by Sophie Assefa
“BoYz may come and Go, bUt hOrSes aRe 4ever”. The Freedom High School play, “Horse Girls,” was presented on November 9-10. The play, “Horse Girls,” by Jenny Rachel Wiener, is about a twelve-year-old named Ashleigh who rules a South Florida horse club named “Lady Jean Ladies.” They receive bad news: her family’s stables are going to be sold and the horses are being killed for meat. This throws the crew off into a crisis in this dark, yet comedic middle school drama. This play is an absurdist theatre piece, which is a form of drama that emphasizes the absurdity of human existence by employing disjointed, repetitious and meaningless dialogue, purposeless and confusing situations, and plots that lack realistic or logical development.
Recently, I interviewed the lead role of “Horse Girls,” the talented actress Samantha Ross is a senior at Freedom High School. “It was fantastic! Though I have played characters similar to her in the past, everything felt perfect with Ashleigh as we kept going further into the process. By the end, and currently, I think it was a great way to end my last year in performing in our one act,” she mentioned when I asked her how it felt to get the lead role.
Since the girls in the play were pretty young, around the age 12, the costumes were very specific. I brought that up to her and she said, “They are the definition of 10 year old Justice store MAGIC! Each girl’s costumes were perfect for the character they were portraying.” Samantha was playing the lead role so her costume was a pink dress and no other actor was wearing one, so she immediately stood out from the others, allowing the audience to get a feel that she was the person in charge.
From the audience’s perspective, the actors were trying to portray shock and surprise. “Some of Ashleigh’s actions at the end were definitely the shock factor, whereas the deep down root to her actions is more pitiful (her friends left/betrayed her, they didn’t like the horses as much as her, ect.).” The audience was definitely left shocked. There were even some gasps in the crowd!
To wrap up the interview, I asked Samantha one last question about any memories she made during this show process for her last year here. “Definitely just the overall bond made with my cast members, since there were only 7 of us we had to make real chemistry with each other.” One of the memories were “on the second rehearsal was literally a ‘slumber party’ where all of us brought food and blankets and played games and it was so much fun!”
Horse Girls was a great piece of absurdism theatre that Freedom High School performed!