We are a very small theatre program at University High school and we’ve been working tirelessly to make sure our show is a hit. We don’t have a large backstage crew so we have been sacrificing 4 hours every saturday for the past 8 weeks on building sets. We practice every single day in hopes that this play will come together well. Our opening night is in less than a week and all of our cast (of basic high schoolers) put our heart and soul into all the work we did.

Now after we had completed one of our many props that took 6 hours to build from scratch and paint, it was destroyed by Steve. Hours of sawing, drilling, painting; wasted. Steve is the guy in our school who as we know “fixes” everything and he was the last person in the auditorium. We had just finished building a shopping cart of wood not even a day before it was destroyed. Steve, who we haven’t had issues with before, went into our wood room, ripped the wood off of the cart, and took the cart. Mind you, the cart has been sitting in our wood room untouched since last year and all the wood that was on the cart was not physically attached. The wood could have easily been taken off of the cart without breaking it. The cart and the wood is now missing so until it is returned we have no cart for our show.

This incident has outraged all of the titian theatre department at the blatant disregard for all we do at this school. This isn’t even the first incident and the fact that our property keeps getting destroyed shows the evident disregard for the arts by this school. All of the incidents that happen in the theatre hallway and auditorium are all because no one has made any effort to stop them. We have emailed the principle, Ms. Chenoweth and we have forwarded a very strongly worded letter to the administrators. For many other incidents, we have taken the same action and nothing has changed. We email, we call, and we do everything to try and get more attention on the severity of all that has happened to us. Countless of times our stuff is misplaced, stolen, broken, or lost due to other programs abusing our space. All we want is an apology and the cart back. We would please appreciate if attention was brought to this ongoing problem so that this small theatre program can thrive.