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Onnika Moore

Before leaving the competition, Nicole Schlautman and Colton Knott (11) hold up the Districts award and coin for the Outstanding Male Performer award.

After three community performances, months of practice and the pressure of being a new program, The One Act team’s “Lend Me A Tenor” earned first place against six other schools in the Nebraska School Activities Association (NSAA) A-2 district competition at Lincoln High School.Along with the team winning districts, junior lead Colton Knott won the Outstanding Male Performer award, with Lincoln East’s Nusrat Amin as the Outstanding Female Performer. Both will move on to compete at the NSAA Play Production State Championships this Friday at Norfolk High School.
“The most important thing is to stay humble,” junior crew manager Jackson Windeknecht said. “So we’re gonna go ahead and go forward with progress in the show as always. The show never stays the same. The first time you see it the last time and will never be the same: it’s constantly changing.”
While the group is looking forward to State, they can’t help but reflect on their achievement as a first-year program.
“It was a little nerve-wracking,” Windeknecht said. “Last year, we got put through that same situation when we tied for districts, which was a hard thing to do, then lost by a judge’s preference, and that was just kind of a flashback moment for me and a couple of others.”
Director Nicole Schlautman and the rest of the directing team heard the news from the four judges minutes before the official results were released, that it was a unanimous win, with them earning 59 points out of the 60 possible. Performers from Gretna’s previous One Act waited for the award ceremony to start, ran and interrogated the directing team to fish the answer out of them.
“I have a bad poker face,” Schlautman said. “Everyone was trying to get the information out of me, and I tried to hide it, but I was excited.”
Their success didn’t come with some challenges, though. For starters, their first performance was not on their home turf, back at the school. It also came with the largest set out of all schools. The actors, crew and even parents of cast and crew members scrambled to fit the six 7-foot-tall walls, heavy stairs and furniture onto the Lincoln High School stage, which was significantly smaller than their own and there was different technology.
“It was hard getting used to Lincoln’s theater,” Windeknecht said. “We had to learn to work with 36 light switches when we were only used to four.”
On Friday, the One Act team will take the stage at 11:30 a.m. and will compete against five others in Class A, including Gretna which has brought up conflicting emotions for several cast and crew members.
“The biggest thing I’m nervous about is going right before Gretna,” junior lead Cameron Anderson said. “The one thing I don’t like about school switching is the fact I have to go against my friends. I’m enjoying starting a new program and having a new director, but it’s going to be difficult to compete with Gretna.”