by Doug Cooney

Doug Cooney received the Charlotte Chorpenning Cup at the American Alliance for Theatre and Education conference in San Francisco in 2010. He has worked extensively with the Kennedy Center and publishes children’s novels as well as plays.

Cooney came to Highland High School for the premiere production of his slice-of-life comedy, Mustardseed. The production was directed by Glen Carpenter, then student teacher at Highland and now teaching drama at Stansbury High School in Tooele, Utah. The play features four young women who are playing the fairies in a community theatre production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. We see them onstage and backstage, always in costume and always referring to each other by their fairy names. It’s a wonderful contest-length play for four young women.