Students at Westerville South High School will be performing in A.R. Gurney’s What I Did Last Summer. The show will take place at 7:00 p.m. on Thursday, September 7; Friday, September 8; and Saturday, September 9. A matinee is scheduled for 2:00 p.m. on Sunday, September 10. Tickets cost $6 and can be purchased at www.localevel.com (service fees apply) or at the door.
The setting is a well-to-do vacation colony on the shores of Lake Erie, the time 1945, during the final stages of World War II. Charlie, an incipiently rebellious 14-year-old, is summering with his mother and sister (his father is fighting in the Pacific) before going off to an expensive boarding school in the fall. Although he intended to spend the summer loafing and socializing with his friends, the need for spending money forces him to take a job as handyman for an iconoclastic, bohemian art teacher, Anna Trumbull, a former member of the “upper crust” who has lost both her fortune and her regard for the ideals of her upbringing. Sensing a kindred spirit in Charlie, she tries to stretch his mind by teaching him painting and sculpture – and exposing him to “radical” ideas about life and love, which, in time, persuade Charlie to reject the notion of going back to school. The result is a family crisis and, more specifically, a showdown between Anna and Charlie’s conservative mother; a clash of philosophies, which raises as many questions as it answers; and, in the end, stimulates the self-awareness that will shape the man Charlie is destined to become.