The students of the Westfield High School Theatre Department Mustang Players are on a roll again this year in the Texas UIL One-Act Play Contest. 

After an upcoming public performance on Thursday at 7 p.m. at the school’s performing arts center – tickets for which are available online – the group will travel to Waco to compete Saturday in the Regional UIL One-Act Play Contest.

Last year’s Westfield UIL One-Act show, which featured several of the same students, made it all the way to the state meet, bringing home third-place overall together with a range of cast and crew awards.

Now the troupe again finds itself just one step away from the state-level competition, and the excitement and anticipation were palpable during a recent afternoon rehearsal on campus, where Westfield Theatre Director Monet Salone and her students were fine-tuning elements of this year’s production – an adaptation of Dominique Morisseau’s “Pipeline.” 

The play is an intense and emotional family story that explores themes around education in America, socioeconomic mobility, class, race, and the challenges of what has often been called the “school-to-prison pipeline.”

The themes can be intense, but Salone said that watching her students engage with the play’s complex topics and emotions and throw themselves into the work – while also having fun and enjoying the camaraderie of theater – was the most satisfying part for her.

“My kids here are my children – I feed them, I water them, I do all of that,” Salone said. “We put a lot on the kids, but the greatest thing, from the director’s standpoint, is the growth that you see from your students.”

Westfield’s production of “Pipeline” has already won a range of awards for its cast and crew at the Zone, District, Bi-District, and Area UIL competitions. Notable honors include the individual acting awards received at every level of the contest so far by juniors Mariah Simon – who plays Nya, an inner-city public high school teacher struggling to give her only son the best future possible – and Immanuel Poole in the role of Omari, her son.

Simon and Poole took a break from rehearsing scenes to discuss aspects of their characters and what it’s been like working on the UIL production with Salone and the tight-knit group of fellow theater students.

“The word we use around here is ‘family,’ because we all are so connected,” Poole said, “and sometimes we spend more time with her and with each other than we do with our own families.”

Poole agreed that the language and themes of play resonated both with the students and with the audiences that had come to see it so far.

“I think specifically with the family dynamic in the story, I feel like a lot of audiences can relate to it, in a painful but also a heartfelt way,” Poole said, “because the story is about a mother’s hopes for her son, who ends up making a mistake, but a mistake so big that it can end up putting him behind bars, and that’s the scariest thing for a mother.”

Playing the role of Nya, Simon said the scenes between the five-member cast onstage – including her scenes with Poole as her son Omari – can be emotionally draining, but added that the relationships and bonds formed among the actors and crew make the play a living thing, new in a sense every time it’s presented.

“It’s powerful,” Simon said. “We have five people onstage, and we are telling a story that nobody has told before, or that nobody has seen yet. We are in ourselves embracing the story, just the five of us, and being able to connect with these four other people, it’s amazing.”

Both Simon and Poole talked about how much their experiences in theater had meant to them, with Simon saying that, oftentimes, it was her arts classes that got her to school and gave her the motivation to succeed in her other subjects.

“If I didn’t have my theater teacher or my choir teacher, I probably would not have made it through school,” Simon said. “You need a good arts teacher in your life to make it through.”

That sentiment was also expressed by the show’s stage manager, senior Aracely Palomo, who joined varsity theater just this year, led in part by her desire for a sense of community and an outlet for her creativity.

“I wanted to be a part of something, and I wanted to make something,” said Palomo, who also stage managed this year’s large-scale musical production of “In the Heights” and said she enjoys the practical work of set construction and working with teammates to produce the best show possible. “I feel a lot better since I joined. I’ve had so much fun and made all these friends. I wouldn’t have ever met any of these kids if I hadn’t joined varsity theater.”

Because of the troupe’s advancement to regionals, the Spring ISD community has another chance to see the award-winning production locally, at 7 p.m. on April 20 in the Philip K. Geiger Performing Arts Center at Westfield. Tickets can be purchased ahead of time online.

Following that, the Regional UIL One-Act Contest will be held at University High School in Waco at 2 p.m. on Saturday, April 22.

The awards earned so far by the group during their 2023 UIL run include an impressive number of individual and group honors. The full list is included below.

UIL Zone A Awards:

• Advancing Play
• Best Performer – Mariah Simon for the role of Nya
• Best Performer – Immanuel Poole for the role of Omari
• All-Star Cast – Melany Menendez for the role of Jasmine
• Honorable Mention All-Star Cast – Kemarr Taylor for the role of Xaiver
• Best Technical Student – Ashley Poole

UIL District Awards:

• Advancing Play
• Best Performer – Mariah Simon for the role of Nya
• Best Performer – Immanuel Poole for the role of Omari
• Honorable Mention All-Star Cast – Karissa Williams for the role of Laurie
• Best Technical Student – Azariah Brown

UIL Bi-District awards:

• Advancing Play
• Best Performer – Immanuel Poole for the role of Omari
• All-Star Cast – Mariah Simon for the role of Nya 
• Honorable Mention All-Star Cast – Melany Menendez for the role of Jasmine
• Best Overall Technical Crew – Azariah Brown, Tanner Coleman-Clark, Julissa Cruz, Destiny Lewis, Aracely Palomo, Ashley Poole, and Marina Rodriguez
• Best Technical Student – Aracely Palomo

UIL Area awards:

• Advancing Play 
• Best Performer – Immanuel Poole for the role of Omari
• All-Star Cast – Mariah Simon for the role of Nya 
• Honorable Mention All-Star Cast – Kemarr Taylor for the role of Xaiver