Drama coach Kelliann Blackburn spends weeks coordinating rehearsals, set building and costume production when the Whitefish High School drama club brings a script to life on stage. Then on opening night, she hands over the play to her cast and crew.

When the cast is ready she flicks the lights and watches from the edges, moving between each side of the auditorium and then upstairs. At intermission she checks in backstage, but then returns to her pacing.

“Once the show has started, it’s theirs,” she said. “That is what helps them raise the bar, because they know my expectations are that this is your play. We built it together, but then I’m done and there’s nothing more I can do.”

Blackburn is stepping down after 19 years with the program serving as assistant and head drama coach. In that time she’s organized 27 productions and led the drama troupe to back-to-back state championships.

The evolution of a play from script to stage is what Blackburn will miss most.

“Starting out with something so raw and a group of 15 kids reading a script in a cold band room,” she said. “To tearing apart the language and helping them understand the characters, and then watching it transform to this magic on stage.”

And the chaos and stress that comes with making that magic happen.

“I’m going to miss the lead’s dress zipper breaking the night before we open and running around the next morning to get it fixed,” she said. “I’m going to miss hemming dresses with duct tape. I’m going to miss feeding soda crackers to the cast member backstage because he has the flu, but he’s there for the show.”

Blackburn will continue teaching at Whitefish High, including instructing a drama class and coaching track. She said she will remain involved with the students, but has decided it’s time to try something new beyond coaching drama.

It was during Blackburn’s first year of teaching that Nancy Nye recruited her to work with the drama club. Blackburn didn’t have any experience, but she signed on anyway.

Blackburn never looked back.

She would also eventually go on to start a drama program at the middle school and take over as head coach of the high school program.

“That first year as a new head coach I was going down the hallways begging kids to be in the play,” she said. “Now, I’m building in extra parts in the plays. I hate having to cut kids.”

The drama club puts on a play each fall and spring. During the spring the group takes a shortened version of their production to compete at the Montana State Thespian Festival. Whitefish has brought home top honors at the state competition the last two years.

The 2013 competition remains a highlight for Blackburn. The drama group spent about five weeks preparing their performance of “The Laramie Project.” The play centers around a small town’s reaction to the 1998 murder of 21-year-old Matthew Shepard, a gay University of Wyoming student who was found outside Laramie, Wyo., tied to a fence, beaten and unconscious. He died five days later.

“For five years I’ve gone to the festival and the adjudication was not always pleasant,” she said. “I’ll never forget standing there and having the adjudicators have nothing negative to say. They said ‘it was the most powerful performance they had seen.’”

She still remembers the standing ovation the drama group received, and her students’ tears that followed because they knew they had just pulled off something remarkable.

The drama club followed the state competition as it always does by performing the full length version of the play two weeks later at home. The play has not always been well-recieved at high schools around the country with school districts banning the play or groups protesting performances.

“I’m most proud of ‘The Laramie Project,’” she said. “It’s such a powerful play with such an important message and the community of Whitefish accepted it. The response was overwhelming positive.”

Blackburn selected the play, in part, because of the timeliness. Later that same spring the Whitefish Theatre Co. brought the epilogue “The Laramie Project: Ten Years Later” to the local stage.

Many of the high school students have grown up in local theater productions for Whitefish Theatre Co. or Alpine Theatre Project before they enter the drama club. While that gives them a great skill level, it also means the drama club plays have to be challenging.

“‘Laramie Project’ was not an easy play for the kids — there were some difficult things they had to say and act, but they believed in the message and it showed,” she said “High school kids want to do plays with characters that have dimension and have a bite to it. They want to play characters that are outside themselves.”