SV Students Take on Teachers in Classic 'Up the Down Staircase'
The district's actors will honor educators in this week's performances.
Call it a matter of role-reversal. For the spring play, members of the Seneca Valley Thespians will be playing teachers in Up the Down Staircase, a classic drama based on the novel by Bel Kaufman. Senior Julianna Hritz plays the lead role of Sylvia Barrett, a rookie teaching in New York's inner-city Calvin Coolidge High, which has demanding students—and administrators. According to Amber Hugus, the play’s director and an English teacher at the intermediate high school, bells at the school ring at the wrong time, a promising student drops out and a girl with a crush on a teacher gets suicidal. Through it all, school officials are most concerned with rules and regulations. There even is a separate up and down staircases, which is from where …
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