Notre Dame’s Drama Collective to perform at National Theatre School’s DramaFest Regional Showcase this Saturday

By JESSICA SHACKLETON

The Notre Dame Catholic High School Drama Collective is preparing for the Regional Showcase of the 2026 National Theatre School (NTS) DramaFest this week.

After moving on from the district competition, they will present their original play, Ellipsis, at the University of Toronto’s Hart House on Saturday, April 11.

Written by Grade 11 students Matilda Klose, Alliah Palmes, Ava Posteraro, and Mariposa Luna-Trzcinska, the play has been in the works since September of last year.

Sara Pedrosa is the drama teacher at Notre Dame and has been involved in the NTS Dramafest for more than 10 years.

“The idea starts as everybody’s, then it’s in the hands of the directors and designers, and then the actors,” she said. “We work together to create a play that everyone has a hand in.”  

At the DramaFest’s district competition, Notre Dame took home Outstanding Production, Outstanding New Play, Outstanding Student Design Team, Adjudicator’s Award for Technical Excellence, and three Adjudicator’s Awards for Acting/Performance.

Seeing the play finally come together is one of the best parts for the students, regardless of accolades.

“It’s a nice feeling to have a project that doesn’t suck,” said Posteraro.

The acting awards went to Sarah Leishman for her role as Aurora, Posterero as Eleni, and Luna-Trzcinska as Aurora’s mom, Julie.

Julie’s character is deaf, so the girls playing the family members learned ASL. It was important for Luna-Trzcinska that Julie’s character was beyond just being deaf, and she impressively embodied the mom character for a 16-year-old.   

Ellipsis is a play about ghosting, which is when communication is cut off with no explanation. It’s an experience that everyone, particularly high school students, can relate to with a layer of magical realism.

It follows a teenage girl named Aurora and her best friend Eleni. When Eleni suddenly stops talking to Aurora, she becomes a ghost and sees the people she ghosted in the past.

The title of the play comes from the dots that appear when someone on the other end of the line is typing a message.

“(Aurora) is like Scrooge, if Scrooge decided to kick Tiny Tim’s crutch the next day,” said Pedrosa. 

Once they had the story settled, one of the students’ biggest challenges was figuring out how to end the play.

“We had a lot of back and forth on what we wanted our ending to be. In my heart, I wanted them to reconcile completely at the end,” said Klose.

The process was very collaborative, with each writer given a scene to work on over the school’s Winter (Christmas) Break and then come back together to finalize the script.

“The biggest divide was that Matilda had this idea of reconciliation and wanting a true confrontation at the end, but Ava, Alliah, and Mariposa felt that could never happen. They had created such space and silence between them that they couldn’t bring themselves to come back together,” said Pedrosa. “When you have those two opposing opinions, I always say that the right answer is probably in the middle.”

As part of DramaFest, schools receive feedback from a professional playwright. The Notre Dame studetns were told to lead the audience to believe that Aurora was about to change, and then have her decide not to at the last moment.  

“They both wanted reconciliation, but neither of them was brave enough to do it,” said Klose.

“We wanted to go back to the isolation part of being ghosted, in the new age, with being able to text and call people. It opens up the floor for people to just be able to leave people with nothing. That isolation, we felt, needed to be there to show that,” said Posteraro.   

Other characters include Maeve and Riley, who are foils of Aurora and Eleni. The four of them are a friend group and have opposite ways of dealing with conflict.

“For Aurora and Eleni, fighting means not talking about it because they’re so scared of confrontation,” said Palmes, who plays Riley.  

“With their relationship, it’s building upon building upon building, while with Maeve and Riley, when they feel hurt, they talk about it. When you don’t talk about it, you don’t really know the reason. Once that build finally crumbles down, you don’t know why it crumbled down, just that it did,” said Luna-Trzcinska.

A lot of the play is about what’s not said.

“As a teenage girl, you just want to be able to confide in your mom and your siblings, and I can’t say, ‘Hey Mom, can you tell what’s going on with me, can you help me?’ but my mom’s deaf and Aurora is so alone in this, she doesn’t have anyone to talk to,” said Lieshman.

While Aurora is a ghost and is interacting with those she ghosted, the walls start to close in, literally, on stage. It’s a genuine representation of the friendship struggles the characters are going through.

“If a person has created that barrier between themselves and other people, it just wouldn’t be realistic for them to talk about it with no problems,” said Palmes.

Along with the emotional wave the girls experience, the play also has some funny moments, including a seance. Armed with a Bath & Body Works scented candle and advice from weird Aunt Theresa (Long Island Medium), the students found a harmless way to make it comedic.

“That laugh was needed before we got into the rest of it,” said Pedrosa.

Audiences will be immersed in friendship tension, ghosts roaming the stage, and searching for the answer to “Can we change?”

Grade 12 student Corin Moran is co-director. This is the first time Notre Dame has had a student director in a number of years.

“It was really weird for me because you have your performance day jitters and you’re either on stage doing your thing or you’re in the wings about to go on stage, and I was sitting in the audience during the performance,” said Moran. “When they were performing, I had to hold myself back from going into the wings and watching and just say, it’s OK.”

Notre Dame is no stranger to the NTS DramaFest, having made it to Hart House the past three years in a row and submitting a play for many years. 

Other local schools competing in the area include St. Patrick Catholic Secondary School, East York Collegiate, and Danforth Collegiate.

Neighbours from down the road, Neil McNeil Catholic High School, is also set to perform at Regionals at Hart House with For the Family, which is a polar opposite production from Ellipsis.

Neil McNeil’s show is an over-the-top wise guy comedy that won Ensemble Over-the-Top Theatricality, Comic Duo, and Ensemble Stage Combat and Physicality. They will perform at Hart House on April 9.

Neither school has its own auditorium with seating, so it’s a special experience when they get to perform in a large space. “Going to a theatre is a gift, to be able to put this up in front of 400 people,” said Pedrosa. “We’re telling a story that needs to be told and can’t control the rest.”  

For updates on the Toronto Regional Showcase, including the performance times for all local schools participating, please go to https://sites.google.com/tcdsb.ca/toronto-nts-drama-fest/home?authuser=0