‘Screaming like crazy people’

Fifteen students, their peers, their coaches and the entire room of speech competitors at Iowa State University’s Stephens Auditorium all held their breath. After a long day of performances, there was nothing else left to do but wait and see who would get the top prize.

Creston High School’s choral reading group, who spent the past few months blending their personalities and voices for their show “The Yellow Wallpaper,” had competed hours earlier but could still feel the adrenaline.

They held hands, holding a small scrap of yellow wallpaper, and bowed their heads. Miles away, one student who had to leave the competition before the awards was watching on his phone, just as anxious.

When the award was called, the announcer only got halfway through the word “yellow.” Cheers erupted from the Creston students as they were awarded the Critic’s Choice Award. After months of work, Creston was named the best in the state.

“When they announced it then, we’re just like, ah!” Coach Laura Granger said. “Screaming like crazy people.”

Junior Dylan Dornack, watching the ceremony on his phone in the middle of an archery meet, said he leapt from his chair and cheered as if he was right alongside his fellow performers.

“My heart was racing before he even said it. I stand up and I go, ‘let’s go!’” Dornack said. “And all these people just stare at me. I’m like, ‘sorry, sorry. Just won a banner, my bad.’”

For the first time since 2019 and for the sixth time ever, Creston received a banner for large group speech, an achievement which required the dedication of every student and coach. For Granger, who wrote the script, it was a moment of validation.

“I wanted to stretch myself and try narrative where it follows a chronological story,” Granger said. “I was a little nervous about taking that. That’s why it felt really good when [the team] did as well as they did, because I took a risk and it paid off.”

1 of 20

For choral reading, 20 teams from across Iowa compete every year at the Large Group All-State Festival speech competition. To qualify for the competition requires special nomination from two or more judges at the state competition, which itself requires exemplary scores for qualification.

Any team that manages to make it to all-state deserves praise. When a team reaches the top prize, it’s based on the individual judge who makes the final call. With 20 teams competing, it’s a challenge to make an impression. With Creston competing earlier in the day, it can be even harder.

“We were the third to perform that day,” Granger said. “There were 17 more choral readings [the judge] watched and it still hung with him for that entire day, which is amazing.”

The women behind the wallpaper

“The Yellow Wallpaper,” coached by Creston teachers Granger, Sara Lane and Abbi Hood, is based on a short story of the same name written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman in 1890. As an early work of feminist literature with a horror edge to the proceedings, the story is an unusual fit for choral reading.

“I read the short story in college so many years ago, and it’s always kind of stuck with me as a really cool short story,” Granger said. “And I’ve always thought, God, it would be cool to do a one-act play, or readers [theatre] or choral. I didn’t know where to put it, but I just knew I wanted to do it.”

With Granger on the pulse of speech and drama in Creston High School, and with a talented group of speech students for her to guide, she began to work on the offbeat script.

“I thought, oh, I think I have the right crew this year that could pull off a spooky, gothic, horror-type story,” Granger said.

“The Yellow Wallpaper” depicts a woman who is confined to an upstairs nursery by her husband as a form of treatment for postpartum depression. Left in a room with no stimulus other than the yellow wallpaper, the woman comes to believe there’s women trapped behind the wallpaper.

The treatment, known as the rest cure, was widely used to cure women of mental disorders and popularized by physician Dr. Silas Weir Mitchell. Granger studied medical reports of the time, synthesizing historical record into her version of the story.

In embracing such a different time period, getting the students to fully commit to the story, especially getting the male performers to embody chauvinistic men, was an initial hurdle for the team to cross.

“The guys had a tough time at first playing it,” Granger said. “They felt kind of icky about it where it was just like, this feels wrong. I always try to put it back into context. I was like, guys, women couldn’t even vote yet. This is what was going on.”

Granger’s ideas extended to the stage design. The titular yellow wallpaper is present as a background for the scene throughout the show. In an arresting moment, the male performers, hidden behind the wallpaper, push their hands through the wall in an equally creepy and intense gesture.

“The hands through the wall was actually an idea I had during the brainstorming process,” Granger said. “I hadn’t finished the script, but I was like, I want hands to pop through a wall.”

The moment left an impression, with the judge for all-state specifically citing the moment as one of the reasons the show won the top prize.

15 people that have to sound similar

Choral reading, where performers speak in unison with one another as part of a collage or narrative, was described by Creston’s coaches as a difficult challenge for the students. Stylistically, the group has to appear as a single entity in order to create the intended effect.

Hood, who was a performer in the 2019 Creston choral reading group which was the last time Creston won a banner, explained the synergy needed for such a performance.

“Choral reading, I feel like, is one of the most challenging categories,” Hood said. “It is 15 people that have to sound similar and speak at the same time. It’s all the same movements, it’s all the same blocking, it’s all the same picture. If somebody’s off on one thing, you’ll notice it. So it is a hard, hard theme. Some coaches don’t even attempt it because it’s that hard.”

“You’re doing a lot of rhythmic movements and syncing everything up on a beat,” Granger said. “And you can add musical instruments, dance; there’s so much going on and so much symmetry and things that you do. But it’s got such a huge payout, I think, where all that hard work that goes into it, when you get a nice crisp page turn, it’s just so satisfying.”

“If you’re not sweating by the end of your performance, you did it wrong,” Dornack said.

Trust is vital to choral reading. With so many moving parts, performers have to keep their peripheral vision open and their attention focused.

“We spent a lot of time around each other,” senior Chaylee Needham said. “It’s all just trust. We had so much trust in each other. They’re going to listen, they’re going to turn their page at the same time that we normally do. We all have so much trust in each other that we’re able to move through the performance very smoothly.”

Granger’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” features a lead character, the woman under the rest cure. Rare for choral reading, having a lead character helps establish the narrative that Granger was intending. She needed a strong performer to fill that role and, after auditions, casted senior Mahi Patel.

“I’ve never seen a choral reading that always had just one defined character going through it,” Patel said. “When I saw that this year’s choral reading would have just one woman that would eventually go insane and then all the rest of the women would go crazy, I’m like, ‘wait, that’s so cool.’”

Patel credits coach assistant Kelly Maxwell with helping her build the energy needed for the performance. As the show continues, Patel has to contort and fully commit to the performance as she becomes increasingly disheveled.

“Gosh, [Maxwell] helped me,” Patel said. “She came to help and she showed me [how to do this]. She’s like, no, you’ve got to go full unhinged.”

Mama Granger

One supporter of all Creston speech teams, big or small, is Granger’s mother, Julie. Known by the students as “Mama Granger,” Julie visited and helped assist with the choral reading team after district competitions. For the Granger family, speech has been integral.

“[My mom] was my choral reading coach,” Granger said. “She was the one that I went to all-state for four years under her tutelage in choral reading. Some of her scripts, I’ve used. So both of my parents are very much a part of the speech experience. They’re Mama and Papa Granger.”

Less than a week after Julie visited, she suffered a stroke and was hospitalized. Granger, assisting her mother, took time off to be with her.

“My mom had a really rough first couple days where she couldn’t talk, and we didn’t know if she would really ever ‘wake up’ essentially,” Granger said. “I put out a post to try to garner prayers and support and positive thoughts. By the next day, then she started to smile and started to turn things around.”

Granger, who spent all her free time with her mother, juggled her daily life even through tough circumstances. With heavy emotions surrounding the speech teams and a noted lack of energy since districts, it took a special type of unity for both students and coaches to keep going.

“We had a big kind of pow-wow talk where I just had said, ‘we have to think positive,’” Granger said. “‘We can’t be scared. We have to think we already got this. We’re awesome. We can’t see the fear in our faces.’ We then dedicated our state performance to Mama Granger. I was like, this is an example of the power of positive thoughts.”

Carrying such an energy through to all-state and eventually winning the coveted banner, Granger had an idea. After discussing with the students and being encouraged by them, the team visited Julie in the hospital and presented the banner to her.

“She just started cheering so loudly, and her voice just kept getting louder and louder,” Granger said. “She was amazed by it. She added a new word to her vocabulary because right now she can only say yes and no. And she said, ‘wow.’

“She recognized some of the kids. She pointed at them, like, oh, so she remembered it. When I said we won the banner, she knew exactly what that meant, which was a really comforting feeling to know she’s still there.”

Granger thanked the team of coaches who stepped in while she stayed with her mother.

“I wasn’t on my A-game,” Granger said. “So, to have the validation that they could lead, they could do it, they could take care of it, they can take on that leadership role.”

“The one thing that I think I pulled from this year was how many trials or challenges kept coming up, with [Granger’s] mom but also students in that performance had gone through some things,” Hood said. “I think it was just, everybody put things aside. They did their job and they got it done while supporting each other through it.”

A victory lap

To cap off such a successful season, the speech department held their Dessert Theatre Tuesday night where performers from across Creston’s speech teams gave their final performances of their shows. Doubling as a senior recognition night, the send off of such talented students brought out the most emotion.

“It is very touching to see, and I think even as the audience too, they notice that, wow, they’re really close as a team,” Granger said. “I think there were more kids that were not seniors that were crying because they were all sad that the seniors were going to be gone.”

By far the loudest group of the night was, unsurprisingly, the students supporting each other. As they filtered through the audience between performances, not a single moment was left without a cheer.

The night ended with the final performance of “The Yellow Wallpaper,” introduced by critic Brad Nesbitt. With a signature intensity refined over countless hours of practice, it stole the show.

The performers, for the last time, bowed and hugged each other while the room erupted with the loudest applause of the night. Tears, of course, were inevitable.

“We’ve cried a lot this year,” Granger said. “But that’s okay.”

The full cast of “The Yellow Wallpaper” includes: Alexis Bendt, Alexis Flores, Chaylee Needham, Claire Ralston, Dylan Dornack, Felix Harness, Fletcher Brown, Gavin Weaver, Josh Bunz, Lizzy Sprague, Mahi Patel, Savannah Jaques, Shyann Richards, Tierany Lee and Wyatt Hitz.