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07/24/2019 08:30 AMWhen Ben Schreck was announced as winner of the Halo Awards’ Artistic Director Award in May, Nancy Malafronte was as surprised and excited as Schreck was.
“I didn’t know that the award existed,” she said.
Malafronte—known as “Ms. Mal” to her students—has been a Westbrook High School (WHS) English and theater teacher as well as the director of its drama and musical theater productions for 22 years. The Halos are prestigious Connecticut high school theater awards sponsored by Seven Angels Theatre in Waterbury. This year, 73 high schools across Connecticut, comprising roughly 6,000 theater students, participated.
“The Artistic Director Award is given to a student who displays qualities of character, commitment, dedication, and artistic ability,” explained Seven Angels Theatre Halo Coordinator Melissa Stemmer. “This student goes above and beyond in his dedication to the production and their theater department.”
Schreck, she added, “is a great kid and very talented.”
This special recognition award has no application. Schools cannot nominate students and nominees are not announced in advance, so the announcement at the Halo Awards gala comes as a complete surprise. Unlike the Tony Awards, the winners aren’t given time for thank-you speeches, so Schreck, who is 6’ 7”, expressed his joy when he got on stage by picking up Seven Angels Theatre’s five-foot-tall Artistic Director Semina De Laurentis.
Schreck, a member of the Class of 2019, was nominated for four additional Halos and won Best Performance for a Featured Actor in a Play for his role as Max Levene in Heaven Can Wait.
Making the Cut
In advance of the Halo judges’ attendance at (and assessment of) WHS productions, Malafronte fills out detailed production notes.
The form “asks me a ton of questions about the different areas of putting on the show,” she explained. “Running crew, tech crew, actors, any incidentals of maybe who made the program cover. A ton of questions that I fill out as a preparation for them to come and judge the show.”
There’s a section on the form that asks whether there is any additional information about the show that the director would like the Halo judges to know.
There was, indeed.
Schreck had been involved in the theater program since his freshman year and racked up several Halo nominations, winning a student directing award as well as Best Performance for a Featured Actor in a Play in his junior year for his role in Radium Girls. Each year, Malafronte cast him in larger and more demanding roles. Then, in his senior year, he approached her about working on an independent study in directing.
“We’re a very tiny school and we have a small [theater] department,” Malafronte explained. “Ben had taken all of the courses that we have in theater and he wanted to do an individual study.
“He created this course for himself,” she continued. “I worked with him. It was all year long and he really wanted to understand what it is to be a director. I think it was a really eye-opening experience for him.”
Malafronte “basically taught me her style in directing and choosing a show and all the different things you have to do,” Schreck said. “You have to do a million and one things just to get a show up.
“That’s honestly what made this year so great,” he said. “If you’re just acting, you can’t really get as invested in everything...[As a director,] you’re seeing everyone progress and everyone else get better and succeed more. And you can concentrate on who you think has the potential to grow.”
Schreck helped with various aspects of both the musical (Spamalot, November 2018) and the play (Heaven Can Wait, March 2019), including student directing. For Heaven Can Wait, he shared student directing with fellow senior Katelyn Wallace.
“Spamalot was tough because I was the lead [King Arthur], so I was in a lot of scenes. It was stressful,” Schreck said. “But [Spamalot] was fun. That was just pure fun.”
He also played on both the basketball and tennis teams.
“I’d go from directing from 2:30 to 4:30 or later and then I’d go to the locker room, change, and then I’d have basketball practice from 5 to 7,” he said. “I’d wake up at 7 o’clock. It was a 12-hour day, every day.
“It was intense. It was a lot,” he continued. “But Ms. Mal’s not going to throw anything at you that you’re not equipped to handle.”
Schreck designed the posters for both shows, spending many hours to get the Spamalot poster just right, Malafronte said.
“He told me, ‘I’ve done more work on this poster than I’ve done on any other assignment in any other class,’” she said.
For Heaven Can Wait, Malafronte was having difficulty coming up with a way to include more actors in the production.
“Ben helped me through that,” she said.
At one point in the play, a radio sportscaster presents a running commentary of a boxing match. Schreck suggested they depict the match itself on stage, creating several additional student roles.
“I brought in someone to teach them combat so they knew how to box,” Malafronte said.
For the 2018–’19 academic year, Malafronte created a new course called Unified Theater, in which special needs students were combined with students in the regular academic track, both veterans and newcomers to the theater program.
“We did an abridged version of A Charlie Brown Christmas,” she said. “I had Ben direct it. I said, ‘This is you—you’re going to decide who’s playing which parts.’
“He very appropriately put them in roles,” she said.
Ben was also called upon to do some writing and editing. The play, as originally written, has a monologue by Linus about the meaning of Christmas.
“We’re a public high school and not everybody celebrates Christmas,” said Malafronte. “Ben revised that piece of it, not taking away from the essence of what was being said, but making it palatable for a public high school.
“He has a natural ability,” she said. “He just gets it.”
Schreck clearly has a natural acting ability, as well. Looking back, he realizes he is more comfortable performing in comedies than in dramas.
“It’s the laughs that make you at ease because then you’re just looking for the next laugh,” he explained. “Once you hear it...you just want to hear it again.
“It’s almost like something to concentrate on—you’re not concentrating on how many people are in the audience, you’re concentrating on where the next laugh is coming from. So going from a show like that—Legally Blonde or Spamalot or Heaven Can Wait—you’re going from that to [a serious play like] Radium Girls, it’s completely silent in the audience, that’s tough. It’s very tough. I would say that was a big learning experience.”
Schreck will attend Quinnipiac University in the fall and plans to major in communications.
“I would consider getting into some directing at Quinnipiac,” he said. “It was really fun.”