Fergus Falls earns first starred rating at state One Act festival

Fergus Falls earned its first starred rating at the Minnesota State High School League One Act Play State Festival with Dark Road, finishing among the Class A standouts at O'Shaughnessy Auditorium on the St. Catherine University campus in St. Paul. The festival concluded Feb. 6, and the rating marked Fergus Falls High School’s first appearance at state since 2001.

Dark Road is set in 1946 Germany and follows the choices that allow evil to become ordinary. Director Allee Nickolauson and assistant director Val Johnson led the production, which the state archive listed with students Cooper Christensen, Nadia Carlson, Cierra Ochoa, Belle Holland and Emmett Rogness. Each cast and crew member from the starred productions received Spotlight on the Arts Awards of Excellence, presented by TruStone Financial.

Fergus Falls reached state after subsection competition on Jan. 24 and section competition on Jan. 31. The high school theater department says its One Act Play program aims to advance to state each winter, and it has built that expectation on a steady run of results, with top-three subsection finishes for the past decade and regular top placements in section competition.

That history made the starred rating a notable step for a program that has spent years trying to turn consistency into a state-stage return. After two decades away from the festival, Fergus Falls left St. Paul with a rating that gives the theater department a new benchmark and the next group of students a recent example of what the program can reach.

Fergus Falls was one of three Class A schools to receive starred performance ratings, joining Belle Plaine and Russell-Tyler-Ruthton. Belle Plaine pushed its state record to 21 starred performances and tied Anoka’s mark of nine consecutive starred festivals, while Russell-Tyler-Ruthton earned its second starred performance in three years and third overall.

Other Class A state qualifiers included Bagley, Providence Academy, Rushford-Peterson, Foley and Two Harbors. For Fergus Falls, the result turned a long stretch of strong subsection and section finishes into a state-level breakthrough that will hang over future seasons in the school’s theater department.