Marquette senior acting students take to the stage

Marquette area women have pushed their boundaries by learning the art of acting and performing for seniors in the community. Last year, the Marquette Arts & Culture Center reached to some of those audience members to see if they’d be interested in taking part in some acting classes of their own…and they were.

The series of classes is called ‘Acting for the Experienced in Life’. Women from the first set of classes having been reading plays on their own for months now. And today, they were put to the test as they performed a one-act play for residents at the Snowberry Heights apartments.

“Some of (the students) were into the idea, some of them not so much,” instructor Jeff Spencer said. “Performing is new to a lot of these people, and so it’s nerve-wracking, but it’s nerve-wracking for those of us that have been doing it for decades, too.”

“He Said And She Said” is a comedy set in World War I at a dinner party. The women who performed it had fun with a new type of life experience.

“It gets you focused on something else and someone else,” Valerie Bradley-Holliday said. She played Mrs. Packard in “He Said And She Said”. “Also, you deepen your understanding of human nature and how to interact with people.”

“I was really nervous about it, and when we came today and the audience started laughing — we had forgotten how funny it was because we practiced for so long! — when the audience started laughing, it just became a really exciting experience,” Susan Shaver said. She played Enid in the performance.

The Arts & Culture Center wants to expand the senior acting program to include more classes and more performances.