Donegal SERVING THE LOCAL COMMUNITIES SINCE 1954
VOL LXV • NO 21
The play’s the thing
K
BY CATHY MOLITORIS
Kara Nissly (left) and Hannah Slobozien
play is performed in a live reading in Hershey. Hannah has written a play for the Apollo Awards all four years of high school, earning nominations her freshman and sophomore years in addition to this year. Kara earned an honorable mention nomination for a play she wrote last year as well as the nomination this year. Hannah entered the competition as a freshman after receiving
encouragement from Donegal teacher Audra Brackbill. “She told me about this competition and I was like, ‘Oh, give me extra work to do!’” she said with a laugh. “I love to write, but I’d never written a play, but I liked theater, so I thought this would be cool to do something related to theater and writing.” Kara entered the competition last year after encouragement from Hannah.
“She said, ‘You should write a play,’” Kara recalled. “I liked writing other genres, mostly poetry and fiction, but then I wrote a play my junior year, and I thought it was fun.” Kara said she was especially happy that she and Hannah both received nominations this year. “I didn’t want to be competing against Hannah,” she said. “I was going to feel really bad if I got nominated and she didn’t.”
Kyle Hess has lived and breathed baseball since he was a young boy. Now the former Mount Joy resident is pursuing the sport professionally. After a brief stint playing with the Stormers, Hess has signed with a team affiliated with the Minnesota Twins. Kyle’s first taste of the sport came through T-ball. “My dad asked me when I was real young if I wanted to play T-ball,” said the son of Jeff and Stacey Hess of Mount Joy. “I’ve been playing ever since.” A 2018 graduate of Donegal High School, Kyle was a standout baseball player. In 2015, his team won the district title. After high school, he played for five years at the University of Pittsburgh before joining the Stormers in Lancaster as an outfielder this past spring. With the Lancaster team, he led the Atlantic League through the season’s first 12 games with a batting average of .433. He also had hits - including three home runs - in all seven games he started, as well as 10 RBIs and two stolen bases. Despite only playing with the Stormers for a few weeks, he quickly grabbed the attention of Major League Baseball. The Twins
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Donegal grad signs with Major League Baseball team
BY CATHY MOLITORIS
ara Nissly and Hannah Slobozien love to write. The recent Donegal High School graduates also love theater, and they put their passion for both subjects together when they entered plays they wrote in the Apollo Awards competition for high school theater students. Both girls earned nominations in this year’s Outstanding Playwright category. Kara’s play, “ The Unhappy Beginnings of Happy Endings,” told the story of an author in the 1950s who was struggling to get his novel published because it lacked a happy ending. Hannah’s play, “Writer’s Block,” was also about an author facing a challenge: coming up with an idea for a play. “Her husband tells her to write about her own life, but she thinks that’s too boring,” Hannah said. “In the end, she realizes, ‘I do have a story to tell, and my story is important.’” Kara’s play also has a positive message. “He decides to write a happy ending,” she shared. “He realizes that this particular story can have a happy ending even if it doesn’t mean his entire story has a happy ending.” To be entered in the Apollo Awards competition, each play must be written to be performed within 30 minutes as a one-act show, and it must include stage directions and sets that could realistically be created. The winning
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