First Stage’s Online Graduation Drama

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Image via YouTube / First Stage

What exactly is a virtual high school yearbook? It’s just ... Facebook. This is the least of the concerns for those graduating in Milwaukee under the looming threat of a global pandemic. First Stage explores the African American experience in Milwaukee high schools facing COVID with an online production of actor/playwright Nikkole Salter’s How To Actually Graduate in a Virtual World.

First Stage opens its BIPOC Short Play Series with a high school graduation drama that resonates through video conferencing and beyond in a tightly produced 38-minute video. A remarkably complex interpersonal conflict plays-out between students looking to put together something for graduation. There isn’t a whole lot of room to develop a plot in such a short story, but Salter and company manage to cover a dizzyingly large thematic landscape the covers topics as diverse as segregation, socioeconomic uncertainty, the future, the past and a little bit of everything in between.

Maya O’Day Biddle opens the story in the role of an emotionally compelling TT: a projected valedictorian who is trying to figure out what it even means to graduate online. Salter’s script dissects overlapping invisibilities of graduating virtually in a smaller-market city that is a Midwestern shadow on the larger American cultural tapestry. Salter develops an intricate dynamic between TT and her classmates. Everyone is grappling with something just a bit bigger than they’ve ever had to deal with before. Director Samantha D. Montgomery has allowed every voice in the ensemble enough room to develop something unique. Time with each of the characters may be severely limited in the scope of the story, but there isn’t a character in the story who isn’t memorable in some way. 

First Stage’s Amplify Virtual production of How To Actually Graduate in a Virtual World is available for free on YouTube through Dec. 5.