag, the theater teacher and head of the arts department, to gain professional feedback on my play. In late May 2021, I facilitated a Zoom table read with volunteer student and faculty actors, and one week later, after edits were made to the script, we put on a Zoom production in front of the Packer community. At this point, my play was temporarily titled The Packer Project, after the play The Laramie Project, which I had read in my tenth grade English class and which had inspired me to write my own documentary theater play. After the Zoom performance, I worked with Mr. Boag to submit my play to various publications. To make my play applicable to a much wider audience, I removed the word “Packer” and renamed my play How It Was. 

In The Packer Project/How It Was, the character Sadie (based on myself) facilitates a discussion between eleven fictional Packer community members about their experience with the COVID-19 pandemic.