By the time the lights came up on “The Shawshank Redemption” at Milford High School, the students had already done far more than memorize lines and learn blocking.
Their preparation came together in a production that transported audiences inside Shawshank Prison. Yet the work behind the scenes offered another story: young people learning how to prepare, collaborate and lead when the stakes feel high and the clock is running out.
The finished production also found a strong audience. At the end of the run, director and educator David Derringer confirmed that all originally scheduled performances of The Shawshank Redemption had sold out, along with the added Halloween matinee. During tech rehearsals, Derringer seemed unconcerned about the show’s mature content and audiences seemed equally unbothered, as evidenced by the popularity.
Behind the production was a deliberate emphasis on student ownership. Derringer gave the students freedom to shape the show themselves. While the cast developed the inner lives of their characters rather than simply imitating the film, student designers made consequential choices about light, costumes, sound and movement to create a fully immersive space. Stage manager Lyra Grammel described Derringer as willing to step back and trust his students. That trust gave them a welcome opportunity to flex their abilities — and required them to take genuine ownership of the result.
For Derringer, the purpose of that ownership reaches beyond the stage, saying, “I believe high school theater is not just about building the next great Broadway or film actor.” He went on to explain the process is also about helping students become better public speakers, use their voices to persuade and develop “empathy for other people’s life experiences” while discovering who they are as individuals.
That ownership began with research. A group trip to the Ohio State Reformatory in Mansfield, where the film was shot, made the production’s setting tangible. Cast members heard accounts of the institution’s harsh conditions and stood inside spaces that helped them imagine the physical and emotional pressure their characters endured. Tech crew members saw firsthand how gritty and gray the setting was, inspiring their approach to the production design.
For Prince Miller, who played Red, preparation meant breaking the character down “to the molecule,” asking what made him angry, happy or afraid. Red’s monologue about solitary confinement became especially visceral. As Prince learned it, he imagined the walls closing in and the sound of water before it began to play. He was not trying merely to perform distress; he was working from the inside out to understand a person.
Asher Link faced a different challenge as Andy. He initially studied Tim Robbins’ soft-spoken film performance, but the production used no microphones, forcing him to balance vocal projection with the character’s quiet quality. Over time, he stopped trying to reproduce Robbins and began making Andy his own. His larger task was tracing 20 years of a life: showing how imprisonment wears Andy down without extinguishing his hope.
Preparation looked just as rigorous offstage. Jacob Peterson, a first-time lighting designer, approached the prison through color and atmosphere. He used warm yellows and reds alongside colder industrial tones to evoke a grimy, oppressive environment, while blue cutting through red became an image of hope persisting amid brutality.
Heidi Hassman, Costume/Make-Up Designer & Head of Wardrobe, pursued period accuracy while looking for small symbolic choices: a red bracelet for Red, chess-piece necklaces for the antagonistic group the “Sisters” and carefully matched shoes that would not break the illusion. Purchased jumpsuits were aged with eyeshadow, petroleum jelly, rough sponges, and sandpaper; prison numbers were made by hand. She also had to solve the practical puzzle of outfitting a cast with widely varying body types while maintaining a coherent masculine silhouette.
The students speak about those challenges with the vocabulary of emerging professionals: deadlines, delegation, budgets, accountability, communication and stress management. Theater may be the setting, but the habits they are building translate readily to hospitals, laboratories, engineering studios, offices and any workplace where people must solve problems together.
Grammel, a junior considering pre-med, said stage management gave her a place to apply lessons that leadership courses could only describe. She learned that the mood she brings into a room can spread through an entire company. She also confronted the harder side of leadership: looking friends and peers in the eye, trusting them to finish work, and resisting the urge to micromanage.
“Part of being a leader” is learning to follow, delegate and trust, she said. In practice, that meant recognizing that not everything was hers to carry.
For Heidi, who is also a nursing student, the transferable lesson was flexibility. Orders arrived late or in the wrong size or color; dye jobs failed; plans changed. Rather than shutting down when something became difficult, she learned to ask what could be done next. That calm, solution-focused response already follows her into clinical work. She also came to value the quieter responsibility of becoming “a space of peace” for cast members arriving stressed about lines, fittings or last-minute changes.
Peterson identified similar lessons in his compressed lighting schedule. The experience taught him that he could manage stress, complete intimidating work and collaborate even when relationships were imperfect. With lighting cues largely unfinished at the start of tech, he programmed the first act under pressure and discovered that the work he feared he could not complete was, in fact, within his reach. “You can do hard things,” he said. Theater requires students to light, lead, costume and act with everyone, not only the people they naturally prefer. That is not just rehearsal etiquette; it is preparation for professional life.
The production also trained the students to recover in real time. When a chess piece fell during a performance, the actors incorporated it so naturally that the moment appeared planned. Link described the broader discipline behind that save: know your own work, stay in character, and trust the people around you. If something changes, keep listening and respond.
Derringer sees that ability to recover as inseparable from preparation. He described costumers quickly pinning a torn costume and light-board operators adjusting when an actor misses a mark: the small, urgent decisions that keep a live story moving. “By the time any of my actors and technicians graduate they have learned how to improvise on the fly,” he said, “but they also know how to do hard work and be prepared so that when they do have to improvise, they know exactly what to do to keep the story moving forward.”
That capacity is developing amid schedules that would test many adults. Students spoke of balancing advanced classes, college applications, extracurricular leadership, and overlapping productions. Soon after “Shawshank”, the program is moving toward an educational tour of “A Year with Frog and Toad” and a production of “Our Town.” The rapid, unforgiving pace forces them to prioritize, communicate and support one another while maintaining the quality of each show.
It produces people who can enter unfamiliar worlds with curiosity. People who can prepare deeply, accept feedback, manage scarce time and resources, and make decisions when a perfect answer is unavailable. It teaches young leaders when to step forward and when to step back. It asks them to trust one another — and gives them repeated chances to prove that trust was well placed.
In “The Shawshank Redemption,” hope is the force that survives confinement. For Milford’s students, hope also looks like confidence earned through work: the realization that a difficult cue can be programmed, an unwieldy costume problem can be solved, a complicated character can be understood and a production can come together because every person took responsibility for a piece of it.
Long after the set is struck and the prison uniforms are put away, that lesson will remain. Whatever stages these young people step onto next — literal or otherwise — they will arrive knowing they can do hard things, and that the best work is rarely done alone.
Upcoming shows
“A Year with Frog & Toad” — November 17 and 20 at 7 p.m. This 100% student-designed and directed production runs approximately one hour and welcomes kids and adults of all ages. Tickets are $5, available online or at the door.
“Our Town” — December 11 and 12. Directed by Cincinnati’s Ed Cohen, this stripped-down production trades Milford’s usual bells and whistles for actors, words and movement, inviting audiences to discover how much a simple stage can move and inspire.
Milford theatre production information and tickets: Browse upcoming events.
