The cast and crew of “Our Town” have started the rehearsal process despite concerns that there would not be enough student participation to cast the play.

“For a while we were worried that the show wasn’t going to go on,” sophomore stage manager and assistant director Stan Bottcher said. “But we’ve got a cast, which is great because we weren’t even sure we were going to have that in the beginning.”

The dramatic play “Our Town” the story of small town Grover’s Corners, New Hampshire. It shows the life and death of the town while neighbors George Gibbs and Emily Webb fall in love, get maried, and reflect on life.

The cast will rehearse for two months and perform on Nov 21-23. They will practice almost every day after school for at least three or four hours due to considerably less time than usual. While this time limit forces students to work quickly to memorize lines and blocking, director Noelle Viñas makes sure rehearsals are fun and not too overwhelming.

“At the very top, I’d say I think you just bring your script and play,” Viñas said. “Then, nearing production time… I’m going to be very hard on you [if] you didn’t do you work.”

Viñas plans to focus rehearsals on the art of pantomime, or using gestures instead of words to express actions.

“”Our Town”  has a lot of pantomime in it, or creation of a world that isn’t visible by the audience,” Viñas said. “It’s up to the actors to tell the audience with their physical movements that that world exists. So, [we will work on] finding that specificity of movement.”

Pantomime can be challenging for actors, especially when the actor or the audience is not familiar with the action. However, when executed correctly pantomime can have an impressive effect.

“It looks really cool how everybody [acts] like they do have props when they don’t,” sophomore Trevor Boyneon, who will perform the role of Doctor Gibbs, said. “I think it’s good. I think it will be a good production. It’s an entertaining script and it looks really good when we’ve stage it with what we’ve done so far.”

Actors will have to work to develop the world of “Our Town”, the close-knit community of Grover’s Corners, New Hampshire.

“People have, in some sense, known each other in this very small town for years. That needs to be obvious the second that they walk on stage together. It needs to be clear that that relationship exists,”  Viñas said. “So it will be a lot of relationship building, a lot of showing to the audience … you need to sense that all these people have been together for many years and know each other very well.”

Viñas explains that AHS’ tight-knit community inspired her to pick a show that matched the school’s atmosphere.

“I chose Our Town because I felt like Annandale [High School]has a really particular pride about Annandale, which I don’t think is true for a lot of other schools. Annandale has a very ‘Annandale’ feel to it,” Viñas said.