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Sacramento Country Day School

Mission In Action—Live Creatively - Our Own Jane McGinnes

Mission In Action—Live Creatively - Our Own Jane McGinnes

Jane McGinnes brings incredible energy to Country Day and as our Middle & High School Drama Teacher, her work embodies our mission to live creatively. Before becoming a teacher, Jane worked as an actor in the UK, touring schools with educational plays, and taking original theatre pieces to The Edinburgh Fringe Festival. A highlight of Jane’s acting career was spending two years touring Europe, the Middle East, and Japan; she played Ralph in an all-female version of Lord of the Flies and then Lady Macduff and Witch Three in a production of Macbeth. 

During Covid, she embarked on a Master’s in Creative Writing where her focus was scriptwriting. It was a desire to write plays for middle school students that prompted that focus. Every summer she searches for plays for students to perform, and with a long list of criteria, the search is often quite challenging. She looks for a play with just the right balance of drama and comedy, a large cast of characters, it needs to be appropriate for young actors and audiences, and preferably have some depth to it. So last summer instead of poring over online catalogues and play websites, she finally began crafting her own play that checked all those boxes. She wanted to explore the different influences that a young person encounters throughout middle school and her script developed around the “hero’s journey.” Influencers was born, and was onstage last week receiving fantastic reviews from students and adults alike. 

Jane shares that, “once in rehearsal, my students became creative collaborators, making suggestions and developing parts of the script. They were genuinely excited to be part of the process, which made the whole endeavor so much more rewarding for me.”