By Carley Watman
After six years in the spotlight of the plays and musicals at LREI, senior Lucy Hirschfeld has leapt to the professional level and dove straight into her first production, SLUT: The Play, a traveling show that performs throughout the year in high schools across America.
Hirschfeld’s acting classes outside of school led her to her first professional audition ever, for SLUT: The Play. “I started taking this improv and character development class in ninth grade called the Arts Effect and it’s led by this woman named Katie,” Hirschfeld said. Her teacher, Katie Cappiello, an inspirational figure in Hirschfeld’s budding acting career, decided to recast her play, SLUT: The Play, and Hirschfeld, along with twenty-two other girls, were called back and given a part. “The play was opened for anyone to audition but she was giving her class the opportunity to audition first,” Hirschfeld said. “I auditioned along with around sixty or seventy girls around the city and about twenty two of us got selected because there are two casts of Slut with about eleven people in each.”
Hirschfeld claims she “got really lucky,” but her past performances and passion for acting betray that there may have been more than just luck involved, according to Middle and High School Musical Director Joanne Magee. “From the moment Lucy played Snout in Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream when she was about twelve years old,” Magee said, “Lucy showed true talent and comedic abilities.”
Hirschfeld’s talents in the performing arts were evident from an early age. After her start in acting in middle school, she was hooked. “I really started acting in the plays and musicals at school in sixth grade and really fell in love with it,” she said. From then on she couldn’t get enough. In middle school, Hirschfeld took classes at the Atlantic Theater Company, The Pit, and when she spent her summers in Nantucket, she attended a theater company called Dreamlands. “When high school started, my dad found Arts Effect through an agent,” Hirschfeld said. “It was apparently one of the best in the city.” Hirschfeld took drama classes both in and out of school, and continued to hone her skills and practice her craft through school productions.
She auditioned and was cast in the role of Dominique in SLUT: a young girl who provides comedic relief through her struggle to buy condoms for her first time. “My character goes into a CVS with her friend and I’m going to have sex with my boyfriend for the first time so I have to build up the courage to buy condoms and I really can’t,” Hirschfeld said. “While it’s a comedic scene, it goes to show how big a deal sex is at our age.” The play itself revolves around a rape victim named Joey: a girl who is assaulted and raped in the back of a cab. Hirschfeld described her experience as “interesting… being able to see students that were their age in this type of situation where a girl is raped in a cab and how girls around her react.” Hirschfeld has loved her time with SLUT and hopes its powerful message of recognizing rape culture and working towards ending its prevalence is understood by its audience, whomever that may be.
With the cast of SLUT, Hirschfeld intends to help inform other audiences like they did at one venue: Choate Rosemary Hall boarding school in Connecticut. “It was really eye-opening because at Choate they had sexual assault on campus the year before and consent was never talked about,” Lucy said. “This play was really giving students a visual about what rape culture is rather than having someone come in.” But the play isn’t the end of the conversation–Hirschfeld plans on continuing to promote activism and raise awareness of issues through her acting. Now that she’s hit her stride in doing so, there’s no telling where she could go next.