“This is just the beginning” said former student Parker Spurlin, in an interview last year.

He was describing his new acting class, just after performing at U.C. Davis. At the time, it was drama teacher Marc Glassberg’s second year teaching at Stagg, and the drama and acting program was seemingly overflowing with potential.

Now, halfway through the school year, has the program fulfilled that potential?

Last year, Glassberg took his acting class to U.C. Davis where the students took to the stage and were able to see what it was really like to act in a professional setting.

This year, students report the class has been slowing down, and has been turning its hands-on experience into a more curriculum-oriented setting.

Junior Celeste Castro talked about how the past years have compared. She has been a student in his class since her freshman year, which just so happened to be Glassberg’s first year as well. She talked about how she joined the class because it was able to “expand (her) horizons.”

To her, “Glassberg became an inspiration, and taught (her) to open up… but this year things are more of a review, we don’t do nearly as much, if any plays.”

She also said that “instead of plays, we’ve worked more on diction and watching other people perform.”

Senior Raymond Taylor, who has also been in the acting class for several years, has noticed the gradual changes throughout the years as well.

He agreed with Castro, saying “this class has definitely changed… we watch a lot of movies, and plays, but don’t really perform as much.”

On the other hand, he did say that they “focus more on different types of acting, techniques and scenarios.”

The class as a whole has worked on two plays so far, “The Diary of Anne Frank” and “Clue.” Both of them never went live, though students spent about two months working on each.

The class as a whole met and decided that both plays were not going to be ready by their performance dates.

Taylor mentioned that “this was the moment things really started to slow down.”

The Acting and Drama Club seems to be where a majority of the returning actors have gone in place of the class, because it isn’t curriculum based and students are able to produce the plays themselves.

They plan to go on “tour” around different elementary schools in the Stockton Unified School District and perform.

In previous years, their productions consist of plays like “The Breakfast Club” and “A Cinderalla Story.”

The play will be a compilation of different classics, like “Romeo and Juliet” and “Frankenstein,” called “Crumpled Classics”.

However, after a somewhat sluggish first semester, students insist that performances are still planned for this year.

Castro believes that “This year we’ve had kind of a downfall, because of all the plays being cancelled, but we are definitely working our way back up,” now that they have been back to working on another performance.

She believes that they can put the class back into the more “hands on” class it used to be now that they have been working on another play that might take place this spring.