From her first play in second grade, to her senior year, Julia Dye’s passion for acting, music, and writing has grown exponentially.

While being best known as a band enthusiast and talented performance artist by her peers, she has recently decided to try her hand in musical play writing. Dye is currently working on writing a musical for the spring play. Later on in the year, once it is ready, it is set to be performed and put on by her classmates.

The name of Dye’s play is “Distance.”  According to Dye, her play is about COVID-19. The musical also focuses on the life of students in schools trying to get through the pandemic. The play sets the scene from the moment that students got the first phone call in March, then the time frame moves through the pandemic up until November of 2020.

  “It’s about the relationships and how it was like to try and be a human during this horrible time that we all lived through,” Dye said.

Around her  junior year, she talked to her theater teacher Kimberly Roberts about what she wanted to do in her upcoming years and her goals for the future. Something she knows is that she definitely sees play writing in her future. 

Dye is wanting to go off to college, preferable Indiana University. She said she will be pursuing the music composition and working very closely with the theater and band department, to put on shows there. And after college she hopes to make connections to get her out to New York to start producing musicals. 

Roberts was extremely excited about this opportunity to work with Dye. She says when you get to work with a student who is knowledgeable with music and writing it is just awesome.

“Anytime when you have a student who wants to do something like this, that wants to be creative, who wants to write, and wants to share their work, It is a blast” Roberts said.

In the theater department, students get the opportunity to write one-act plays. Roberts told Dye that instead of writing a one-act play, she should go ahead and write a musical. With the pandemic happening, SHS theater was not able to put on a fall musical. This is when Roberts asked Dye to produce the play that their class would be performing in the spring.

While Dye was the writer of the play, there were many people that came together to help her to write and produce it. Jaclyn Richardson, the choir director, has been the one to help Dye with the music writing process. 

The theater department has been doing drama club meetings after school, to read out the scenes Dye has already written. After these meetings, the students and faculty give her feedback on what she can do to improve parts of her play. 

Dye’s play will hopefully be completely produced by the end of the school year. While they don’t know whether they will have to do it virtually, Dye says it is written to be either virtual or completely in person. 

“This is honestly just a really fun opportunity for me to try my hand at writing musicals,“ Dye said. ”I want to learn how to do it more smoothly and make a cohesive story.”