What You Need To Know About Spring Athletics Registration, by Nassa Warab, Freshman
With spring just around the corner, spring athletics are already on the horizon. This year’s sport selection consists of baseball, softball, lacrosse, outdoor track, tennis and sailing. Interested in joining? Here is what you need to know about registering.
On the Marblehead High School website you can find the tab “Students & Families.” Under this section there is a subcategory for athletics. There you can find your link to register. Make sure to complete your payments and fill out all of the required information before Friday, March 9th, when registration will close permanently. Keep in mind that when registering you must have an up-to-date physical taken on or after February 17th, 2024. If this is not the case, then be sure to book your next physical as soon as you can.
Once you’ve finished with all of your requirements, it’s time for the athletics assembly. This will take place on Wednesday, March 12th at 6:00 P.M. at the MHS auditorium. The assembly is open for student athletes and their parents or guardians. Attendance to this event is mandatory for every student that wants to participate in this year’s spring athletics program. After learning everything you need to know, you can start your training for team tryouts on Monday, March 17th. Once tryouts are over, all that’s left to do is wait for the results.
If a student, parent or guardian has any questions about this year’s sport schedule they should contact Mr. Kent Wheeler, the Marblehead High School athletics director. Good luck Marblehead athletes!
MHS Drama Club’s The Sleepwalker Performed at MVMS and METG’s Dramafest, by Max Kane, Sophomore
On Friday, February 28th, The MHS Drama Club’s The Sleepwalker was performed at the MVMS Performing Arts Center. The Sleepwalker is an adaptation of the 1920s German silent film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. The Sleepwalker tells the story of the mysterious Dr. Caligari, who arrives in small-town Holstenwall, Germany, for the town fair. Dr. Caligari arrives with a mysterious cabinet where a somnambulist resides. Sleeping for 20 years, it is said Cesare the Somnambulist can tell you anything you want to know. However, a series of mysterious events occur, with Dr. Caligari and Cesere appearing to be at the center.
Written and directed by Benji Boyd, the project has been over 2 years in the making. When asked about the difficulties of adapting the silent film to the stage, Boyd had this to say: “The hardest part was trying to maintain the integrity of the silent style while still using dialogue to tell the story. I encouraged the actors to use physical acting to reveal their emotions rather than just relying on the script. I wanted the show to be very centered around striking visuals, from the sets to the lighting to the actors’ movements.”
When asked about why he chose The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Boyd explained, “I decided to adapt The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari because I thought the plot and the expressionist style had a lot of potential for a stage production. The script started as a writing exercise to see if I could integrate words into a silent movie, but when I had the finished product, I thought I would send it to Ms. Skeffington to see if she would consider it for DramaFest.”
DramaFest is a competition held by the Massachusetts Educational Theater Guild where high schools from all over the state perform their productions and are judged. While The Sleepwalker did not move on from the preliminary round of the competition, four participants who worked on the performance were awarded. Anya Kane and Sam Jendrysik for Excellence in Acting, Benji Boyd for Excellence in Directing, and Lettie Park for Excellence in Makeup. Sam Jendrysik’s portrayal of Cesare the Somnambulist was fantastic. Although the character had no speaking lines, Jendrysik’s uncanny use of facial expressions and body language was spine-chilling. Lettie Park, a student at Essex Tech, expertly used makeup to aid the actors in portraying their characters’ personalities.
Anya Kane’s portrayal of Dr.Caligari awed the judges, who described it as a “distinct and captivating performance that had highly specific facial expressions, body language, and vocal nuance.” “The most challenging part of portraying Dr. Caligari was attempting to keep the craziness and intensity of the character at appropriate levels,” said Kane. “Sometimes it would be a little too crazy, sometimes it would be a little too evil and intense. It was pretty difficult to try to find the balance between them.”
The entire cast and crew of The Sleepwalker demonstrated huge talent and dedication to their craft. A fantastic play, The Sleepwalker will go down in MHS Drama Club history as an amazing and captivating experience for everyone involved.
David Lynch: A Retrospective, Nathianiel Carper-Young, Junior
Given Lynch’s untimely and seismically affecting death earlier this year, I thought it appropriate to write not only a eulogy—which I have already elucidated in an earlier article—but also a celebration of his work.
What I think is important to understand about Lynch, in each and every work of his, is that he is not interested in participating in the economy of the “real”. Or, the economy of the cinematic meta-truth — he operates in his own mannerist-impressionist language, as can be uniquely identified in each of his projects. Eraserhead was the divorce picture (as made so popular by Lynch’s contemporaries) filtered through psychodramatic rorschach ink and grim storybook fantasia; The Elephant Man, the banal populist biopic reborn in TV static and silent sensibilities; Dune, the sci-fi epic as dissonant camp object; etcetera. He does not so much eschew filmic convention as much as reframe it in the world of his own dreams — movies are dreams, after all.
And then, Blue Velvet emerges, formed in venom and song, a shadow womb from which it sprung: Lynch’s true eighties picture, his first Conscious Perversity, and by no coincidence his first masterpiece. It is perhaps the closest he has ever come to making something that earnestly engages with the popular film culture—its sociocultural implications meager, its modernist structure easy—but there is also something deeply caustic in its heart. Forgetting Hopper, and forgetting Rossellini, and forgetting the Rear Window homaging, good as they all are, the framing of MacLachlan is most fascinating to me: the college boy returns to his hometown so as to manage a familial—or shall we say domestic—ordeal, only to practically forget about it and go on to pursue a rather concerningly young heart and then a blossoming mystery. In Blue Velvet’s storied geography, domestic affairs “matter” but only as a necessarily peripheral social function… What actually matters is the underneath—as seen in Hopper and Rossellini and of course the Rear Window homaging, which all eventually take the center stage, and, well, how could they not? What lies at the heart of Blue Velvet is an actual nightmare; a present-moment cultural assessment of one of America’s most catastrophic experiments in isolation: the great suburban vacuum.
So, following suit, the advent of Twin Peaks arises from Blue Velvet’s artificial celluloid ashes in new-age post-soap glory. Its dramatic weight is contingent on Lynch’s abilities to evoke tragedy and to proficiently characterize, so of course it feels like the heaviest thing in the entire world. Laura Palmer—whose historically meta-narrativized (and definitively false) fiction-archetype is one of the pure-hearted victim—underpins the project, dying prior to its first episode but living on forever as small-town myth of beauty and grace torn asunder. The Laura ur-text is in large part kept a mystery over the course of the show, not given real life until Fire Walk with Me, Lynch’s greatest achievement to date.
Lynch’s aesthetic and methodological predilection for dreams feels most potent in Twin Peaks, the work of purposeful synthesis and unconscionable density it seems the man was born to make. The dream-form allows for a real cosmic spirituality the likes of which the modern serial has not seen since, and through such a form, Twin Peaks and its folk carry their own cultural mythology: one of orgiastic overcloseness and dying industry; of a fading safety and a fracturing security; of the ghost of the American Dream passing through. It’s all very romantic, really.