Forget everything you think you know about high school theater. North Bergen High School’s drama club just took things to a whole other level.
When you think of high school theater, you immediately think of the classics, like Shakespeare and musicals. North Bergen tipped all those expectations on their heads by staging Alien as their school play, and the results were nothing short of spectacular.
Images and video of the production trickled onto social media on Saturday, though the play took place on March 19 and 22, after a student from North Bergen took to Reddit to discuss all the work that went in to bringing the play to life.
The student confirmed that the production followed the original Alien movie pretty closely, excepting “a few scenes added to kill time for scene changes.” One of those added scenes involved the near screen-perfect Xenomorph walking through the audience.
While the story of Alien is, at its core, simple enough, the sci-fi classic posed some interesting challenges for the drama club, particularly when it came to the chest burster scene.
“The chest burster has someone underneath the table,” the student wrote, explaining how they achieved the feat. “There’s a separate person who wears a fake head for Ash attack the others. And there’s someone inside one of the eggs holding a facehugger and throws it at the person playing Kane.”
A video of a facehugger scene was later posted to social media, showing just how pitch-perfect the timing was for everything.
A parent filmed the facehugger scene. pic.twitter.com/oamxaxikM2
— Paul Owens (@oh_pollo) March 23, 2019
The climax, where Ripley tricks the Xenomorph out of the airlock, was also posted to Twitter.
I love that north bergen high school did alien last night as their school play, so I’m gonna keep tweeting about how great it is..everything was made from recycled materials .. so nuts amazing I’m so proud of my hometown pic.twitter.com/EEMEbankDz
— Andrew Fernandez (@bhsdrew) March 23, 2019
All of the costumes and props were made with a limited budget and recycled materials, making the production all the more impressive. It was so impressive, in fact, that they caught the attention of the official Alien franchise account.
We are impressed! 40 years and still going strong… https://t.co/NJGJIZj2oq
— Alien (@AlienAnthology) March 23, 2019
What better endorsement is there than that?
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