ESUHSD District Theater Festival

By Layla Abdelhamid

February 12th, 2026

A dark room. Closed curtains. A full stage. And in the midst of it all, someone performing, captivating the hearts and minds of a hundred theater kids on a Friday in January. 

This is the ESUHSD District Theater Festival, an event where every drama club in the school district comes together for one day at Independence High School to act, sing, and most of all, make connections. 

This year was EVHS Drama Club’s fourth year attending the festival, and the club performed everything from large musical numbers to Shakespearean monologues. 

A day at the Theater Festival starts with getting picked up by the bus, then driving over to pick up the Mount Pleasant Drama Club to head over to Independence. Then, there are introductions to the different theater departments and the different judges, who provide feedback on performances. At that point, students are given the schedule by their teachers and disperse to perform or watch as an audience member. Due to the high volume of students at the festival, students perform group and solo musical numbers at Independence’s theater, musical solos at their C-commons, and acting solos and scenes at their D-commons. 

The day is split into four sessions, with a thirty minute lunch break and ten minute breaks interspersed throughout the day. It ends with a one-act performance of SIX The Musical by the Independence High School Drama Club, with a live band. 

But for some, the festival isn’t just about the fanfare and performances.  For Indigo Tran, EVHS Class of 2026, the Theater Festival is about the people:

“It’s really incredible to see so many people perform, see the chemistry they have with each other [as performers]. To just be in a room that is full of so much passion and energy, and everyone has been building up for two months… and you really get to see that spark come to life in everyone that goes up onstage and you get to see the aftermath when they come back and join you in the audience.”

It’s Indigo’s fourth time at a Theater Festival, from performing Giants in the Sky from Into the Woods in their freshman year, to now performing Agony from that same musical, and that love of the festival and the people in it hasn’t faded.

Indigo Tran is also the president of Writing and Literature Club, and they organized a collaboration with EVHS Drama Club to have WLC members write scenes for Drama Club students to perform at the festival, so that both performers and writers could feel what it was like to be appreciated by an audience that gets it. Tran adds:

“And you know that, the audience, when you go up there to perform, they all understand what you’ve gone through to get to this point where you’re onstage and what it takes for you to get up there and perform in front of everyone. I think it's kind of a place where when you perform you get the most amount of appreciation that you wouldn’t be able to get from any [other] sort of audience. It's… really awesome to be around such like minded people who really get you.”

You don’t need to be a Theater Festival veteran to enjoy your time there, however. It’s EVHS student Madison Joy Emiano’s first time at Theater Festival as a freshman, and when asked about her initial view of Theater Festival, the amount of fun she had stood out:

“I think that Theater Festival is fun and interesting and it's a fun way to connect with people and it gives more experience [in theater].”

“Fun” seems to be the popular sentiment for those at Theater Festival. The community the festival inspires, the cheers at every performance, the chance to witness the rise of the stars of the future– that’s what keeps people coming back. It’s not just the chance to perform and share one’s craft. It's that moment of clapping along to a song while the person onstage sings their heart out, of having your breath taken away by a dramatic monologue, of laughing yourself silly to a group scene. It’s gasping at someone’s voice, of karaoke with a hundred other people, of stupid jokes to fill the space between. 

The festival is more than a day off school or a performance. It's a community, bonded together by a shared love of theatre and a school district and not much else. The people there might not meet ever again, but they met at one point in time, and it mattered, in that way live theater matters– like something fleeting and ephemeral and beautiful all the same.