Theatre Arts

Theatre Arts provide a window into the lives of other people and other times; and as we learn about these characters who played out their parts in history or in a playwright’s imagination, we learn what it means to be human, and what it means to make hard choices, and these lessons teach us compassion. Students have many opportunities to participate in theatre arts. Northfielders have acted as citizens of the Old West for Cowtown Museum’s Education Day; they have been soldiers and citizens in Civil War battle reenactments; they have performed monologues, poetry, and comic sketches for the Northfield Christmas Festival of Lessons and Carols show; they have presented historical figures through scenes and monologues as part of the National History Day competition

Northfielders also have the opportunity to be part of our community-service drama troupe, The Northfield Players, in which students may perform Shakespeare as part of the Shakespeare Troupe, or comic sketches, folktales, and improvisation with Laugh Out Loud Literature for children. The Players have performed at City Arts on First Friday, on the square in midtown, for the benefit of Exploration Place, Collegiate Lower School, Mueller Elementary, and The Independent School’s second graders. Most recently, the company was asked to develop a show for the Wichita Public Library’s celebration of the Kansas Sesquicentennial. The result was "We Live in Kansas," a forty-minute show featuring Kansas songs, poems, and original scenes.

William Coleman

Mr. Coleman directs the Northfield Players. He has performed in plays throughout the Wichita area and has twice been the recipient of a Mary Jane Teall award for acting. He studied improvisation at the Second City Training Center and the Second City conservatory in Chicago. His one-act play, Building a Pyramid, was chosen for perfomance as part of the Emerging Artists of Chicago theatre and arts festival.

“Suit the action to the word, the word to the action, with this special observance, that you o'erstep not the modesty of nature. For anything so overdone is from the purpose of playing, whose end, both at the first and now, was and is, to hold, as 'twere, the mirror up to nature, to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure.”
            —William Shakespeare