To the Players cast and crew, they are the directors who execute visions and help actors bring their scripts to life. But to the majority of the SCH community, whom they have served for a combined 38 years, they are unknown.
Meet Dave Snyder, Carolina Millard, Terrance Hart, and Daria Maidenbaum: the figures behind the team of students bringing 13 Past Midnight to the Rec’s stage. Who are they? What do they do for SCH? Why does their work often go unnoticed?
Dave Snyder, 13 Past Midnight’s director, has been involved in Players since December 2014. Snyder puts in ten hours of work in a normal Players week at the Rec with his cast, but in total, the sum is larger. “A lot of it’s homework too, right?” Snyder said. “We do prepping a lot. I read 13 Past Midnight like 20 times.” This level of dedication comes from his genuine love for theater, the kids he works with, and the bond between him and his production team.
When asked to name his favorite part of his involvement with Players, Snyder discussed his coworkers: “Honestly, it’s our production team. We were just at [Lina’s] wedding. We had a great time just hanging out with each other. We’re all friends.” This interpersonal connection stems from the history that most of the Player’s production team shares with each other.
For instance, Snyder and Daria Maidenbaum, the technical director, went to college together. Carolina Millard, one of the two assistant directors, and Snyder have worked at various theater companies as coworkers and friends. This shared history creates a deeper level of understanding and a sense of community within the Players faculty, which in turn results in fewer conflicts. It also leads to a synchronization that can only be found between people who are truly comfortable with one another. “These are people I know and love,” Snyder said.
Besides the friendship that he has to offer his production team, his impact on his cast has been even more influential on the culture of Players. “When I came in, what a big part of the interview was [that] they needed a disciplinarian. They needed someone to put their foot down because that wasn’t happening. Their kids were kind of taking over rehearsals. And I was kind of like, ‘Eh, my dad was a cop. I know how to do this,’ really bringing the structure,” Snyder said. “We wanted them to set some ground rules. We needed to change the culture of Players because it was really rowdy. It was very much – you do it for fun and you do it for socialization, you don’t do it for theater, right. And the shows didn’t present as professional as what we’re doing right now.”
Snyder’s attitude towards the disciplinary changes that Players needed shows his aptitude and ability to implement them. His professionalism has paid off and increased the quality of Players’ performances.
Carolina Millard, one of the assistant directors for 13 Past Midnight, worked on her first Players show as a choreographer in 2010 with Brigadoon, but her dedication to Players began in 2000 when she was a freshman at Springside School. “I am a Player,” she said. “Hands down. I have put blood, sweat, and tears into this program since I was in high school. It was so impactful to me. It’s like coming home,” Millard said about her return to SCH as a staff member.
For her years of dedication, she would like a little acknowledgment.
“Honestly,” she said, “I’m still here. Here we are on this little island that is the Rec, and we’re waving our hands. I just want to be like, we are still killing it. We don’t do it just that one week that the show is. We’re making magic all the time.” Although the cast and crew feel her impact, her audiences are unaware of her value to Players.
The amount of work Millard and the rest of the production team put in for SCH is certainly remarkable. “There’s so much prep work that happens behind the scenes,” Millard said. “It takes me at least an hour to choreograph a number or to look at blocking. On top of that, we also have admin stuff where we’re sending emails and all that. It’s a lot of time. It’s a lot of work.”
Carolina Millard’s goal at SCH has always been to advocate for the arts, and in the coming years, she will continue to champion for the Rec.
Terrance Hart, the Assistant Director for 13 Past Midnight, started his SCH career as a camp counselor in 2018. In the past six years, he went from substitute teacher in 2020 to Summerside Theatre camp counselor, and finally to teacher in 2021. Hart teaches in all three divisions: he is a teaching assistant for kindergarten girls, the music director for Middle School drama, and the assistant director for Players shows.
Hart brings much professional experience to the performing arts. He is a Marian Anderson Scholar artist, which is a program that supports classical, opera, theatrical, musical, and visual artists from around the globe. In addition, he is a classically trained singer and has been doing shows professionally since 2006 on various stages in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Hart is at SCH from 7:45 a.m. to 9:00 p.m. on rehearsal days, but it’s not as much of a chore for Hart because of his coworkers. When asked, he said this on his favorite aspects of involvement with Players, echoing the words of Dave Snyder: “Players is like it’s own little personal family, and I love that. I love our team. We see each other’s visions. We also contribute and bounce ideas off of each other.” With Hart’s level of experience and love for the people that he works with, he is one of the reasons Players is as good as it is.
Daria Maidenbaum is not just the technical director for every Players show, but the technical director for every performance that happens at SCH, and she has been for the past decade. “There are no other people at our school who have the knowledge and skill sets that I do when it comes to any of these technical things,” Maidenbaum said. “I don’t have other people to help out.”
Maidenbaum’s immense workload is reflected in the time that she puts in at SCH. “That’s a funny question. What aren’t my hours?” Maidenbaum rhetorically quipped. “In terms of supervising crew, I do Monday and Wednesday 4:00 to 6:00, Tuesday 4:00 to 8:30. Sometimes Saturdays, and then I do a lot of things during prep periods or literally any time that I don’t have class.”
Her dedication to her craft is unsurprising due to her extensive past of acting, performing, and tech roles. “I’ve been doing theater since I was six,” Maidenbaum said. “I started doing an outside not-related-to-school acting group called LIPAC, Long Island Performing Arts Center. Was a performer all the way up through high school, started doing the backstage tech-type things when I was in ninth grade, and then never stopped.”
At SCH, Maidenbaum found that her love for theater extended through teaching hands-on skills to Players crew members. “There’s something about the sense of accomplishment of seeing people who have never used a saw or picked up tools suddenly look at a stage that has 16-foot tall walls that they helped build.”
To have a good sense of the roles within Players and the jobs the production staff take on, you have to know how much Daria oversees. “When it comes to Players, I do a lot of things that people probably do not notice, and that is designing everything about the production,” Maidenbaum said. “That is leading the building of it, that is overseeing sound and microphones and all the lighting, and writing all the lighting cues and coordinating things like a program and a poster and a lot of the logistical things. It’s me.” Given the amount of work she does daily, Players would not be able to function without her.
And it would certainly look different without all four of them.
This production team has been working in sync with each other since Once Upon a Mattress graced the Rec’s stage in 2022. The camaraderie that they embody in their relationships with one another is a testament to the positivity that Players brings to SCH year-round.
These skilled performers came together from across the tri-state area and beyond, making up an incredible team who have put in hard for years, and in most cases, a decade or more.
The Players community recognizes and appreciates the effort that Dave Snyder, Carolina Millard, Terrance Hart, and Daria Maidenbaum put into every show, rehearsal, cast, call, email, and audition. Everything they do, they do for SCH.
Millard concluded, “I’m still so proud of the work we do. And I just want to shout that from the rooftops all the time, because I don’t know if it’s always heard.”
