Hanover Park High School Senior Writes Music and Script, Directs and Performs in Her Own Play

There was this newfound sense of happiness once Erin Peters heard somebody else singing her song.

“Someone the other day came up to me and was humming a song, and she said ‘I think that's yours,’ and it stuck in my head. And that was the craziest feeling, because other people were in my music.”

Her friend was humming “Monster,” a tune Peters had written a few years back. “That's actually one of my most popular ones,” she says. “I entered it in a songwriting competition a couple times and it has done me nothing but good.”

And now there’s an extension of that - seeing people play the roles she’s written, she herself being in the actual production of her new show creation, and other people's happiness performing the parts and reading the script - which has been beyond exciting for her.

Peter’s play, Outside the Box, was performed by a local theater group called Spotlight Kids Company at the Madison Community Theater on Saturday and Sunday, May 14 and 15. The 17-year-old Peters who wrote the script and music for her play, directed the show, also had a starring role.

Peters recalls when she was told she had to have a script in three days. The Hanover Park High School senior had already written 10 songs for her original play. “I've written short poems or a chapter of a book, but I've never had to do it extensively. So, I was talking to (Spotlight Kids Founder and Director) Kathryn McManus, who's co-directing it with me, and she said, ‘I need the script by this weekend.” And I had maybe five pages of actual back and forth dialogue. I ended up writing the first draft of the script in three days. It was very different for me. I’ve always had kind of an intuition in creative things, but it definitely took some effort, and then she helped me a lot. She did the first edited draft, but once I started writing, it got easier once you got in the flow of things.”

Outside the Box features lead girl, Alexa, who is struggling with her mental health after she gets pretty badly bullied throughout school. She gets pushed so far that she tries to commit suicide, and it causes her to go inside of her mind where her bullies are turned into real life monsters, and where she battles with her struggles. “I think there's a lot going on for any high schooler, but once COVID hit, I think it was amplified a lot,” Peters says of the idea behind her production. “Any person you talk to, it's very discouraging lately. So, I was kind of thinking about how I could represent how I felt in a way that I knew how, because I've only ever expressed emotions really through music and through songwriting.”

Peters also took a musical theater songwriting class with the New York Youth Symphony, which prompted her to write those 10 songs in one week. And dealing with McManus and the youngish crew at Spotlight Kids Company was a plus. “It was more than just a professional who was telling me how to do things and what to do,” Peters claims. “It was having a friend there to say, “I know you're struggling with this, but you can do it.’ It was really nice.”

Peters, who is supported at home by her parents, Kevin and Kelly Peters, and siblings Patrick and Shannon, has been singing since she could make sounds, and she started out in plays prior to elementary school, when she had a role in The Princess and the Pea. It sparked a stage presence interest in her immediately, and she did all the shows she could up until her freshman year of high school, when she did her first-year musical and then community theater with Spotlight Kids, and then entered the world of songwriting. “I always kind of had ideas going on in my head,” Peters says. “I wrote a lot of poetry and stuff like that, and then I learned how to put it to an instrument. I said to myself, ‘I have a piano and voice and they work together, they express things, and they make people feel things - and that's such a beautiful thing.”

Peters isn’t one to sit back and rest. She has already started another musical, and is preparing for her August departure for the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., where she’ll study (right – you guessed it) musical theater. But there’s more. “I said when I was younger, I wanted to be on Broadway, so that's always kind of in the back of my head, to be on a big stage. But I also now get to explore kind of the writing side of it, and the business side of it, and I love children. I love working with kids, and I can always kind of step in and do what Katherine did, and have my own business where I can write and help people find the joy in theater that I have found.”