Lakeside School

There’s magic in the air and trust in the teaching — a glimpse of what makes drama such a transformative experience for so many students.

Step into the Upper School drama office at any hour on a typical school day, and odds are good you’ll find it filled with students. They’re not there out of obligation, not to rehearse lines or discuss the current production. They’re there during a lunch hour or a free period to decompress, share space with each other, or just enjoy the culture and camaraderie of a department known for being especially close-knit.

The atmosphere in the office can feel like a party, says Upper School drama teacher Michael Place, affectionately known as Micky (pronounced “Mike-y.”) Place directs the school’s annual musical production and is one of three teachers in charge of Lakeside’s drama program. “Sometimes, it’s a study hall,” he says. “And sometimes, it’s a place for people to rest or rejuvenate or share deep feelings or whatever it is that they’re experiencing as a teenager in high school. But the thing that’s special about it is that there’s so much trust between these students because they’ve shared together, over and over and over.”

Trust is the foundation of any successful theater production. That value became deeply instilled in the program here under the watch of Al Snapp. In 1979, Lakeside hired Snapp to teach history and oversee productions at the freshly opened St. Nicholas Hall theater. Snapp would go on to head the arts department for 35 years. A pillar of the school’s theater community with a signature style (goatee, fedora, mischievous grin), Snapp retired in 2021. But his influence is everywhere. It helped the theater program evolve into a welcoming, wide-ranging, and holistic mingling of academic learning, personal development, and impressively polished performance.

Every year, the Lakeside theater season kicks off with a fall play in the Upper School that is selected by drama teacher Alban Dennis. Dennis came to Lakeside after a lengthy tenure with Seattle Children’s Theatre, the second-largest children’s theater in the country and home to one of the region’s most robust drama education programs for school-age children. Those roots are evident in the structure and approach to education that Dennis and his colleagues take at Lakeside, accommodating a wide range of ages while affording opportunities for students to participate in all aspects of theater, from acting and directing to costuming, stage tech, and playing in the pit orchestra.

“We have a scope and sequence that run basically from 6th through 12th grade, which include deep dives into writing, research, and directing,” says Dennis. “We try to expose the students to all aspects of theater, not just the acting part.”

The department benefits greatly from Lakeside’s practice of hiring working professionals to teach their arts classes. Like Dennis, Place has an impressive theater résumé outside of the school. He has an MFA from Yale University School of Drama. He was the founding artistic curator of a new play development festival formerly in residence at ACT Theater in Seattle. He served on the faculty at Cornish College of the Arts and the Seattle Film Institute. He’s currently the artistic producer of Pacific Performance Project/East. He brings all that high-level experience to his high school students at Lakeside.

For those who want to pursue careers in theater after graduation, the program is solid preparation, but that’s not its focus, says Dennis: “It has more to do with the things that we find important in theater: collaboration, critical thinking, creative problem-solving, creating relationships, and allowing risk-taking to happen because of them. We’re really process-based, and during the process, the students find connection with each other because they’re taking similar risks, or they’re creating stories together.”

This connection gets its start at the Middle School, where every student takes a performing art class each year beginning in 5th grade. “We get them as often as their academic classes do, which is huge, a huge blessing,” says Middle School drama teacher Jenny Estill ’06. The students begin their journey into theater with education on practices such as lighting, setting a tableau, and costume construction. During a visit to the Middle School, I see a fuzzy, muppetlike synthetic orange pelt in Estill’s office. She says it is destined for an important role: Her students learn about costume design through a Halloween project that tasks them with building a costume for a staff member. The fluff of orange, says Estill matter-of-factly, will be part of a student-created Denver Nuggets-themed Labubu costume. It’s all in the timing.

The Halloween costume project is just one of many entry points Lakeside middle schoolers have into theater, and that’s intentional. “I think we often have an image in our head of a theater kid — and, yes, that was me, so I get where the image comes from — but there are so many more ways to be involved, and there are so many more ways to be a person in the theater,” says Estill.

At the Middle School, Estill teaches acting, but she also introduces students to directing and writing. While some end up taking drama every year, not everyone will, so offering a broad range of options, says Estill, means she’s able to meet every kid where they are and move them forward.

From that beginning, students enter the Upper School drama program, which features both drama classes and a busy annual production cycle spanning the fall play (often a Shakespeare production, often with a technical focus), the winter musical (also open to students outside the drama program), and a spring festival of student productions known as Circus! in which students curate, cast, and direct their own short plays.

All of this, says Dennis, is animated by a strong grounding in communication and feedback for students across the school — even those who may not appear in a performance but who will be better lifelong theater audience members because of the intimate interactions. One of his favorite parts about the program is how students learn to talk to each other about the work. He says: “This happens with Jenny in the Middle School. It happens with us in the Upper School — that feedback-loop process, whether it’s in rehearsal with peers or in front of the group or post-performance; that idea that we’re asking questions of the performers while also validating their choices and following that loop of collaboration; that even though we’re not performing, we’re still part of their performance because we’re the ones seeing it.”

Speaking with Dennis and Snapp, I get a clear sense of legacy and continuity tied to theater at Lakeside. While performance is ephemeral, an emphasis is growing on stewardship of the program’s history. Videos of student performances can be hard to come by. (According to Snapp and Dennis, they’re kept mainly on DVDs.) But Lakeside archivist Leslie Schuyler has begun digitizing and collecting program notes from decades of shows going back to the 1930s; the material is now available online. The digital archive is itself a testament to the department’s commitment to variety and inclusion, with classics like “12 Angry Men” (aptly renamed “12 Angry Jurors” in the 2009 production) and “The Crucible” alongside more recent fare such as “9 to 5: The Musical,” esoteric choices including German modernist Bertolt Brecht’s “Caucasian Chalk Circle,” and a few repeated favorites. The school has put on “Fiddler on the Roof” three times — in 1991, 2001, and 2011. This year’s Upper School musical, “Anything Goes,” was previously staged in 2013.

“There are no small roles, only small actors” is a saying familiar to thespians everywhere, from community theaters to professional stages. But in practice, professional American theater is retreating from the tradition of large ensembles, as economic imperatives encourage companies to select plays with smaller and smaller casts.

Lakeside productions proudly buck this trend.

In fact, when it comes time for Place to choose the winter musical, a large cast — one big enough to accommodate as many interested students as possible — is a requirement. “The first thing I look for is: Is there a robust chorus?” he says. Sometimes, this means adapting an existing production to accommodate a larger ensemble, as Place did in a last year’s production of “Hadestown,” the Anaïs Mitchell musical based on the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. The Broadway version features a small chorus, which Place bumped up to more than 30.

This approach allows for more student participation, but it also means the chorus can be “involved intimately with the narrative of the play,” Place says. In a recent production of “Newsies,” he points out, “Every single character on stage who’s playing a newsboy has something that their character’s fighting for. So they’re not just there to be jazz hands behind the leading actor. Instead, they have a personal investment in their character’s role in the narrative, and that motivation and passion that result from their investment in the plot really resonate in the production.”

The payoff from this level of cast buy-in, says Place, is that students have a richer, more engaged experience, regardless of where their names appear on the cast list. “I don't love the idea of having actors backstage who have one number in Act 1 and two numbers in Act 2 and just are sitting around,” he says. “I love it when the whole team is engaged towards the collective goal of the narrative and the production.”

At some schools, theater is considered an afterthought, a nice-to-have accessory to more fundamental academic pursuits, a necessity only for students planning on careers in the field. But at Lakeside, theater is everything. Deeply integrated with the school’s teaching of competencies and mindsets, drama here offers a chance to build skills that students can apply to a wide range of future goals. Place sees great value in the perseverance and self-expression theater education fosters among his students, “particularly in high-stakes circumstances when the instinct may be to reduce ourselves.” 

Drama is, after all, one of the oldest forms of storytelling, and narrative is always a way to cultivate understanding. “Ultimately, we do this work with the students to develop empathy through the embodiment of someone else’s experience as we expand our intimate understanding of the human condition,” says Place. “We find this exploration to be deeply valuable to all students who meet this work, regardless of their chosen field of study after Lakeside.”

Al Snapp agrees. He says the school’s theater instructors have worked hard to listen to students and provide them with meaningful theater experiences “in ways that most [of them] value and find most manageable in the fairly demanding Lakeside environment.” The focus, he says, is on experiences that will benefit students the most, including developing storytelling and collaboration skills or using dramatic roles to explore the way people behave.

Getting there requires trust from everyone involved. And trust permeates the school’s theater community, from the improv classes in McKay Chapel to rehearsals in St. Nicholas Hall to those moments of downtime in the drama office. Because at a certain point, the students will be walking out onto the stage, with all the scaffolding and preparation and support from their teachers behind them. But what happens next, with its risks and rewards, will be theirs alone.

Dennis describes the magic this way: “Oftentimes, it has to do with giving students in our classes an opportunity and then getting out of their way.”

Megan Burbank is a Seattle-based journalist. She’s written for NPR and The New Republic and for local outlets including Crosscut, The Seattle Times, and South Seattle Emerald. This story originally appeared in the Fall/Winter 2025 issue of Lakeside magazine.