Senior EPiC performers took home a “superior” award, the drama competition’s equivalent of a gold medal, from this year’s Motherlode Drama Festival on April 20 for their original play “Life, After.”

Though the annual competition is not limited to drama groups with original productions, Redwood’s EPiC was only one of three groups to present an original play out of the eight groups that attended.

According to senior Maria Lee, though the drama students weren’t sure if their play would be well-received by the judges and audience, both groups laughed and were touched by the senior’s original script and what Lee called their most focused performance yet.

The rollercoaster of a creative process that leads up to the annual Motherlode play came to an end last week as seniors unveiled their original play for the first time in the Little Theater.

“I wasn’t sure what I envisioned at the beginning,” said senior EPiC student Aaron Strand. “It was more, ‘God, we’ll never have a play. We’ll never have enough content.’ And then it turned into, ‘We have so much content, how are we going to get it into 20 minutes?’”

According to senior Rachel Halilej, this year’s Motherlode production is unique in its presentation through varying types of theatrical art, ranging from interpretive dance to singing to reenacting texting conversations.

“We were all really intent on including a lot of different kinds of art – not just theater, but music and dance,” Halilej said.

Though Halilej said the group tried to stray away from typical tales of teenage angst, some elements still wound up in the final skit.

“In some aspects it ends up like that because that’s really all we know as teenagers, angst and what we’ve gone through – which isn’t a lot in the scheme of life,” she said. “But I think we came to terms with that.”

In fact, according to senior Aaron Strand, a great deal of the humor in the play comes from the fact that students can relate to what the actors portray.

“There are elements of humor, but it’s not humor for the sake of humor,” Strand said. “The inspiration comes from our everyday experiences. The play is based on the world we see every day around us, how people interact.”

To create the script and storyline, the seniors brainstormed collectively by throwing around ideas, spitballing with short open-ended scenes, and discussing what worked and what didn’t. The final product is essentially a collection of vignettes – original monologues, favorite acts from rehearsals, and other multi-media productions.

“Everyone has a huge amount of ownership over the play because the play is like our baby – we’ve been working on it for so long, and we saw it come from a hodgepodge to a final product,” Strand said. “Everyone had a say in everything at one point or another.”

As the seniors worked for their first time as one unified group, some said that the competition comes second to the bonding and team-building inherent in the creative process of Motherlode.

Though Redwood has historically scored highly in past Motherlode competitions, Strand said the group is more focused on enjoying the process and creating a script they like, rather than worrying about receiving a “superior” score, which the group has earned multiple years running.

According to Halilej, the group aimed to create a play that refrains from making viewers feel excluded from the EPiC cast, and said she hopes the audience can appreciate all of the diverse ideas that went into writing it.

“I think they’ll notice that it took a lot of different people and a lot of points of view to make this play and to put it all together, and given the chance we wouldn’t do it any other way,” Halilej said. “The way it flows is very us. A lot of different minds came together to create it.”

Seniors will perform their Motherlode sketch April 24-26 at 7:30 in the Little Theater.

Updated on April 21 at 8:40 p.m.