Competitive high school activities range far and wide, from bowling to knowledge bowl, but hiding below the line of common interests is one of Mayo’s most successful teams of recent years. The Mayo High School One Act Team are reigning state champions and are looking to repeat. They have gone from underdogs to top dogs and are now set on maintaining their mantel as the top team in the state. 

This year, Mayo’s one act play is titled A Human Write by Amelia Armande, which follows a writer as he struggles with writer’s block. Rocco Ruggeri stars as the writer alongside Tennyson Fuhrer, Syd Brown, Maeva Djousu, Sydney Groehler, Leah Dow, Luca Presa, and Teagan Brown as characters in his imagination. At the subsection competition in Kasson-Mantorville, A Human Write pulled off the sweep by getting ranked as number one show by all three judges, an echo of last year when Icarus swept at sections.

Exactly one week later the cast and crew of A Human Write once again found themselves on the Kasson-Mantorville stage, this time, with medals between their teeth. They had pulled off the perfect sweep, going 1-1-1, having accumulated only 6 points over two competitions, it could not have been better. In the process, they had beaten Kasson twice, once at subs and once at sections, as well as beating Lakeville, to whom they had suffered a heartbreaking loss two years ago. Since that loss the Mayo One Act Team has remained undefeated with an average score of 3.25, the best possible being 3; these State Champs are hungry for their second.

A One Act play consists of one act, as one would expect, but the rigorous rules and regulations make the play difficult to execute at a high level. Arguably the most hindering of these rules and regulations is the limit on personnel. At competition, a team can only have a combined 20 participants between cast and crew. To put that in perspective, the fall musical often draws in over a hundred students. Other rules in place are that a show’s set must begin in a 10 by 10 square and has only 10 minutes to be set across the stage. The show itself is limited to 35 total minutes from the first sound or light to the final sound or light. If a show exceeds any of the time limitations, the team is immediately disqualified.

Are you interested in going up on the Fan Bus this Friday to see the team compete? Go here for more information.