“Our students here work very hard and they are very highly talented. They have excelled in different categories and placed somewhere in the top five for the different categories against other schools in the mainland for the past years,” Easton said.
The TWPI is an honor society and Thespian chapter composed of various groups of students from grades 6 to 12 from different schools in the CNMI.
“By joining the TWPI, the students from different schools get a chance to get lifelong learning through the dramatic arts,” Easton said.
Students who join the TWPI are trained in different performance arts such as public speaking, costume designing, musical theater experience, acting and other useful skills.
Easton said due to the accomplishments of the local Thespians for the past years, more students are encouraged to join.
The increased membership also means that transportation is now a pressing problem, he added.
“We have to transport the group from place to place to perform and over the years, transportation has been our biggest problem. We cannot accommodate everybody on the two vans we are using,” Easton said.
“We need to get around but we cannot avail of the school buses of the Public School System because they are also tied up with transporting students from the schools to all over the island,” Easton said. He said the TWPI would be glad to accept assistance for transportation from the community.
“Our kids have the talent to perform, we have the props and everything that we need, except for the transportation,” he added.
Some members of the TWPI will be competing in the 2011 Thespian Festival to be held on June 20 to 25 at the University of Lincoln-Nebraska.
“We’ve done extremely well the previous years and we’re confident that our team will once again bring honor to the CNMI this year,” Easton said.
The students will be competing in monologue, duet acting, solo musical theater, mime, set design, costume design, film, and group musical theater.
For more information, call Harold Easton at 237-3230 or email Frank Gibson of the Friends of the Arts, which supports the TWPI, at [email protected].
