For Tabor Academy drama students, being the first actors to take on a play makes for more creative theater.

Tabor students performed “Cedar Beach," written and directed by Tabor English teacher Mark Howland, Wednesday night.  According to the actors, the privilege of being the only people to portray the characters allows them to develop their own interpretations without being influenced by previous adaptations.

Tabor student Chapman Hyett of Evergreen, CO, said, “The boundaries of how to adapt a character are much more narrow.  The character is so completely new because no on else as done it before.

“Cedar Beach,” Howland said, is a drama about a family who inherits a beach house in Cape Cod and the challenges that arise with joint ownership between four siblings.

Howland said he wrote the script, in part, because he wanted to give the high school age group material that would challenge them. Most of the plays directed towards grades 9 through 12, he said, are not really tailored to the actors either because they are too juvenile or experiences they have not yet had.

By debuting his play with the Tabor students, he said, both get the chance to flesh out the material and develop characters that no one has experienced before.

“For me, the fact that it wasn’t published beforehand made for a much richer experience with just working with actors,” Howland said.  “We made some little changes based on their input, which if this were a published play it would have been acted out closer to the script.”

The play is the second drama production of the fall for Tabor and will be running in the Will Parker Black Box Theater Nov. 9 until Saturday Nov. 12.