It was State Trumbauer 2019 over the past weekend and marked the Bob Jones theater department’s 22nd year of attendance. While Bob Jones’s one-act, “The Sister’s Gift,” was beat out by Grissom, Huntsville, and James Clemens, several individual events proceeded to state, and then further advanced there.

Trumbauer is a theater competition where high school students perform individual events with a variety of categories and styles. The production team at the school will also perform a single play that has to be under 45 minutes in total, including the setup and takedown of the set, which must fit in a 20×20 space. Trumbauer starts at a district level, then state, then the highest-ranking from state go to represent Alabama at the Southeastern Theater Conference (SETC).

Fourteen of the Bob Jones events, seven duets and seven solos, that went to state brought home awards for the school including Caleb Curled and Clare Norris, JD Willis and Maddy Dobbs, Aiden Lay and Natalie Parker, Sam Bignault and Matthew Pimmel, Collier Knowles and Grace Hannah, Luke Culver and Eva Candia, Amelia Dobbs and Lizzy Brady, Maggie Brown, Ryland Segerson, Mo McCann, Jarrett Stephens, Ashley Maggert, and Zach Yarborough. Five of these events will be proceeding to SETC, taking up a sixth of all events.

This, of course, couldn’t have been accomplished without the hard work of Bob Jones’s two theatre directors, Mary Davis and Dwayne Craft. Since the beginning of the year, they’ve given nothing but their hardest work to the school and company, and have done their best to support all of the other schools in our district and keep things fair and fun. They’ve gone out of their way to ensure the festival is the best it can possibly be and even wrote The Sister’s Gift which, while it didn’t make state, was generally well-received and raised over six hundred dollars for autism awareness. 

The two winning one-acts at state Trumbauer were from Huntsville and James Clemens and were titled “The Trench” and “The Dentist” respectively. “The Trench” was a dramatic piece written in iambic pentameter that dealt with a soldier selling his soul to Satan to save the rest of his group, going through three harsh trials and giving his life for his friend. “The Dentist” was a form of commedia dell’arte, Italian comedy based around improv and risque themes, and was about a servant named Pedrolino trying to get revenge on his master, Pantalone after he was embarrassed in a fight. Both of these pieces were phenomenally written, set-up, and performed, and brought something wildly different and equally wonderful to the table.

Trumbauer was a fast-paced and amazing field trip experience, and it never fails to bring light to all kinds of styles and actors, and as it has before, it’ll only get better as the years pass.