#IDRC Instrumental

Came To Play

Hurricane-- Instrumental

Hurricane

Sandbox Instrumental

Sandbox

Deep Down

One Light--instrumental

One Light

I Want It

“Written In the Stars” (WITS) is the story of Eddie Hollman, his girlfriend Amanda, and his friend Tyler who are all Coventry High School seniors on the cusp of graduating.

The show begins at the final high school performance of the Coventry Theatre Ensemble (CTE), a movement based theatre program in which Eddie, Amanda, and Tyler are stars. The performance takes place on the day the three will find out if they've been admitted to the prestigious Sar Academy of Dance, a conservatory for which each has auditioned.

Amanda wants to get into Sar because she worries that she and Eddie will break up if they don’t get admitted to the same school together. We learn that she is a terrific student for whom acceptance into Sar is a matter of personal pride, a validation of her overall excellence. 

Tyler’s motivations for getting into conservatory center on several hardships he faces in his daily life. He is racially ambiguous, while his classmates are clearly Black. Moreover, his family situation is unstable. These factors make him the target of jokes from his peers, which causes him to focus on dance as a means of validation. 

Eddie’s motivations for getting into Sar center on his desire to escape the bleak conditions of his Westside community. This becomes evident when we are taken to the failing convenience store owned by his mother, and introduced to his older brother Cool, a high school dropout who aimlessly roams the streets of the Westside. Eddie eventually departs his mother’s store to go to a cast party thrown by his classmate Lars, but only after she gives him the admissions decision from Sar. Here we see Eddie’s vulnerability as he refuses to open the letter because he fears he's been rejected.

Much of the show’s action takes place at Lars’ cast party, at his home in the affluent Eastside. There, we eventually learn that Tyler’s been admitted to Sar while Amanda has been rejected. Just as Amanda begins to question Eddie about the status of his admission, Cool and his gang crash the party and eventually provoke a fight between Eastsiders and Westsiders. 

In the midst of the melee, the ground rumbles, the sky lights up, and a spaceship descends onto Lars’ lawn. A being from another planet, SP-X, descends the ship’s staircase and announces that she is willing to take all who are willing to a distant place, away from the “gravity” threatening to destroy them. SP-X convinces nearly all the partygoers to leave with her, but Eddie, Amanda and Tyler remain unmoved.  After some deliberation, Eddie removes the unopened admissions letter from his pocket and rips it up, announcing he’s meant for bigger things than Sar. He boards the spaceship and asks if Amanda and Tyler will join him. Both decline, and in the final scene, the spaceship closes with Eddie aboard declaring that his fate is indeed “Written In the Stars.”

Charles Inniss