OHS Students React to Assembly

Orem High School Students React To Every Brilliant Thing

A few weeks ago, Orem High School students had the opportunity to watch a play that was both lighthearted and heavy. It touched on sensitive topics like depression and suicide and simultaneously encouraged the audience to focus on the great things in life. We asked Orem students what they thought.

NEUTRAL

Rachel Clark (senior)- “It wasn’t as impactful as I was expecting. It ended abruptly, I was waiting for the climax.”

Gentrey Gibson (senior)- “I had low expectations, so I thought it was fine. Could have been better, could have been worse.”

NEGATIVE

Sarah Error (senior)

– I think that it’s a very serious subject, and I was trying to respect it and take it seriously. But once finding out that it was written in the 70s, and wasn’t about her, it felt really not genuine. The mix of humor made the kids not take it seriously enough. I liked the message of focusing on the beautiful parts of life though.

Gabe Cano (senior)

– I would have preferred a discussion with people who are trained on the subject matter rather than an actress. It made me feel very unimportant and felt disingenuous.

Cole Napierski (senior)

– they hired the play, and that was great. But they shouldn’t have. Alpine district has one of the highest suicide rates and the worst thing we could be doing is watching a play that doesn’t deal with the topic well and doesn’t take it seriously enough.

POSITIVE

Jack Leonard (senior)

-”I think it served its purpose well, it was a little long, but it hit most of the emotional notes well and made people reflect and ponder.”

Grace Call (junior)

-”I thought that the assembly was good. I thought it covered heavy topics in a pretty sensitive good way. It was kind of over the top. I watched the first one, and I think the second may have been better because I watched a little bit of it. Um i thought that it was good, like a little over the top, but still good. A lot of it depended on the audience because its a one person show and so much of it was based on audience participation. So depending on what group of kids you were around and how they all reacted really changed how you felt about the show. I thought a really big group of high school kids might have been a rough way to go about it but it was still good.”