Recent Arcadia High School grad Kaitlin Aquino thought she was going to spend her summer before starting at UC Irvine workingin fast food or retail.
But then another opportunity arose, one that would allow her to continue to act on stage like she had done through her high school career — but this time be paid for it.
Compared to the typical teen summer job, “this is a lot better,” said Aquino, who will star as the title character in “Antigone,” which finishes its four-day run on Sunday. It’s sold out.
The production comes from Arcadia’s first professional theater company, Vaulting Ambition, a collaboration between the Arcadia Performing Arts Foundation and Arcadia High School. The company brings together theater pros and students to stage professional productions at the Arcadia High School Performing Arts Center.
The problem, said Vaulting Ambition Director Whitney LaBarge, is that Arcadia previously had no professional theater options for the high school’s alumni once they returned home from college.
“We spend all this time and money cultivating great talent at Arcadia High, and they get into NYU, Yale, Julliard, amazing theater schools,” LaBarge said. “But there was nothing for them to come back to in the community because there is no theater here.”
LaBarge, a Los Angeles-based director, writer and actress who has been directing Arcadia High’s fall plays for eight years, made sure exactly half students and half professionals comprised both the cast and crew.
“It’s a stepping stone for the students to get a chance to work with professionals side by side, help launch their careers, get their resumes started,” LaBarge said.
This weekend’s sold-out performances of “Antigone” will take place in the the Performing Arts Center’s black box theater — an intimate space with no more than 100 seats. While these theaters may be common in Hollywood, they aren’t in the San Gabriel Valley.
The purpose, said Maki Hsieh, executive director of the Arcadia Performing Arts Foundation, is to help expand locals’ ideas about what theater can be and inspire future participation and patronage.
“Introducing this kind of intimate space where transformation happens is a very powerful opportunity we have that other venues don’t have,” Hsieh said.
Because of the availability of the black box theater, Vaulting Ambition is limited to staging productions in the summer and around the school’s winter break. The plan, as of now, is to stage a children’s holiday play later this year, LaBarge said.
While “Antigone” — a classical Greek tragedy about a young woman who is persecuted for seeking a proper funeral for her brother — may seem like an unusual choice for a young theater company to perform, LaBarge said she updated the dialogue to help show that theater can be accessible to everyone.
“‘Antigone’ is very timely because it’s about standing up for what you believe in regardless of your government, your political surroundings, your social surroundings,” LaBarge said.
Having read the play in one of her English literature classes, Aquino was already well versed with the title character. The class would read sections aloud, and while she felt the intensity in the text, she didn’t always hear it from her classmates, who weren’t in theater.
“I expressed my frustration that a little too overtly, so the next day in class, the teacher wrote who was reading for who, and it said Antigone — Kaitlin,” Aquino said with a laugh. “But I really did have an emotional connection to the text, and now I get to perform it on stage.”
