50+ Entertaining Plays for High School Students

• Spectacular Exhibits for Small Casts
• Lavishly Massive Performs for Excessive Faculty
• Memorable Musicals with Smaller Casts
• Breathtaking Musicals with Massive Casts
• One-Act Performs for Excessive Faculty
• Assets to Train Play Manufacturing
• Extra Excessive Faculty Theater Class Actions
• All of the World’s a (Excessive Faculty) Stage

Nothing energizes a highschool theater division like an upcoming play! Get younger actors, backstage crew members, and stage managers amped for this season in drama with a number of basic and distinctive performs for highschool. 

From small one-act performs to epic ensemble musicals, we’ve compiled an inspirational record of memorable performs for prime schoolers. You’ll additionally discover sources for managing the manufacturing course of and educating college students the fundamentals of theater (howdy, improv video games and blocking workout routines!). 

Spectacular Exhibits for Small Casts

It may be difficult for smaller theater departments to seek out good performs for highschool college students. Showcase their expertise with these small-but-mighty performances that decision for 10 or fewer roles, plus the flexibleness to construct out a modest ensemble (or have actors double their elements in some circumstances). For abridged or modified variations of the performs, search for the teenager variations.

• The 39 Steps (4 roles, 2 hours): A homicide thriller takes primary character Richard by means of an adventurous manhunt throughout the nation.
• A Doll’s Home (6 roles, 110 minutes): A spouse breaks away from her controlling husband seeking her identification.
• Virtually, Maine (4 roles, 2 hours): 9 quick performs discover love and loss in a small city.
• Animal Farm (7 roles, 105 minutes): Livestock overthrow their human chief and create a corrupt society.
• The Curious Incident of the Canine within the Night time-Time (10 roles, 2 hours 20 minutes): A boy with autism makes an attempt to resolve the homicide of his neighbor’s canine.
• The Glass Menagerie (4 roles, 2 hours): A dysfunctional household struggles with unfulfilled objectives and disappointments.
• Launch Day (Love Tales From the Yr 2108) (10 roles, 90 minutes): Two-actor scenes present complicated relationships in a high-tech romantic comedy.
• The Odd Couple (8 roles, 1 hour 45 minutes): Mismatched roommates study to get alongside regardless of their many variations.
• Peter and the Starcatcher (12 roles, 2.5 hours): A prequel to the story of Peter Pan, the play exhibits acquainted characters in new conditions.
• She Kills Monsters (9 roles, 105 minutes): Agnes discovers the magic of her late sister’s Dungeons and Dragons fantasy world.

Prolong your highschool play right into a full theater unit

From the stage to the classroom, any play is a educating alternative. Use your upcoming highschool play to show the fundamentals of theater and drama to new actors or ELA college students.

The Odd Couple Play Study Unit — 3 Full Weeks of Activities & Performance!
By From Web page to Stage
Grades: Ninth-Twelfth

Topics: Drama, English Language Arts

For those who’re planning a manufacturing of The Odd Couple, this useful resource is simply what you want! Created for an introductory drama class, the play examine unit equips starting actors with instruments to memorize strains, block their scenes, and take part in characterization apply and actions. 

Lavishly Massive Performs for Excessive Faculty

For theater departments with a lot of curiosity and much more expertise, performs with bigger casts are simply the appropriate match. Select a bigger efficiency piece with 15 roles or extra, and provides others an opportunity by crafting ensembles of various sizes.

• Arsenic and Previous Lace (15 roles, 3 hours): Two aged girls poison outdated males of their group on this Black comedy.
• Clue (20 elements, 90 minutes): This basic homicide thriller combines darkish comedy with theater intrigue and drama.
• The Crucible (20 roles, 2.5 hours): Teenagers in Seventeenth-century Salem accuse fellow townspeople of witchcraft.
• Entrance (18 roles, 2 hours): Households persevere throughout wartime in a dramatic exploration of World Struggle II.
• A Midsummer Night time’s Dream (21 roles, 2 hours): In Shakespeare’s basic comedy, a fairy impacts romantic entanglements earlier than they attain a contented ending.
• The Outsiders (18 roles, 2 hours): Teenage gang members flee a killing and attempt to keep alive on the run.
• Stage Door (20 roles, 90 minutes): Younger girls come to New York in pursuit of their appearing desires on this entertaining comedy.
• Treasure Island (22 roles, 2 hours): A teen boy takes up a pirate life with the notorious Lengthy John Silver in a swashbuckling journey story.
• Twelve Offended Jurors (15 roles, 75 minutes): A contemporary tackle the basic Twelve Offended Males, this gender-inclusive play explores guilt, accountability, and the trendy authorized system.
• You Can’t Take It With You (16 roles, 2 hours 20 minutes): Cash and life-style threaten to separate Alice and her boss, Tony, on this well-known comedy.

Memorable Musicals with Smaller Casts

Does your smaller theater class like to sing? Make their stage desires come true with musicals which are excellent for casts of underneath 15 gamers. Be happy to construct out ensembles in the event you’ve bought sufficient curiosity to make your present actually shine!

• The twenty fifth Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee (9 roles, 100 minutes): Six college students navigate the world of spelling bees within the pursuit of the massive trophy.
• Be Extra Chill (10 roles, 2 hours): Jeremy discovers a supercomputer that can provide him every thing he desires on this trendy musical.
• Dreamgirls (8 roles, 2 hours): Three Black feminine singers pursue their desires of fame in a musical impressed by Nineteen Sixties Motown.
• Hadestown (6 roles, 2 hours): A retelling of the parable of Orpheus and Eurydice takes audiences by means of a journey of affection, hope, and loss.
• Little Ladies (10 roles, 2 hours): 4 sisters develop up amidst social requirements and life classes in post-Civil Struggle New England. 
• Little Store of Horrors (8 roles, 2 hours): Seymour, a shy floral assistant, grapples with a difficult plant in a theater-favorite comedy musical.
• As soon as on This Island (10 roles, 2 hours): A peasant woman faces prejudice and finds love after rescuing a wealthy boy on a Caribbean Island.
• Journey the Cyclone (7 roles, 90 minutes): Six youngsters have an opportunity to return to life after a deadly accident on a curler coaster.
• Tick, Tock…Increase! (3 roles, 90 minutes): A composer examines his life and friendships in a journey of inventive self-discovery.
• You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown (6 roles, 2 hours): Charlie Brown and the Peanuts gang come to life in a revue of the basic sketch and its characters.

Breathtaking Musicals with Massive Casts

When it’s time for the massive college musical, it’s all concerning the ensemble. Placed on a spellbinding present with giant casts and intensive ensembles that get everybody within the viewers singing alongside! Some musicals could also be out there as abridged or edited teen editions. 

• Magnificence and the Beast (16 roles, 2.5 hours): A younger lady falls in love with a prince cursed to life within the type of a beast.
• Chicago (19 roles, 90 minutes): A jazz singer and a starstruck ingénue are arrested for homicide and grow to be movie star criminals behind bars.
• Into the Woods (17 roles, 2.5 hours): This whimsical musical connects many fairy tales and their characters in a posh journey towards togetherness.
• Mamma Mia! (12 roles, 2.5 hours): The daughter of a hotelier invitations the three males who might be her father to her upcoming wedding ceremony.
• Matilda (21 roles, 2 hours): A superb younger pupil will get revenge on her merciless mother and father and evil principal.
• Newsies (30 roles, 2 hours): Newsboys in 1899 type a union and strike in opposition to the grasping publishers who’re elevating their prices.
• Faculty of Rock (28 roles, 2 hours): A struggling musician poses as a instructor and varieties a band together with his proficient college students.
• The SpongeBob Musical (16 roles, 2 hours): SpongeBob Squarepants should save his underwater house from a volcanic risk.
• Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Road (9 roles, 2 hours): A Nineteenth-century barber takes revenge on those that wronged him.
• Urinetown (18 roles, 2.5 hours): This apocalyptic musical satirizes a authorities through which residents should pay to make use of the restroom.

One-Act Performs for Excessive Faculty

One-act performs are excellent for theater showcases, end-of-the-year performances, or theater courses that need to get only one extra present on the calendar. Check out these in style one-act performs for highschool that may really feel simply as dramatic and breathtaking as their full-length counterparts.

• 10 Methods to Survive the Zombie Apocalypse (7-25 roles, 35 minutes): 4 mates use a how-to record to outlive a zombie apocalypse.
• 12 Offended Villains (14 roles, half-hour): In a comedic tackle Twelve Offended Males, this fairy-tale themed play places twelve villains in command of Peter Pan’s destiny.
• The Brothers Grimm Spectaculathon (5-20 roles, 35 minutes): This one-act play is a fast and entertaining exploration of all 209 fairy tales written by the Brothers Grimm.
• The Day the Web Died (25 roles, half-hour): On the day the web goes out, mates and households discover ways to get by means of life with out their screens.
• The Diary of Anne Frank (13 roles, 75 minutes): A brief play dramatizes elements of the well-known diary of Anne Frank, together with her adolescence hiding from Nazis in an annex.
• A Night time Below the Stars (17 roles, 45 minutes): Characters trying to escape their regular lives bond and discover life underneath the celebrities.
• Queens (15 roles, 45 minutes): King Henry VII is haunted in loss of life by his wives and mistresses for his misdeeds in life.
• The One-Act Play That Goes Unsuitable (8 roles, 75 minutes): A play-within-a-play options an ill-fated whodunnit and the actors making an attempt to place it on.
• Tracks (10 roles, 40 minutes): Ten folks arrive in a subway station after they’ve died to resolve whether or not they need to get on the prepare or not.
• A Wrinkle in Time (17 roles, 50 minutes): Meg challenges the boundaries of society and time to save lots of her father and humanity.

Assets to Train Play Manufacturing

The National Core Art Standards for theater element the significance of pupil participation within the play manufacturing course of. Whether or not you’re coaching new actors or serving to drama college students with their passion projects, these class sources can streamline and standardize the way in which you run a play.

Grasp monologues and talking on stage

Do your excessive schoolers have a case of stage fright? Assist them really feel comfy and assured on stage by working towards monologues and in-class performances earlier than they ever enter the theater.

Acting Monologue Performance Unit for Junior High / High School Drama (Low Prep)
By A lot Ado About Drama
Grades: Eighth-Eleventh
Topics: Artwork, Drama, English Language Arts

A monologue efficiency unit turns apprehensive actors into practiced performers in simply ten classes. This low-prep useful resource consists of warm-ups, discussions, and appearing actions that concentrate on vocal exploration and character targets to get college students comfy with being on stage. 

Handle the course course of from begin to end

The perfect performs for highschool are probably the most organized ones! Hold everybody on monitor, together with the instructor, by planning out your play finances, calendar, auditions, and rehearsal schedule. 

Bundle: Play & Musical Production – High School Drama Materials
By Students on Stage
Grade: Sixth-Twelfth
Topic: Drama

Take a play manufacturing from audition to closing curtain with a bundle of highschool drama supplies. With useful templates, a manufacturing calendar, finances sources, rehearsal reviews, and instructor/director guides for each step of the manufacturing, this useful resource is simply what any highschool class must preserve the drama on the stage and out of the preparation course of.

Educate and enhance with drama classroom posters

Theater is artwork, so shouldn’t you may have some theater artwork in your classroom? Use instructional drama posters in school or backstage to remind college students of theater fundamentals.

Roles in Theater, Theatre Hierarchy, Production Roles | Drama Classroom Posters
By Delightfully Dramatic
Topics: Artwork, Drama

For those who’ve bought area in your partitions between all of the musical and play posters, use a theater position poster to determine the correct hierarchy of a typical play manufacturing. Obtainable in shiny colours or black and white, the poster lets everybody know who they report back to, who reviews to them, and who will get to make the ultimate name on a inventive determination.

Extra Excessive Faculty Theater Class Actions

Want extra methods to bulk up theater college students’ expertise and understanding? Discover methods to infuse theater fundamentals into your classroom instruction, together with improv video games, the historical past of Greek theater, and staging fundamentals.

Host a reader’s theater for drama fundamentals

A well-liked approach to deal with CCSS for English language arts, reader’s theater actions are a mixture of studying and theater fundamentals. Use this educating methodology to bolster literary evaluation expertise and drama fundamentals in theater and ELA courses.

Reader’s Theater Script | Greek Roots | Drama by Teaching and Motivating Teens
By Instructing and Motivating Teenagers
Grade: Seventh-Tenth
Topics: Shut Studying, Drama, English Language Arts
Requirements: CCSS RL.8.1, 2, 3, 4, 6, RL.9-10.1, 2, 3, 4, 6; CCRA.R.1, SL.6, L.1, 2, 3, 4, 6 

Preferrred for each theater and ELA courses, this useful resource introduces college students to the basics of Greek drama, together with hubris, hamartia, Greek refrain, and poetic justice. They examine widespread Greek root phrases earlier than performing an unique reader’s theater script, then analyze the expertise and their half in it.

Train characterization and blocking earlier than a present

Uninterested in calling “Discover a window!” to your theater college students? Join characterization and blocking so that they perceive extra about their character’s motivation, and subsequently, their onstage placement.

9 Short Scenes for Characterization and Blocking
By ShowStopper Theatre Assets
Grades: Sixth-Twelfth

Characterization and blocking will be tough to grasp for brand spanking new and skilled actors alike! Make these expertise extra accessible for prime schoolers with a sequence of quick scenes that each one start with the road “You’ve bought to be kidding!” Pupil teams create their very own characters and work to dam their scenes earlier than performing in entrance of the category.

All of the World’s a (Excessive Faculty) Stage

There’s nothing like highschool theater season, whether or not you’re performing a two-student present or an enormous all-department musical. Discover extra high school drama resources to make this theater season the most effective one but. For extra methods to get drama college students pondering creatively, check out writing prompts for high school that work for younger actors.