FREEPORT — Freeport High School playwrights Angus Macdonald and Logan Freeman hope to make history Friday.

With a 28-person carnival of characters, the two seniors will travel to Yarmouth for state competition after placing first regionally with their play, “Carnival of Curiosity,” in the Maine Drama Festival’s annual one-act play competition on March 9 and 10.

In the competition’s decades-long history, Freeport Drama director Tim Ryan said, the top spot has yet to go to a student-written play.

The feeling, Freeman said, is high stress.

“Being one of two (student-written plays) at regionals was high-stress alone,” Freeman said.

But that stress is tinged with the excitement of producing a show that’s entirely new.

“We’re going up against ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ and ‘Antigone,’” Freeman said. “But that has been done before and this hasn’t — it’s cool, it’s exciting.”

The play, which tells the story of a early 20th-century circus struggling to draw crowds, started out in something of an epiphany.

“We wanted to write something for a large cast,” Macdonald said.

“He came to me one day in study hall and just said: ‘One-act, carnival,’” Freeman said.

With just over a month of collaborative writing, the duo had something workable but hardly complete.

The day before the play’s first curtain call on March 1, the crew decided to change the ending.

“It’s not unheard of to go through eight to 10 endings,” Ryan said. “That’s the biggest pain of the whole thing.”

Pain, yes. But gain, too.

After casting, Freeman said, the play took other unexpected turns from the script he and Macdonald had written.

“When you have a set script, you have to follow that script, but here we can adapt the roles to fit the person,” Freeman said. “ For one of our leads, played by Storme Charette, he’s awesome at piano, so we wrote that into the show.”

In fact, the piano opens the show and Charette’s live playing provides a soundtrack as the carnival’s acrobatics and drama wheels on.

With both writers playing important roles in the production — Freeman in the lead as the ringleader Lester Polanski and Macdonald directing — they said the play still offers more room for change, growth and learning than with a “canned” play.

“Nobody’s ideas are off limits, and everyone feels pretty comfortable sharing what they think would be a nice touch to the show,” Macdonald said.

Even for the show’s leaders, Macdonald said, the level of involvement is higher.

“I feel like I’ve touched every aspect of putting on a show,” Macdonald said.

From writing to casting to a lesson in clowning from the Kora Shriners, Macdonald said he’s never been more involved in the production of a play, and that the feeling of collaboration is strong.

“It’s really touching how the other students have gotten behind it,” Macdonald said.

That level of involvement and learning is unique to a production built from the ground up, Ryan said.

“When I produced my first play that I wrote at 30, it’s a big learning experience — not just as far as putting on the show but as an overall life lesson,” Ryan said. “You can do anything if you put your mind to it.”

That lesson, he said is what he hopes the students come away with, “even if they don’t write again.” And Macdonald said that’s the most important thing.

“Even if we get dead last, I’ll still be proud because — it’s like, we’re the only ones who wrote something here,” Macdonald said. “This isn’t some other director’s vision.”

With that, Ryan said he expects a challenge at the state level.

“We’re the dark horse because we are student-written,” Ryan said. “There was a stigma when we first started doing these.”

That was nine years ago. Freeman and Macdonald said they feel the reception about student-written plays is changing.

Macdonald said there has been increasing community support for student-written plays and that the idea is not out of reach.

“A lot of people I know have said they might write a show and I’ve told them, ‘ That’s great! Do it!’" Freeman said. “‘You can. Anyone can.’”

The Freeport High School cast will compete for the Class B state title — for schools with enrollments of fewer than 550 — on Friday at Yarmouth High School, starting at 6 p.m.

¦ A SPECIAL ENCORE performance of “Carnival of Curiosity” is scheduled to begin at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday at the Freeport Performing Arts Center, 30 Holbrook St. Admission is “pay-what-you-can” and will help fund costs of moving the play’s large set to Yarmouth this weekend for the statewide round of the Maine Drama Festival’s annual one-act play competition.

dfishell@timesrecord.com