Round House Theatre is celebrating 20 years of its local Teen Performance Company.
Local teens will stage “TikTok (a period piece)” this weekend in Bethesda, Maryland.
“Round House does a program called the Teen Performance Company, which is a program of all high school students — we have 20 of them in the program this year from around the DMV,” Director of Education Danisha Crosby told WTOP. “We commission pieces each year that are specifically meant to have teen characters and speak to a teen artist.”
Written by professional playwright Stefani Kuo, the world premiere play follows eight teenage social media influencers living and working together in a collaborative “Vibe Villa.”
“We all think about our kids on TikTok, but this takes a little bit of a different take on it,” Crosby said. “It imagines that these eight teenagers are living in a content house in a hype house kind of place, but they’re still dealing with all the things teenagers deal with.”
These eight characters all have different social media experience levels.
“One was a Vine star who is having trouble gaining traction in this new TikTok world, some are young and just breaking through,” Crosby said. “A few are dealing with things we don’t think about wanting to lay on our teenagers. One is the financial support for her family, so she is stuck in this place even though she’s not sure it’s a place she wants to be.”
The show is produced by 19 teenagers from 12 different local schools.
“We have several students from Bethesda Chevy Chase High School right down the street,” Crosby said. “We have students from the Barrie School, we have a couple of home-schooled students from D.C., Churchill, really from all over the area.”
Over the years, the program has helped 373 students from 59 high schools.
“It is a really exciting and unique program,” Crosby said. “There’s a young teen who worked with us as an intern who passed away unfortunately in 1999. Her parents had this idea and started a fund for groups of teenagers to do a show under the auspices of Round House. This is our 20th year. That’s grown into the Teen Performance Company.”
This year marks the 20th Annual Sarah Metzger Memorial Play.
“We put together the company in the summer, they start in the fall with us, they do master classes with our Round House main-stage artists, they come see shows … then in the winter they actually rehearse and perform the play,” Crosby said. “The play is entirely done by students, so there’s a high school director, dramaturge, designer, stage manager.”
The students helped create the visual design of what we see on stage.
“We have a student set, props, lighting, sound and project designer, a whole design team,” Crosby said. “When you look at the stage, you get a sense of what the inside of a content house might look like. There’s really nice, clearly rented furniture in the center of the living room where they do their filming, then the bedrooms look more like a frat house.”
Of course, the subject matter allows for additional digital elements.
“Because the name is ‘TikTok,’ there’s absolutely an element of social media that you see,” Crosby said. “On top of doing the show itself, the students had to film some things that we then turned into TikToks for the play, you see some of the work they’re filming inside the actual play that we are projecting. … We have had our hands full!”
Tickets are free for students and $25 for everyone else.
Listen to our full conversation here.
