The Westwood Theater Department took their University Interscholastic  League (UIL) one act play, Blue Stockings, to competition this Tuesday, bringing home the best actress award. The cast and crew have been working on their show for two months, even rehearsing over spring break.

“We have the spring break rehearsals where we’re literally here for six hours for four days in a row, and you really start to see the show come together,” Simone Heim ‘17 said. “We really start to build ensemble, and it just gets better and better the more that we practice.”

The cast weren’t the only people working hard on the show over their break — the show’s crew had to be there to make sure the performances would all run smoothly and without error.

“I am the lighting technician, and I make sure that everything is lit up the way it’s supposed be and play with people’s emotions, or at least try to,” Scarlet DeBont ‘17 said. “During one of the scenes when Maeve is leaving we are trying to make it really emotional and really dramatic and that is only really accomplished with sounds and lights.”

The cast and crew alike faced many difficulties throughout the show, including quick costume changes, illnesses, and even a broken sound board at contest.

“The most difficult part of the play [for me] was probably the accents, that was really hard,” Mackenzie Spinks ‘17 said. “I played two characters: one [with] a cockney dialect and the other [with] a standard British dialect, so trying to find the distinctions was a bit difficult, but I think it worked out in the end.

For  many of the students working on the show, the script meant more to them than just another competition piece.

“The show is about women trying to receive the right to graduate from college and I think it is really important that we talk about this. Especially now with everything that’s going on, I think it’s a good reminder that women are still equal to men and it needs to be that way,” Spinks said. “It’s really important to me that we have this idea brought up again to show that women are fighters too.”

Some of the actors found themselves telling a story that seemed all too familiar to one they were experiencing in their own lives.

“I think it’s really important, especially in the political climate that we’re experiencing now, to see these young women grow and fight for their rights in a similar way that we’re fighting for right now,” Heim said. “A lot of women are worried about losing their reproductive rights, and it’s the same sort of set up that it was back then: women were protesting, the suffragists were trying to get men to vote for them; it was really about these girls’ struggles and trying to earn a right that should already be theirs.”

The final performance of Blue Stockings is Tuesday, March 28 at 7 p.m. in the Westwood cafeteria.