CAPE ELIZABETH – A student-written satire of December’s infamous “pot cookie” incident at Cape Elizabeth High School, canceled by Principal Jeffrey Shedd hours before its premiere last weekend, will be performed Friday night.
The curtain goes up at 7 p.m., Friday, June 7, at the high school. Tickets are $5 at the door.
The year-end satire, a recent annual tradition at CEHS, deals this season with the suspension of nine students for selling or consuming cookies laced with marijuana while at school Dec. 7. After a police investigation, three students, ages 15-17, were arrested for selling the cookies, while eight others were summonsed for possession of marijuana.
On the day of the cookie incident, upperclassmen were conducting a first-in-the-state, daylong TEDx video seminar, featuring motivational speeches designed to help students “expand their horizons as they look toward planning their lives beyond high school.”
Reportedly, the student satire was titled “Shedd-X,” although it also has been listed publicly as “Year of X.”
Shedd said last week he canceled the play because he felt it would “send an incredibly mixed message” to the community. Although the 50-odd students involved offered to rewrite the play following a Thursday preview for Sheed, he said, “There just wasn’t enough time to do it justice. The reality is that the school year is ending and it just couldn’t be pulled off to my satisfaction.”
However, after a private performance for parents and family members Saturday, Shedd agreed to reschedule the show.
“We just were able to take the time to sit down and talk through how we could frame the production – not really change it, but frame it – mostly by adding a couple of elements to it to make sure people understand what the message is, and what it is not,” he said Thursday afternoon.
Shedd said he was not worried about how he was portrayed in the show. “People can laugh at me all they want,” he said. Rather, his concern was for the feelings of the students involved in the cookie incident. The added elements reportedly soften that blow.
“The message I think is just making fun of people, as satires do, and really bringing up the mirror to all of us and make us laugh at ourselves,” he said, “as opposed to piling on to some kids who made some dumb decisions in connection with a well-publicized incident a while back.”
On Thursday evening, the school’s theater director, Richard Mullen, called the play, “one of the best pieces of student writing I have ever seen.”
In a notice published on the town website, he described the play as, “a satire of school and community and beyond, seen from the perspective of high school seniors. It is witty, daring, perceptive, and in the tradition of laughing at ourselves.”
“Cape moms, teachers, students, police – all are fair game in this clever take on our year at CEHS,” he wrote.
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