As senior Olivia Taylor looks around at people lined up to audition, the nerves of directing their own theater production start to creep up. And as the next person steps up to audition, they push the feeling down, deciding to trade nerves for excitement.

Every year, Bowie’s Starlight Theater Company allows senior members to take on the role of a director and choose their own show to put on. The program started in the 90s during the theater program’s 3rd year in existence and is still a time-honored tradition for the program. Each senior that volunteers to direct a show picks a one-act play they would like to direct, auditions cast members, and works together with the tech theater program to put on their show.

“I chose to direct a show because I want to go into directing,” Taylor said. “I want to be a screenwriter or movie director, so this was a great opportunity to at least get the feel of directing a show as well as getting together a cast and crew. I definitely think I benefited from it and want to continue doing directing.”

Senior-directed shows started as a way to get seniors more experience in a role they normally wouldn’t take on in high school. Theater teacher Matthew Humphrey is a Bowie alumni that participated in the senior-director program when he was a part of the Starlight Theater Company when he was a student.

“Directing a show when I was a senior was very enlightening for me,” Humphrey said. “I definitely had to check my own ego a little bit at that time, but it helped me deal with a lot of personal issues through putting those things on stage and gaining that experience.”

Although they had to get permission from their teacher, seniors were mostly free to choose what show they directed. This resulted in students choosing shows that called to them, with some of those shows, such as Five Kinds of Silence, containing heavier topics like themes of domestic violence and abuse.

“You have to be careful with how you’re portraying these topics because you want to be able to get your message across to the audience without directly hurting someone,” freshman Alice Goss said. “You want to affect someone whether it makes them happy or sad, but not seem like a caricature or a stereotype.”

Goss plays one of the leads in Five Kinds of Silence and feels that the Starlight Theater program prepares students to take on roles such as these. Both Goss and senior director Olivia Taylor agree that more intense themes need to be explored.

“My play is about a high schooler trying to figure out why his friend became a school shooter,” Taylor said. “It’s a very heavy story, but the issue of school shootings have, very sadly, become more prevalent in our lives and is something a lot of people including myself have to worry about.”

In recent years, the topic of censorship in schools has become more prevalent with things such as an increase of 63% in the number of books banned in Texas during 2023 alone according to KXAN. In addition, a study done by the Texas Public Radio found that out of 2,300 teachers in Texas surveyed, about 85% of them are worried about censorship in schools.

“I think that as long as everyone is comfortable and willing, it’s super important to be spreading awareness about these topics,” senior Amelia Cook said. “At the end of the day, not talking about these things is not going to make them go away, so I would rather normalize conversations so we can talk about these things.”

Cook portrays the lead in the show Go Ask Alice, a play about a teenage girl struggling with drug addiction. The play is based on a book by the same name that was written in the 70s near the height of the psychedelic era and preaches about the dangers of teen drug use.

“There are scenes in the play where my character has breakdowns and goes through withdrawals, so it was a lot to portray,” Cook said. “I do think that the benefit of having a peer direct you instead of a teacher is that there is a lot more understanding and I was able to work with her outside of school and have her walk me through scenes.”

Taylor says they make sure students are aware of the play they’re signing up for and make efforts to make sure every actor is comfortable with what they’re portraying. Overall, many students agree that the senior-directed plays give students valuable experience for their futures-, and their teachers can see a difference too.

“These kids have gone from being little squares on Zoom to having their own shows and being the heart of the Starlight Theater Company,” Humphrey said. “It’s wonderful. We really encourage students to take pride in what they do, so I think the reward is baked into the program.”