Canterbury senior Shennan Nelson plays Carrie White in Arts Bonita's production. Her character’s home life is awful. Her mother, a religious fanatic, believes her daughter is doomed to hell because she got her period. An outsider at school, Carrie is tormented by her classmates.
“Carrie, in general, is a good human being,” Nelson declared. “She does not want to hurt anybody, which is crazy because she's gone through so many things where you would assume she probably has some sort of animosity. But she doesn't. She’s truly just kind and genuine.”
While it’s just acting, once Nelson assumes the persona of Carrie, she mentally and emotionally becomes that downtrodden, isolated teen.
“She has nobody,” Nelson noted. “She lives through abuse and religious abuse, as well as manipulative people around her. It's really, it's a lot. It's a lot to try and not get too engulfed in what Carrie’s going through and being able to separate my life and Carrie's life so I'm not acting unhealthily.”
Bishop Verot senior Halle Heckman plays Carrie’s tormenter-in-chief, Chris Harkinson. She too has to project emotions that lie outside her normal life.
“People know me as like the smiley, happy, in-the-front dancer,” said Heckman. “That's definitely not who I am in this show. I'm always mean. So I feel like they're going to be like, wait, this is not Halle. The audience is going to be really surprised when they see me in this role.”
North Fort Myers Senior Georgia Rainero plays Sue. By the time she tries to befriend Carrie, it’s too little, too late. Rainero is compelled to channel the hardest emotion of all.
“Because she hadn't done anything before, she's lost everyone that she really, truly cared about in her life and even the person that did all of this,” said Rainero. “She definitely thinks all of this is her fault.”
With these three heartfelt performances, audiences will better understand what it’s like to bully, be bullied and feel remorse for not doing more to change that dynamic.
“Carrie the Musical” is onstage October 3-12.
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Shennan Nelson in the footlights
Shennan Nelson’s stage credits include “Hair,” “Hadestown: Teen Edition,” “Spring Awakening” and “Bulletproof Backpack” at Arts Bonita Performing Arts Center. She has done several shows for Florida Repertory Education Conservatory, including “Matilda the Musical,” “Spongebob” and “Newsies.”
Nelson loves acting “because I like to connect with the people around me and I think that acting is a chance to portray very real things that go on in the real world that people are sometimes afraid of talking about or afraid of showing.”
Inhabiting the characters she’s played has facilitated her personal growth and development in myriad ways. “Playing different characters teaches me more about humanity,” she said. “Every single time I play someone, it teaches me the different types of complex emotions that each character has. My understanding of how they grow teaches me more about humankind and how I can grow from those characters and their issues and their flaws as well as my own as I’m connecting with the character.”
On the abuse Carrie endures on a daily basis, Nelson said, “I can't even fathom what it would be like to live with these circumstances every single day. Although I can relate to the bullying on some level, I have a safe home to go to and a very loving mother that's my best friend so putting myself in a position where she has nobody is really, really difficult.”
Nelson hopes her portrayal of the character helps audiences understand that Carrie is not evil. Rather, she has a power she does not fully comprehend and does not know how to control. At prom, her emotions so fully overwhelm her, that she loses control and that leads to the death and destruction that follows.
“All the emotion overcomes her,” Nelson said. “Her mind is somewhere else when she's using those powers, I don't believe that Carrie intended to kill all these people, but she did.”
Nelson’s task in playing Carrie is winning the audience’s sympathy and inducing them to see her as a tragic hero so that they see her in the end as more than a macabre mass murderer.
“[Director] Kody [Jones] and I had a very long talk about how we wanted Carrie to be perceived. I think it's very understandable that she's got this power just as she's coming into womanhood, but she's got no one to talk to about what that means or even what her menstrual cycle is all about,” Nelson explained. “So in the end, her emotions override because she doesn't know how to separate her emotions from the power or the ability to control either one.”
That loss of control is all the more understandable because of the rollercoaster of emotion she experiences after Tommy asks her to the prom.
“Going to the prom is so important to her because that is her one chance to be somebody other than the Carrie that's been bullied,” Nelson elaborated. “She’s able to finally feel like a girl and feel like it's OK to be who she is because things are finally getting good. She’s growing up. She gets to wear makeup and put on a nice dress like a young lady would. She can see what it might be like to be a normal woman as opposed to what her mother has been telling that being a woman is terrible and she’s going to hell because she had her period.”
Then in a flash, the dream is dashed and her hopes for the future are crushed.
“You experience the depths of her despair. You’ve seen the height of her joy at the promise of a normal life, and then in an instant it's all taken away. But the problem with the destruction is that I don't know if the audience is going to feel for her or if they're going to be mad at her for killing everybody. There's just such a thin line between good and evil. For me, it's a rollercoaster and for the audience it's going to be a rollercoaster for sure.”
Halle Heckman in the footlights
Halle Heckman’s stage credits include “Hair” and “Hadestown: Teen Edition” at Arts Bonita Performing Arts Center, “Footloose” at Cultural Park Theatre, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat,” Frenchie in “Grease,” “Fame” and “Spongebob.”
Heckman loves acting. “I like playing somebody I'm not and just escaping like my own world, whether for a few hours or a whole day,” Heckman said. “There's so much going on in the world right now and just getting to be someone I'm not is relaxing, and I also get to learn so many new experiences from everyone that I play.”
Inhabiting other characters has help her grow as a person as well.
“It makes me realize that everyone is going through something different because a lot of the characters that I've played, they are all true, real-life people that I see every single day. I see them at my school. I see them in real life. I see them as adults. So it's like I get to see every human experience.”
She may have seen bullies, but Heckman said she’s never bullied anyone. So that makes playing Carrie’s tormenter-in-chief a genuine challenge.
“Chris, she's definitely not someone I'm used to playing. But I mean, she's such a complex role. Her home life is so bad, she just takes everything that she's going through there and pushes it on Carrie. But what makes her so bad is that she really sits and thinks, ‘Wwhat can I do today to Carrie? What can I do today to be Queen B and stay on top?’ She's very smart, which makes the bullying worse because she really, really thinks about what she says and what she does, like throwing tampons at Carrie. That's crazy. Who would ever think to do something like that?”
Heckman finds her character’s hatred of Carrie ironic.
“They both come from crappy homes, right?”
To play her character effectively, Heckman has to get into the mindset of a bully and make decisions and do things as her character would. It helps that she’s known many of her castmates for a long time and they know she does not have a mean bone in her body.
“I'm comfortable with like all the people in the cast,” Heckman confirmed. “So, they know I'm not actually mean. All of these kids have known me forever.”
Georgia Rainero in the footlights
Georgia Rainero’s stage credits include Katherine Howard in “Six the Musical” for Melody Lane Theatre, Velma Kelly in “Chicago” (Melody Lane Theatre), Belle in “Beauty and the Beast” (Florida Repertory Theatre), Demeter in “Cats” (Melody Lane Theatre), Karen Smith in “Mean Girls High School Version” (Melody Lane Theatre), Judy in “A Chorus Line” (Melody Lane Theatre), work in the ensembles of “Spring Awakening” (Arts Bonita Center for the Performing Arts) and “Les Miserables” (Melody Lane Theatre in both 2023 and 2021), Elmer in “Newsies” (The Belle Theatre) and one of the Venus-A-Go-Go-Girls in “Rock of Ages” (Melody Lane Theatre).
“I love acting so much because I just love showing people things that might make them uncomfortable or make them open their eyes a little bit more to different situations, different emotions that they can feel,” Rainero said.
Rainero’s character functions as a quasi-narrator. In various scenes throughout the play, she sits in a folding chair, being interrogated by the police, who are trying to piece together what happened on the night of the prom.
“Sue is such a deep character,” Rainero observed. “She has such an insane arc and change of character. She goes from being a not nice person and very narrow to really opening up and saying at the end of the day, the only thing that matters is being a genuine good person. Although she was initially mean to Carrie, she knew that wasn't her. That wasn't what she wanted to do, and she did everything in her power she could to make that right.”
Ironically, Sue is the one who sets in motion the events that lead to everyone’s death, including her boyfriend, Tommy. But rather than that being an illustration of the adage that no good deed goes unpunished, Rainero thinks the lesson is that in matters of mental health, time is of the essence to avoid a lethal tipping point.
“Sue realizes at the end that they were kind of at the point of no return by the time they wanted to help Carrie,” said Rainero. “She was maybe not a lost cause, but something should have been done before that.”
Rainero has watched the Stephen King movie.
“Sue and Tommy are untrustworthy characters in the movie. We don't really know their intention and their motive,” Rainero observed. “But the musical really expands on what they want, their objective, and how this is going to affect Carrie. This makes it more of an emotional story for the audience because they see everything that they're trying to do and that Carrie doesn't know. She’s blocked off from this point of view, but the audience clearly sees the two conflicting sides.”
While Rainero doesn’t characterize Sue as a bucket list role, it was one she was excited to do.
“When the cast list came out, I was just so excited because I hadn't done anything like this before. Everybody loves 'Carrie.' Everyone loves the movie, and I just can't wait to show people the musical because I think the musical is a little bit more underground than the movie. People really only know that side of the story, so I'm glad to show my character’s development and have audiences see how much Sue has a big part in this, too.”
Support for WGCU’s arts & culture reporting comes from the Estate of Myra Janco Daniels, the Charles M. and Joan R. Taylor Foundation, and Naomi Bloom in loving memory of her husband, Ron Wallace.
