The Central Kitsap High School’s Drama Club recently put on their fall play for the year, “The Jungle Book” written by Briandaniel Oglesby. The show ran from November 17. through 19. The play was held in the Central Kitsap High School auditorium, also known as the Central Kitsap Performing Arts Center.

The play followed the same general plot as other adaptations of the story; a human boy named Mowgli is found as a baby and raised by wolves, taught lessons about the jungle by a bear named Baloo and

A panther named Bagheera. A tiger, Shere Khan’s, claim on him causes him to flee the jungle, all while trying to develop a sense of self and find people like him. 

This specific adaptation bode well for interesting design choices in the costuming and the plot of the play. This play is specifically more of an adaptation of the original book by Rudyard Kipling, rather than the 1967 Disney movie. It’s also depicted to be in modern day, shown in the costuming, the settings, and even the subplots, which had themes about environmentalism and pollution.

For the costuming, all of the animal characters have very specific clothing motifs, shown through modern clothing, while the human characters are either dressed in ill-fitting clothes, non-specific clothes, or clothes covered in fake fur.

“For the costumes we were trying to play as somewhat an analogy for the characters,” Xavier Marks, a senior in charge of the lighting and productions for the play, says. “The wolves were supposed to be dressed up as athletes, and their numbers were supposed to symbolize stuff, like zero for the traitor in the pack.”

The seats were set up in an unusual way. Making use of the size of the stage, chairs were set up on bleachers, which were placed on the actual stage rather than having the audience sit in the usual seating area. This left only a small area in the middle for the actual play. There were three sections, one directly in front of the sets, with two on the sides. 

The close seating benefited other aspects of the performance. None of the actors, save for the snake, Kaa, used mics. The small stage meant that the actors didn’t need to overly project their voices, the audience being able to hear them without much issue. This also was helpful for audience members, especially in the first rows, in being able to see the whole show clearly.

The setting itself would have been simple, making use of only a few boxes made to look like rocks, and utilizing lighting to mimic foliage on the ground, if there hadn’t been ample use of twenty-foot screens along the back wall of the stage

“We wanted it to be really immersive,” Marks continues. “We had the big screens and our video person. They spent a lot of time finding what videos would capture the scene most accurately.”

In terms of the future, the drama club has already decided what their spring musical will be. Starting in February, auditions will be held for Legally Blonde: the Musical, and the play will be put on sometime in May.