By Erica Rohde
Staff Writer
It should be known that a greedy family will battle it out for a share of its richest and oldest relative’s coveted estate. The Coppell High School theater department will show how such a situation plays out, bringing “Dividing the Estate” to the Black Box Theatre; a play with no action but spiteful words and funny twists.
“The characters are in a terrible situation,” director Bill Ballard said. “They are undergoing an economic recession similar to what we had as when the housing market was collapsing. They act almost unethical.”
Taking place in the fictional town of Harris, Texas in 1987, the character Stella is the owner of the estate whose three middle aged children, Mary Jo, Lucille, and Lewis, are quarrelling amongst each other for their share of the estate at the date of Stella’s death.
“Mary Jo is very materialistic,” said senior Emma Hair, who plays Pauline. “She continues to buy clothes and spends a lot of money she borrows from Stella. Lewis is a drunk who has a gambling problem and I play Pauline who is one of the few characters that is not trying to divide the estate.”
As members of the family bring in new spectators, daughters of Mary Jo, Emily and Sissy, as well as Lewis’s girlfriend Pauline, tensions heat up leaving not only a state, to be divided but also a family, to be divided.
“Stella thinks [Pauline] is stuck up,” Hair said. “[The family] thinks they are better than everyone else, when Pauline is just incredibly sweet. She actually pays attention to the news and tries to bring substance into the conversation, like talking about issues in the school system. Everyone else is in their own little bubble.”
Hair thinks the play’s story is very relatable to practical family situations.
“They are just talking about what is going on in life,” Hair said. “Everyone has those people in their family; an uncle Lewis who’s always drunk or a grandmother who wants to stick with the ‘old ways’.”
Putting together a play staging real-world scenarios is not as easy as it looks.
“When you go on, you stay on,” sophomore assistant director Aaron Kennard said. “You have to work on stage business. Stage business is where you are off to the side but still visible, so you go ‘I’m going to read a book or read the newspaper.’ For some reason at CHS it’s snapping pees.”
Ballard chose the challenge of the Black Box Theatre play for sentimental reasons.
“I really loved the playwright Horton Foote,” Ballard said. “He was a very prolific playwright. A lot of his plays were made into films. He won two Academy awards, one of them including the screen play To Kill A Mockingbird.”
Foote’s plays aren’t action filled. He died in March 2009.
“[‘Dividing the Estate’] is very simple,” Ballard said. “They say interesting and crazy things, so you get attached to them. While we are rehearsing we look at each other, and react. It is what we do in real life.”
The set of “Dividing the Estate” will be created by theater teacher Bruce Herman’s Stage Craft class. It will have two rooms; the parlor and the dining room. There will be suggestion of windows for the audience to look through.
“This play lets the audience imagine for themselves,” Ballard said.
Dividing the Estate will show in the Black Box Theatre on May 10-15, excluding a Sunday showing all starting at 7:30 p.m.
