Arnold Public Schools closed out the fall semester celebrating another in a line of successes in One Act Play Production. The One Act Team brought home the Runner-Up Trophy from the State Competition held at the Johnny Carson Theater in Norfolk, December 10 – 12, 2025.
Arnold One Act has won the Class D-2 Championship in each year prior five years back to 2020, with a Runner-Up placing in 2019.
Coaches Debby Moninger and Tonya Welch spoke with KCNI/KBBN about the success of the Arnold One Act team recently, noting that the kids actually have more experience in play production than they did this year in their first year as a coaching team, along with Holly Remund.
Moninger and Welch said that, as with any competitive activity, Arnold’s success does not come without significant effort. The team conducted multiple workshops featuring everyone from Arnold play production alumni and former coaches to the Lincoln-based Blixt Arts Lab team behind Not Too Far Distant, a production centered around the experiences of a World War II soldier presented around Veterans Day.
“They workshopped with us on our death scene and everything a lot, and on trying to get the emotion out of everything,” said Moninger. “They were phenomenal; it was a phenomenal play to watch.”
This season, the Arnold team performed “All For One”, an adaptation of story of the Three Musketeers, developed specifically for the group by the coaching team.
“We added some historical elements and then we tweaked it some for our actors to let them shine,” said Moninger. “We had a lot of guys this year so we want to make sure it was a guy heavy one and we want to make sure that it wasn’t one star.”
Moninger and Welch also extolled the support they receive throughout the Arnold Public School system.
“We’re very supported in all aspects of fine arts from one acts to speech to music, band and choir,” said Welch. “We’re working really hard to build from the ground up right now, focusing a lot on that elementary level and getting kids really interested and passionate about music and arts in general.”
According to Welch, this includes the introduction of elementary level stage production on small scale in lower grades. It is the renewal of a program run by prior music educator Berni Crow which is paying dividends now.
“I really contribute a lot of our current success at the one act level to the fact that the kids that we have now at the high school level were the elementary kids doing those stage productions with Berni in the past years,” said Welch.
Given the dedication and ongoing support of the school, coaches and students at Arnold, look for more success from the Central Nebraska play production powerhouse into the future.
