After more than a year off, Arlington High School (AHS) Drama is preparing for a return to the stage, performing “All in the Timing” by David Ives. The first performance occurred Friday, Nov. 5 and was followed on Saturday with their second showing of the production. They will do their last performances of the show this Friday and Saturday, Nov. 12-13.  

The play that was written in the early 90s perfectly mirrors the experience of remote learning last year. It brings the experiences of glitches and lag into the real world, with eerie foreshadowing. This coincidence led to the AHS Drama choosing to perform this show.  

“The thing that suffered the most during the pandemic and having to move to online learning was the idea of timing,” Scott Moberly, the AHS Drama director said. “Comic timing is where you have two actors on stage who have that nuance… A pause here. A reaction there. All these have to happen in real-time, when you have a glitch on the video screen it doesn’t look the same. So having the actors in person working on their timing generated the whole show.”

The play utilizes humor in the five short shows that make up the play. This comedy is used in a way that brings the performance to life. 

“There are five different shows, that are between five and 20 minutes,” Moberly said. “An audience, they get comedies… It’s going to be fantastic. It moves quickly. It’s funny. It is intelligent in that you are dealing with the space-time continuum in how you reset your life. It’s thought-provoking.”

This will be the first in-person production in over a year due to delays and cancellations caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite this, the production still has to abide by the rules to be able to produce the comedy—keeping both the actors and the audience safe.

“We have many COVID protocols to keep everyone safe, which includes masking kids on stage,” Moberly said. “As we got closer to performing, we enabled a system that allows for vaccinated students to remove their masks for brief periods of time when on stage. So, the audience is going to come in to see people without masks [on stage].” 

“I think [with] the pandemic and everything that is going on in the world, we have forgotten how to laugh and how we can collectively find things funny… If something is funny, then we need to laugh and share that communal feeling of laughter, now more than ever,” Moberly said.

If you want to laugh, then get your tickets for the four shows soon. Tickets are currently only available for purchase online here. Shows are currently operating at a reduced capacity of 215 people per showing and are first come first. Make sure to buy your tickets for only $8 a piece, while space lasts. 

 “I enjoy the play, my students have really enjoyed working on it and we can’t wait to have a live audience again,” Moberly said. 

More information can be found here:

https://stageagent.com/shows/play/1089/all-in-the-timing

https://bpac.asd.wednet.edu/