Senior Moira Kate Forrester gives direction to her actors.
Courtesy | Charlie Cheng

Her hands were stained red after she spent the afternoon standing in the kitchen brewing fake blood.

Senior Moira Kate Forrester developed a concoction of cocoa powder, peanut butter, xanthan gum, and red dye to set the scene for her senior project, the play “Angels of Bataan” by Tracy Wells.

“Angels of Bataan” tells the stories of eight nurses and their courage during the days leading up to their capture and the nearly three years they spent in a Japanese internment camp with little food, water, or medicine.

Forrester said her dad showed her “Angels of Bataan” because he grew up participating in theater and introduced theater to her. After a few years break, Forrester made her return to theater in 10th grade when a teacher began searching for a stage manager.

“She sent a school-wide email, and I replied within the first hour that she sent it,” Forrester said. “She came into my classroom, completely interrupted class, and said, ‘I’ll take you.’ She was a very intense director. I actually learned from her what not to do as a director.”

Forrester got her first experience directing as a sophomore at Hillsdale when she took a directing course with Chairman and Associate Professor of Theatre Christopher Matsos.
Directing, Forrester said, quickly became her favorite part of theater.

“I know people think it’s a very unsung or unappreciated part, because you don’t have a bow or anything. But I never really minded that because I don’t really like being up in front of the crowd,” Forrester said. “I’m really bad at taking compliments.”

She said she is now working on a play of her own, using all of the skills she has learned at Hillsdale.

“In playwriting class we wrote a lot of our own plays. One of the ones I wanted to write, that I’m still working on, is a play about my family. I’m half Japanese. My mom’s Japanese, my dad’s American,” Forrester said. “During WWII, there were these actual internment camps they had for the Japanese in America. I want to do it in a way that when you are watching the play, you don’t realize what is happening until the end.”

She said directing “Angels of Bataan” stemmed from the WWII play she is working on because it highlights the American servicemen and women imprisoned by the Japanese and the struggles they faced while fighting to survive.

“Having a play that’s set in that kind of environment makes the moments you have with the characters that much more sweet,” Forrester said.

Sophomore Alex Rigal, who played Army nurse Sally Bailey, said it was difficult to accurately portray a character who had suffered so much and witnessed one of the most tragic events of the war.

“I think at some points it may have been a little hard to balance the feeling of normalcy in certain moments, especially during the attack scenes,” Rigal said. “There were so many moments where that normalcy did show, like in the love story between Jean Perkins and Dr. Stevens.”

The actors had to find a way to capture both the constant terror the characters would have felt and the hope that they would all make it home alive, according to Rigal.

“You have to take moments seriously, but also we’re all human, and we have to laugh,” Rigal said. “You know the expression, ‘if you don’t laugh, you’ll cry.’ It’s just getting into character mode where you say, ‘Okay, you can laugh here then be serious there.’”

The nurses find ways throughout the play of preserving their humanity. Jean, a nurse played by senior Vinny Acuña, marries Stevens after he nearly dies.

When the characters first came under fire from the Japanese, chaos set in and no one would have known how to react as they saw the destruction of the world around them, according to Acuña.

“You get to see what the first thoughts are that are going through someone’s mind during a crisis,” Acuña said. “For me in the bombing scene, I think the one thing I found myself saying initially was ‘this doesn’t happen.’ Then I tried to quickly reassure the nurses around me. I quickly realized that I don’t know what happens in this situation and I don’t know what to do.”

Forrester said staging scenes embroiled in chaos were challenging, but also the most rewarding part of directing “Angels of Bataan” as her senior project.

“I love the scenes where there’s lots of people on stage, like there’s so much happening, and they’ve gotten really good at filling the space, even when they’re not saying a line or something,” Forrester said. “It makes the scene feel really alive, and all the stuff that’s happening in those scenes I just adore.”