Dispatches From The Rollercoaster by Tiffany

Dispatches From The Rollercoaster by Tiffany - December 2016 Scholarship Essay

My greatest school accomplishment that I am proud of is when I participated in a one act play with my drama department. The one act is called Dispatches from the Rollercoaster. It contrasts the minds and the bodies of people who have autism. My theater group went to Growing Kids Therapy Center in Herndon, VA and we interviewed some of the kids there and we wrote the one-act with 90% of the words they actually said. I feel like this experience impacted me in many ways because I got to see a new side of the people that are mostly described as “messed up” or “dysfunctional.” I created great bonds with the kids, especially the one that I portrayed, Ryan, and had a blast.
The process of creating this one-act was very difficult and time consuming, but it definitely payed off in the end. First, we had to do interviews. We ended up meeting the kids in the summer, which was really hard because we had to figure out everyone’s schedule. Luckily, we worked everything out and got to meet them. We played some improv games with them, and did some ice-breakers. Then we asked them questions about living with autism, which was very interesting because they are non-verbal autistics, meaning they cannot speak. They use a system called RPM (rapid prompting method) which is just a piece of laminated paper with the alphabet on it. They point to the letters in order to express how they are feeling. We had so much fun with them, it was a really life-changing experience.
Next, we went back to our Black Box Theater and we started writing and discussing the script. It took almost a month to write this and it was a very frustrating process, but we ended up getting it finished. 90% of the play came directly from the minds of the kids, which is amazing. The play is centered on their lives and how they are treated because they have autism. It's a very emotional journey because people don’t understand that non-verbal autistics have brains and are just as intelligent as we are.
Dispatches from the Roller Coaster has been very successful since we first performed it for our school. We did a Thursday, Friday, and Saturday night show for our student body. We also decided to use it as our competition piece. We brought it to districts, and we won 2nd place. This meant that we could move on to regionals. Unfortunately, the judges were really strict and didn’t like the idea that we wrote our own one-act when all of the other competition pieces were well known. We have recently discussed doing it for Autism Awareness month for a school assembly, and we were invited down to Georgia to present it.