As the final monologues were being said, sniffles were heard from the audience.
Tears were wiped as the stage went dark.
When the cast remerged back on stage, they embraced their student director as they received a standing ovation.
It soon became obvious — the show, the cast and the student director — would never be forgotten.
For the theatre department’s senior showcase, senior Emma D’Andria decided to direct Andrew Bovell’s Things I Know To Be True after stage managing the play her freshman year for another senior’s senior direct.
“It became the reason I got really passionate about theatre,” D’Andria said. “I fell so in love with the show [and how] none of the characters are perfect, but are so real and raw. I think anyone can find a piece of themselves in the show.”
The show had a more personal meaning to D’Andria that reminded her families aren’t perfect nor are meant to be.
“My aunt passed away a few month ago [from] a really long, awful battle with breast cancer,” D’Andria said. “The way my family has reacted to it has been pretty difficult, and the show reminded me the love we all have for each other is so strong that it can overcome any of these more difficult moments.”
Before the start of the show, D’Andria placed a tiny red cardinal statue next to the play’s coffee maker prop to honor her aunt.
“I felt I needed to remind myself that she was there with me,” D’Andria said. “That cardinal sits by our coffeemaker in my kitchen and cardinals [symbolize] the loved ones you’ve lost. My mom bought it after my Aunt Janet died so I felt that [it] was necessary to have right there, and to me, completed everything.
The play revolves around the Price family, and their adult children navigating through personal crises. For senior Mia Wimmer, she felt as she’d found a piece of her family throughout the show.
“I definitely saw a lot of my mother in the character,” Wimmer said. “She works in health care and I would read some of these lines and I was like ‘oh my god, I’ve heard this before.’ Even [my mom] walked out saying, ‘wow, I can really relate to your character.’ It hit really close to home.”
Wimmer, who plays the character of Fran Price — the Price family’s mother and a nurse — felt her role gave her more empathy for other people.
“Acting in general teaches you empathy,” Wimmer said. “ It makes you be in other people’s shoes for a day [and] really just opened my eyes to why people would say [certain] things.”
D’Andria believes having the show shine light on difficult material, like generational trauma and the challenges transgender people face, is what made it worth doing.
“The oldest son, Mark, [in the show], comes out as transgender, and his family has trouble accepting it,” D’Andria said. “That was a big thing that we sat down and talked through. We have a member of our cast whose brother is trans, and she talked us through his process of becoming a man that really helped us gain insight. It’s made a lot of us more knowledgeable on the subject and more empathetic.”
For the show, D’Andria ended up not holding auditions, but rather, decided to ask the same people who helped her out with her New York University directing portfolio.
“These are the students I taught my sophomore year — the ones that got me passionate about directing,” D’Andria said. “Everyone in the cast had come up to me and said how badly they wanted to do it, so I knew those were the people I wanted to go with.”
During rehearsals, to better understand where her cast needed her, D’Andria would sit down with them to talk about where they believed their strengths and weaknesses lie.
“This is about telling [a] story, but really helping this new generation of actors in our department grow,” D’Andria said. “My job as the director [is] staying true to what the author wants, but also to what the actor feels best for their characters. [It’s] why having those individual meetings is so important to me [so] I can help build their actor’s toolbox.”
Ultimately, four out of the six cast members that helped D’Andria with her portfolio came back to help perform the real deal. Together, they ended up throwing a show together in a month — forcing them to get creative.
“It was all very DIY,” junior Nitya Purini said. “We had to build a set by ourselves from blocks and wood leftover from our other sets this year, all of the decorations were our home appliances and the ladder we used [was] decorated in class.”
Purini, who plays Pip Price — the eldest daughter in the family — mentions the struggles the cast faced when rehearsing for the show due to conflicts with University Interscholastic League (UIL) shows and not having stage time be reserved by teachers.
“It was hard memorizing an entire show in a time crunch,” Purini said. “Having to stay late after school, going to Emma’s house on random occasions, [or] having our rehearsal getting canceled the day before our performance really [forced us] to lock in.”
The challenges didn’t stop there. For Wimmer, playing Fran was out of her comfort zone.
“It was so out of my typecast,” Wimmer said. “You think actors should know how to play all ages of people but physically it’s so different so it involves a lot of people watching and looking up on Youtube: old people.”
Amidst it all, D’Andria’s house served to be the place that made all the chaos and challenges easier.
“It’s those moments at the end of rehearsals that have made it really matter,” D’Andria said. “All of us getting to hang out together, ending up in my pool [or] on my trampoline, it’s just nice to have such an amazing community while working on difficult material.”
For D’Andria, watching her castmates perform exceeded anything she had imagined during rehearsals.
“[It] was the best I’d ever seen every single one of them act,” D’Andria said. “I honestly don’t think I could have ever expected [them] to [act to] that caliber, cause I’d never seen them do anything to that caliber. But getting to have everyone see what I saw in them was so rewarding.”
As D’Andria looks towards her future in attending the University of Texas at Austin and majoring in Theatrical Directing & Nursing, her senior direct taught her the importance of not only going into directing knowing the show inside out, but ensuring everything was a collaborative process.
“We all have something unique to add,” D’Andria said. “I did my best to make sure that everyone knew they are valuable to this show and was a collaboration with myself, the actors and technicians because I know they know the show, love the show and aren’t going to let me down.”
To Purini, D’Andria’s future in theatre feels undeniable.
“She has such a way with art and theatre,” Purini said. “What makes her such a good director is she sees things a lot of people don’t see. She has done this with so many shows [where] she makes it into something that means so much to everyone in the cast and everyone in the audience. She’s going to make art something that changes people’s lives and the world.”
Even though D’Andria’s departure from the department saddens Purini, being apart of the production felt fitting to her.
“Emma taught our freshman year class,” Purini said. “To have this full circle moment when she’s leaving and for her being able to teach us once more tied off nicely because [we’re] able to [leave] our relationship in theatre the way we started it.”
When the final curtain closed, the emotional weight of the show had reached far beyond the stage.
“I’ve never been a part of a show that elicited that kind of understanding and reaction,” D’Andria said. “To have headed up a project that made so many people stay after [telling me how they’d] never cried at a play, a musical or TV show just made my heart so happy and full. It reminded me why I was doing this.”
Looking back, D’Andria feels as the response to her production validated the years of work she’d put in.
“I don’t think that I could have ever imagined that I would have gotten to this point,” D’Andria said. “I never took a directing class. A lot of it has been through my own resourcing, learning and effort. At times, it felt really draining and discouraging. But to see my hard work over four years pay off in that one moment, it really made all of the hardships that I went through in the past four years worth it.”