Students Perform In Yearly Merrill Prize Assembly
Senior Raul Galvan smashed a chair on the Assembly Hall stage at the end of his duologue on the nature of a photocopy machine. His dramatic finish prompted enthusiastic applause. Later performances took a more somber tone. Seniors Zoe Marshall and Sanjana Rana stood in front of the audience and told the story of an overachieving high school girl, who reflected on the college process, saying, “I can’t get rejected if I’m not breathing.” The assembly finished on a more comedic note, with uppers Billy O’Handley and Ian Johnson sharing a coming-of-age story that left the audience in uproarious laughter.
Exonians performed spoken pieces during assembly on Friday in the hopes of winning the Merrill Speaking Competition, Exeter’s oldest oratory competition. For 120 years, students have performed short monologues and duologues in the hopes of winning a small monetary reward, with teachers acting as judges of the event. Performers had a wide range of readings to choose from, as the Merrill Speaking Competition has only one requirement. “The guidelines we were given were mostly time-related (monologues had to be 2-3 minutes, while duologues had to be 5-6 minutes), but there were not really any limitations on subject material,” lower and duologue participant Anna Clark explained. While some students chose comedic pieces, others read meaningful poems or political monologues.
Clark, who performed alongside upper Daisy Tichenor and senior Raul Galvan, read a transcript from a real deposition. Entitled “Verbatim: What Is A Photocopier,” the piece centers around an absurd but real conversation between a lawyer and a defendant arguing about what a photocopier truly is. “We chose to perform that piece because we thought it was hilarious, and [Galvan and Tichenor] were both really familiar with it,” Clark said. “The characters in it are really fun to play as tension builds throughout the scene.” Clark felt that Exonians received her work well. “I think the audience reacted positively to every performance, and everyone was respectful of the shift from a dramatic tone to a comedic tone throughout the course of the performances, so it was a very rewarding crowd to perform in front of,” she said.
“At a school centered around discussion with lots of standout conversationalists, I love that individuals get to stand in front of their peers and raise their voices about a variety of topics.”
Uppers Ian Johnson and Billy O’Handley also delivered a comedic performance. The two prepared a duologue—an excerpt from the play Brighton Beach Memoirs by Neil Simon meant to highlight the comical experience of sexual maturity—after receiving the suggestion from theater faculty member Sarah Ream. “The speech was mostly trying to speak on childhood innocence,” O’Handley said. He was thrilled to see the audience’s appreciation for the piece. “When you’re rehearsing it on your own, it’s hard to understand how the audience will react,” he said. “It got so energized and it made the whole experience very fun and exhilarating.”
Upper Ratana Chheng, on the other hand, saw the competition as a platform to speak on a serious issue about which she is passionate. “I participated in the competition because I want to promote awareness about my Cambodia, my homeland and the regime that completely destroyed the country that used to be the Singapore of Asia,” she said. Chheng performed a part of U Sam Oeur’s poem “Sacred Vows” in the hopes of educating audience members on the cruelty of the regime. “The author is a survivor of the horrific regime responsible for the mass genocide of 21 percent of the population—mostly the educated and the wealthy,” Chheng explained. “This piece is very meaningful to me. I feel like that it does a great job of summarizing what the regime did to my home country.”
In the midst of both serious and comedic pieces, lower Gwyneth Crossman was the only orator to perform self-written work, despite such speeches being discouraged. Crossman performed “Self Portrait II,” a poem about her own artistic inspiration. Originally, Crossman wrote the piece as an assignment for her Drama Sports class, Blackbox Production. “Then I started to get into it, and it became less about ‘Oh, I have to do this,’ and more about, ‘I want to do this, because it’s putting a little bit of the way I think out there for people to empathize with,” she said. She spoke about how she did not choose what to write, but rather felt a sense of urgency to put on paper what went through her mind. Crossman described the experience of going up onstage as exhilarating, saying, “Same as with any theater performance: I love the feeling of being up on stage, looking out at an audience, and giving them something as amazing as I can.”
As well as performing for the audience, Crossman presented a written copy of her work to the three monologue judges: English Instructors William Perdomo, Wei-Ling Woo and Lionel Hearon. The duologue judges were Modern Languages Instructor Pedro Perez and English Instructors Courtney Marshall and Kelly Flynn.
Marshall enjoyed the variety of performances. As a first-year teacher, she seized the opportunity to judge the competition. “I think [the competition] shows the power of oratory,” she said. “At a school centered around discussion with lots of standout conversationalists, I love that individuals get to stand in front of their peers and raise their voices about a variety of topics.”
To increase the number of students who could present their work, Marshall and her fellow judges discussed the possibility of adding a third category to next year’s competition. “Maybe there will be spaces for a trialogue or some sort of group category,” Marshall said.
As Hearon was in charge of judging the monologues, he looked not only for well-spoken pieces, but for active ones. “[Monologues] should also have something arresting in the physical performance,” he said. “Whatever stage presence the actor is able to bring—gesture, movement, body language, etc.—these are also important qualities.” Hearon enjoyed the theatrical elements of all the performances. “It’s not just a speech, not a TED Talk,” he said. “It’s a performance that calls upon all of the tools that theater can muster.”
Woo agreed with Hearon, saying, “The number one criterion is the delivery or performance of the piece.” She agreed to judge this “long-standing and beloved tradition at Exeter” because it has been a custom at Exeter since the first competition in 1897, and she thinks that it should continue as long as students want to perform. She said that the competition provides “a chance for us to honor the acting and spoken word talent at this school in an assembly.”