This past weekend, Elevate Studios partnered with Lee County Parks & Recreation to take William Golding’s 1954 novel “Lord of the Flies” outdoors. Two separate casts reenacted the action, danger, and theatrical excitement of the iconic novel in an immersive walk-through production.
“What made this production completely different is it's an original adaptation of ‘Lord of the Flies’ done in ‘found theater,’ in site-specific theater,” said Elevate Studios’ Kody Jones. “We actually did this in the woods. And not only that, but it was almost like theater meets haunted house, where it's a walk-through adventure for the audience members.”
Every audience member was greeted by a search and rescue guide and given brief instructions on how to find the lost kids that went down in a plane on the banks of the Caloosahatchee River.
“We actually involved the audience in the production,” Jones added. “Once they got to Caloosahatchee Regional Park and got their tickets, they were handed a form that said ‘we're looking for these lost kids, here's a picture,’ and then they were given a neon vest and trained in Florida Search and Rescue. They were no longer the audience when they entered the ‘Lord of the Flies’ experience. They were part of Search and Rescue, looking for the characters, and the story of ‘Lord of the Flies’ unfolded around them on the trail as they walked through it.”
Murray and Jones empaneled two separate casts. One was all male; the other all-female. While the actors in that second case may have been female, they played male characters providing the audience with a different take on the way they are traditionally portrayed.
There were eight performances over two days, with the all-male and all-female casts alternating.
Lennox Ordway as Jack
Lennox Ordway starred in the role of Jack.
“Jack was the bad guy,” she said when asked to describe her character. “He wanted power over the other characters in the show. He was very power-hungry.”
Ordway understood her character’s thirst for power and control to be an overcompensation for his feelings of inferiority.
“He didn’t want to feel inferior to the other characters. He wanted everyone to listen to him. He wanted to feel smart and powerful, like he's the only one that's doing right.”
She’s relished the role of bad guy.
Ordway has been acting since third grade.
“I was really into watching the musicals, but wasn’t interested in being in them,” she recalled. “But my friends were in a show, so I got involved to be with them.”
Fast forward to the present and Ordway is now in the North Fort Myers High School theater program. She was recently in ‘Aladdin’ and will be performing in “Newsies” in February.
“I'd like to do acting in college, but also double major with something else as like a backup plan,” she said of her long-range plans.
Caitlyn Clark as Maurice
“He's the second in command to Jack,” said Clark of her character. “He's a combination of two characters because in the original novel, there's Roger, which is Jack's lieutenant, and then there's Maurice. But we didn't include Roger in this adaptation.”
Clark found playing Maurice particularly challenging because of the glee her character takes in murder and mayhem.
“It all just came down to survival for him,” said Clark. “Jack was all about the power. He kind of went crazy. Maurice was different in that sense. He cared less about the power and more about survival, which was what the entire show was actually about. It asked what people would do in these situations for survival. Instead of thinking, ‘oh, I want power, I want all these kids to support me, and I can be supreme leader,’ Maurice knew that his supreme leader would kill him, too, if he didn’t shape up and do what he was told.”
Reflecting further on her character’s embrace of violence, Clark intimated that her character’s love of the kill was his way of providing his loyalty and blind allegiance to Jack.
“[Maurice] is extremely scared,” Clark explained. “He feels extremely threatened. As Jack spiraled more and more into madness, Maurice had to follow along. So, he killed in order to reclaim his spot at the top of the food chain, to stay safe, to be protected. And then suddenly it's this avalanche where he's threatening to kill everybody.”
Clark discovered that performing the role outdoors in a desolate setting enabled her to dig even deeper into Maurice’s character and motivation.
Clark has been performing since seventh grade. Like Ordway, she took to the stage because that’s what her friends were into.
“It didn't really interest me,” she recounted. “I was just like, oh that's cute. But a lot of my close friends had started to join shows so that made me want to do it as well. Why not? I needed more hobbies.”
She didn’t just like performing. She loved acting.
“It's become my entire life,” Clark said, who is a senior at Estero High.
She’s currently applying to colleges, where she plans to pursue a BFA in acting.
“I'm hoping to go to school at Florida State University,” she said, adding that she is going through the pre-screen/audition process required for admission into most collegiate theater programs.
FSU’s top-tier theater training program challenges students to grow as artists and individuals as they explore the world of theatre. It offers a balance of core theater classes and electives, allowing students the freedom to design their own curriculum. In a given semester, the FSU School of Theatre offers classes in performance, directing, various aspects of design and technical work, specific areas of theatre history and performance studies, dramaturgy, theatre management, playwriting, play analysis, and stage makeup. BA students may blend theatre training with a different academic pursuit by minoring or double-majoring in such areas as English, Humanities, Education, or other disciplines offered at FSU. BA students take an active part in production work. Students interested in performing can audition for roles in any of FSU's productions. Students can also be involved as stage managers and can participate in various production assignments and tech crews.
Lyla Black as Piggy
Lyla Black played the part of Piggy in “Lord of the Flies.” In the story, Piggy meets Ralph in the aftermath of the crash and two bond as they search for other survivors.
Black gave a very frank assessment of her character.
“Piggy is very logical and very smart,” she said. “However, he was also very insecure, between having glasses, having asthma and having people pick on her for eating a lot. She is just a good representation of how kids can have these great talents that get hidden due to insecurity.”
The play illustrates how Piggy’s insecurities were exacerbated by being bullied, first in her school and then following the plane crash in the wilderness where she and the other kids were stranded.
“She’s of emblematic of a victim of bullying,” Black said. “I think a lot of people can relate to bullying.”
Black knows about that firsthand.
“Unfortunately, I was bullied for a lot of the same reasons,” she noted. “I wore glasses. I had an inhaler. I was very insecure about my body. I was taller than majority of the kids and they’d make fun of me saying, like, ‘oh, you look anorexic,’ or things like that. So unfortunately, bullying is a very real problem. I overcame it over time, but people do get bullied a lot for stupid things and I was able to channel that into the character even though my situation was not necessarily the same exact circumstances as in the book or the same exact circumstances as the play. I was able to channel into the same insecurities that a lot of people feel.”
Anyone who’s read the book or seen the play knows that Piggy is pushed to his death toward the end of the story. But what led to his demise is not fear, but rather his inability to comprehend the power of groupthink. Piggy is rational and introspective. Groupthink is irrational and outwardly directed.
“People see Piggy as this innocent character,” Black remarked. “He really wasn’t shocked that the other group could be so violent, though that is shocking for any child. Rather, he found the violence illogical. Why would you do that? Why would you be that type of person? That makes no sense. Why would you bully me for things I can't control? Why would you be so violent? We're all just trying to survive. Ralph is all trying to help us here. Why do you want to go around being so violent when we all logically could have made it out alive? So, Piggy’s reaction to their violence is more along the lines of why would you do that rather than shock that they did.”
Playing the part not only forced Black to confront old demons, it got her out of her element.
“I don't go outside that much,” Black quipped. “So, honestly, [performing outdoors] was great for my vitamin D. I’ve never done anything like that.”
And Black has been performing for a dozen years.
“I started acting when I was around 4 years old,” she noted. “I'm 17 now. So that was a hot minute ago.”
At present, Black has no plans to pursue acting as a career, but performance nonetheless lies in her future as she hopes to do some modeling and ultimately practice law.
Jaelynn Lias as Ralph
Jaelynn Lias played the lead as Ralph. She took a novel approach to getting into her character’s head.
“Going into the character creation process for Ralph, I found an image to focus on in my head, and that was a compass,” Lias said. “I believe he is a compass, morally, ethically, as a person for the rest of the kids in the story and for the audience to follow. And his fatal flaw is believing the best in people.”
Aside from playing the lead in such a renowned play, Lias was attracted to Elevate’s production of “Lord of the Flies” because it was being performed outdoors.
“Normally as an actor, you have to imagine and you have to create the world around you,” Lias observed. “In this case, the world already existed. I didn’t have to pretend to feel the sun, I did feel the sun. There was sweat running down my back, for real. There were bugs everywhere. I could feel the grass beneath my feet. That allowed me and the rest of us to focus on the story more.”
The experience was more akin to filming on location than a standard theatrical production.
“During rehearsals, Mr. Kody told us we were going to throw out all the usual theatrical conventions like cheating out, turning your back a little bit,” Lias said. “We threw it all out the window, much like they do in film, and that was a super cool to experience, because it allowed us to focus more on the people around us and the dialogue.”
Lias got her start in theater at age 5.
“Theater was a way to channel my energy into something that wasn't annoying,” Lias said, laughing. “But also, my parents love the arts, and they've taken me to shows since I was little. I saw those shows and those characters and actors, and I thought, I want that.”
Lias said she became serious about the craft when she turned 13.
“That’s when I met Kody Jones,” she said. “My first was ‘Footloose’ back in ’22. This is now my 13th production with him. Most recently, I was in ‘Carrie’ at Arts Bonita.”
She is so serious about pursuing a career in acting that she’s applying to schools around the country for acceptance into their musical theater programs. One school that’s given her a callback is Carnegie Mellon, reputed to be one of the top three musical theater programs in the nation. (The Hollywood Reporter ranked it No. 4 among the best drama schools in 2024, and it is recognized by industry sources like Backstage as one of the top programs for musical theater.)
As part of the prestigious School of Drama (the oldest in the United States), the BFA in Musical Theater provides conservatory-style training, combining intense acting, singing, and dancing with academic rigor.
It remains to be seen whether Lias gets an invitation to join Carnegie Mellon’s musical theater program, but the mere fact that they gave her a callback is validation of her talent and accomplishments.
Izy Sedorchuk as Simon
Izy Sedorchuk’s character is Simon.
“Simon’s mom always told him that he was different,” Sedorchuk observed. “He never understood exactly what that meant, but he knew that he wasn't normal in a sense. He wanted to be normal, and so his mom told him whenever he was doing something wrong. She taught him how to fix it and be more normal. But when Simon goes away to this school and then gets trapped on the island, he doesn't really know what to do. He’s very confused and so he latches on to Ralph because Ralph has all the rules and knows what to do and that's basically what Simon needs. Simon needs rules.”
Simon is obviously autistic. First his mother and then Ralph provide him with the social cues he cannot ascertain on his own. But that, in turn, places him at a severe disadvantage when he finds himself in an unfamiliar situation, especially where his survival is at stake.
Like Lias, Sedorchuck liked the experience of performing outdoors in “found theater” because it freed her into responding more to the action and dialogue because it wasn’t necessary to also create for herself or the audience the world of the play.
“It’s so much easier because you don't have to think about what is around you,” Sedorchuk said. “When you're on stage, like as Jaelynn said, you have to imagine everything around you. You have to imagine the trees and the sand or the grass. But when you're out there, when you're really out there, you can see the trees and you can see the grass and you can feel the sun on your face and you can feel the wind in the air. And something that we kind of went into in one of the scenes was the sky. You could actually see the sky and look at it and think about all of those things that are just like you would have to imagine the sky, of course.”
Sedorchuk began acting at age 9. Like Lias, she got serious about performing when she met Jones and now, she, too, is planning to pursue a BFA in Musical Theatre.
“I really love acting, of course,” said Sedorchuk. “And if that doesn't work out, then I'll teach.”
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.
