Submitted Photo Members of the Rugby High School one-act team pose for a photo after their Region 4 win for “Appropriate Audience Behavior.”

Slurping SpaghettiOs, snoring and behaving badly has earned the Rugby High School one-act play team a ticket to state after they won the Class B Region 4 title at Rugby’s Tillman Hovland Theater Thursday, Nov.4.

The “rude behavior” was the theme of the 15-member team’s play, a comedy titled, “Appropriate Audience Behavior.” Members of the RHS cast said they had fun performing it.

“For the past few years, Rugby has done mainly dramatic performances,” said Katelyn Duchscher, an RHS senior who plays a straight man role in the comedy. Her character, Carol, and Ashley, played by senior Amber Selensky, spend the play trying to find a good seat at a performance of Shakespeare’s “Hamlet.” Their search becomes a challenge when they encounter a character with a perpetually scratchy throat and a king-sized bag of cough drops in loud, crinkly wrappers, a chatty cell phone user and a loud sleeper, among other annoying people.

Duchscher said the comedy “was pretty fun. It was pretty new. It was a good change and I think we needed it. It’s virtually a play within a play.”

“We’re all the main characters,” said Katelyn Towe, an annoying audience member. “We all get the spotlight every once in a while, so it’s really fun to watch everyone do their part. It’s really hard to keep from laughing on the stage as well.”

“It’s really more of an ensemble piece,” said Trista Busche, who directed the play and coached the team to their sixth straight regional championship. “It’s a chance for everyone to be the main focus. But as a whole, they’re acting as an audience. They have to be in sync all the time. There are times where, instead of watching the little scene that’s going on, I’m looking at all the other kids to make sure they’re not dropping out of character. That will really draw the eye (away from the characters in focus). They can be slurping spaghetti, or whatever they’re doing, but if someone’s spacing out, that’s where my eye is going,” Busche said.

Each annoying audience member has their turn in the spotlight, operated by tech crew members Tucker Schoenberg and Alec Wolf.

“One of my characters, Jack, they have an itchy throat, so they bring a huge, comically-sized bag of cough drops, a can of SpaghettiOs and a soda that they loudly slurp on. Obviously, it’s going to cause a distraction,” said Haley Heilman.

“She actually opens and eats the SpaghettiOs onstage,” Selensky noted, laughing.

“That’s method acting,” Busche said, smiling.

“It’s really fun to watch everyone put their own personalities into the personalities of all the characters because you can see their character (develop) as they go through the play. It’s really cool to watch them progress in that as well,” Towe said.

“This is my first year coaching, so for me, I asked how many kids I could expect for this, because that affects the play I select. And I was told, ‘It kind of always depends, so plan for anywhere from four to 14.’ That makes it super easy to narrow down what to choose,” Busche said, laughing.

Busche said she asked the seniors in the play for advice on choosing the play. “I got mixed answers, so I chose to do this play because of the flexibility of casting. It’s so easy to either remove a scene from it if we don’t have enough kids or swap some things so it made more sense of where they were running around. My favorite thing was they auditioned without scripts. The scripts were late, so I had a piece of paper with random sentences on it. I tore off each piece with a sentence and asked the students, ‘Read this as if you were having the biggest, most dramatic fight you’ve ever had.’ And by doing that, I was able to see that every single one of these kids would not only be able to understand what was being asked of them but execute it immediately, even off someone saying something as ridiculous as, ‘I think the aloe plant is dead.’ From that, I was able to say, ‘Okay, you’re my snoring person.’ I was able to see exactly where they would fit.”

Busche’s method worked, according to her giggling cast. The team will travel to Jamestown for state Nov. 22 and 23.

“I think one nice thing about this play being a comedy and with the casting in it, we have a lot of younger kids in our group this year who maybe haven’t been to a one act competition before. This is all very new to them and in dramatic pieces, they’re a little bit more difficult and for this, it was a lot easier for us to grasp onto characters and comedy,” Duchscher said. “To play out your character in comedy is easier and you can do a lot more with it. That was a really good choice on Trista’s part to do a play we can all grow with and capitalize on our characters.”

Two other teams, one from Harvey and one from Langdon Area High School, competed at regionals. Harvey placed second in the competition, while Langdon placed third.

“The larger cast from Rugby made the performances easier, according to Busche. “Like I said, it was an ensemble piece, so there are a lot of suggestions in the script to isolate and put a spotlight on what’s happening, but when you’re onstage, you want to be onstage. The characters are so vibrant, the judges said, ‘I could tell what your character was and you didn’t drop it one minute when you were up there.'”

“The judges said, ‘I could tell who you were when you hadn’t even spoken a word. I could tell your personality and who you were going to be just by you sitting in the audience,’ which I think is a really hard thing to do so I applaud the cast for being able to do that,” Duchscher said.

Duchscher said she hoped the cast would make sure to speak their lines loudly enough to be heard in the larger University of Jamestown venue.

Physical comedy also played a “huge” role in the play’s success, according to Busche. “One thing that makes a huge difference for us is a lot, I’d say about 90 percent of the jokes in this show are visual jokes. So, when they were playing it to an empty house, I could feel the energy level. Then, when we had our public performance and had a crowd in here, you could feel the difference.”

Team members said they couldn’t remember Rugby’s one act team taking a state title, but they had high hopes.

The cast gave kudos to a younger member, Elijah Towe, Katelyn Towe’s brother, who’s in the eighth grade.

“You’d never be able to tell because he comes out with the most bombastic entrance,” Busche said, smiling. “Because of course, the entire time the audience is being inappropriate, Hamlet’s just trying to do his thing onstage. So, at the very end, when everything has reached a ridiculous climax, he comes storming in and reminds them all, ‘You’re here to watch a play that I’m in!'”

“He also got honorable mention in regionals, which is just amazing,” Duchscher said of her fellow cast member.

The competition’s superior actor award went to cast member Annie Risovi. Haley Mayer received honorable mention for her performance as well.