Excited chatter filled the hall outside of Chapin’s Black Box Theater (BBT) as the audience awaited the premiere of this year’s Winter Play. Inside, actors, crew members and the writer-director made their final preparations before taking the stage.
This year’s play, “American Hero,” was a special treat for the Chapin community as it was written and directed by Class 12 student Celestine Deaton, as part of her Berendsen Scholars project. She is an avid writer across the disciplines of prose, screenwriting and playwriting and has long dreamed of pursuing this project.
Celestine has always been a storyteller, but it was in Class 7, during the Covid-19 pandemic that she began to write more prolifically and crafted her first TV script. “Some people baked bread or dyed their hair … I got into writing,” Celestine shared. “Everyone found a hobby [and] I stuck with my thing.” She spent much of that school year creating original works of fiction, and then in Class 8 discovered playwriting during Drama classes.
Chapin’s Drama program opened this creative avenue for Celestine, who has since written several plays, with one performed off-broadway and another at a Chapin Upper School Play Festival. She was also selected as a playwright for The 24 Hour Plays at The New Victory Theater in 2024. The program, adapted for students, matched students with theater professionals to write and perform an original show in 24 hours. She described the experience as “Totally insane! It was such a fun process and if given the opportunity I’d totally do it again. I was given a playwright mentor [and a director and three actors]. I got to sit in on their rehearsal and it was really cool to see someone directing professionally with professional actors. It was a total whirlwind.” Celestine also shared how director Kylie Brown’s work influenced her own directing choices when working on the set of “American Hero,” and informed her tone when giving feedback and her experimentation with the actors’ blocking and delivery choices.
The spark that became “American Hero” flared in April 2025 when Celestine read “Jack Ruby, the Many Faces of the Oswald Assassin,” a biography about the man who killed President Kennedy’s assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald. Just a few lines in author Danny Rothfinger’s book created vivid imagery that stuck in Celestine’s imagination — which is how she often finds inspiration for her writing projects.
“Usually it’s in just a couple lines of dialogue where I find a nugget [of inspiration] for a show, or maybe it’s a couple of images, and I think, this is something that would be really cool to capture on stage.” For this particular play, the inspiration “was a recorded conversation between Jack Ruby and a man who came to visit him named Rabbi Solomon.” After the Rabbi tries to lift Ruby’s spirits by encouraging him to smile, Ruby asks if he really believes that a smile would cheer him up. Ruby smiles and then lets it fall. That image remained in Celestine’s mind and, months later, would become the basis for her play.
“American Hero” spans the years before, during and immediately after Jack Ruby fatally shot Oswald. The play opens to reporters badgering the prosecution and defense counsel after a court hearing for Ruby’s case, letting the audience know that this is a capital offense and that tensions are high. The play weaves back and forth through time, jumping backwards to provide additional details about Jack’s life and temperament, and forward to show how little public opinion had changed in the decades after the case closed.
Celestine’s carefully crafted play explores the complexity of the human experience and the consequences of our choices. She focused the narrative on Ruby’s humanity, looking at him as a whole person, not only his bad actions. While this layered approach doesn’t erase his crimes, it contextualizes him and encourages the audience to reflect upon how they form judgements.
As the piece progresses, the audience learns of Ruby’s complicated relationship with friend (and possible love interest) George Senator; the steadfast support offered by his brother, Earl; a fame-seeking, big-shot lawyer intent on escaping Ruby’s capital punishment through a temporary insanity plea; and the frustratingly biased attitudes of the case’s prosecutor and judge. Although the audience knows Ruby is guilty, they don’t know why he did it. Celestine takes care to introduce the main character through the sympathetic eyes of Earl and George, but as the case unfolds, details of Jack’s intense temper and violent outbursts, followed by questionable remorse, darken his character. Slowly, his erratic behavior builds, hallucinations begin and a claim of insanity, once seeming like a false defense, suddenly feels more like the truth.
Even with evidence of an unstable state of mind, Jack Ruby loses his case. As his lawyer pursues an appeal, the audience is torn between sympathy as they witness Ruby slip further from reality, and concern as they grapple with the truth of his violent tendencies and admission of guilt. A moment of hope appears for Ruby as the defense prepares for a second attempt at freeing Ruby and to secure an unbiased jury, yet a sudden illness reveals undiagnosed, terminal cancer. Ruby passes before his appeal is brought to trial.
Jack Ruby left a legacy of sadness in his wake. Celestine captured this in a short and ill-attended service where her cast sang a beautiful and heartbreaking rendition of “Ose Shalom.” Refocusing the play on Celestine’s original spark of interest, the audience is brought back to the night of President Kennedy’s assassination — the calm before the storm. The play closes following a simple scene where Jack Ruby and George Senator sit in their living room, each reading a book, sharing tea and listening to the radio, presumably about to hear the news.
Although inspired by real events and people, “American Hero” departs from the facts. To capture the story she wanted to tell, Celestine decided to leave pieces of Ruby’s life out of the narrative and add or exaggerate some characters and elements of the story. Celestine conducted an incredible amount of research to write this play. “This is the first time that I have written historical fiction. I don’t think I’m going to be writing [in the genre again] for a while because it is hard and I learned through this process that I like to make stuff up. I tried not to, but some things in the play are just my invention because I thought they held the story better.”
Celestine also wrote several pieces exploring themes covered in this play, like grief and death, in preparation for this narrative. She worked closely with her advisor, Chapin’s Technical Director and Upper School Drama Teacher Robert Thaxton-Stevenson, throughout the play’s creation and production. He helped to edit and revise the script, and offered staging advice and thoughtful answers to her questions. He also gave Celestine freedom to create her own lighting cues, which she described as “a superpower.” She noted, “That was really cool because I’ve never gotten to design technical cues before.”
Reflecting on the production of “American Hero,” Celestine shared, “This has helped me to improve so much as a director and as a writer. It’s been really fun.” Something that stuck out to her was “the way that [the] cast really grew into their characters over the process. It was really cool to see them experiment with saying lines differently, or walking differently, or pitching their voice down, along with trying to figure out exactly where their characters were at emotionally in all of the scenes. All of those things were stuff that evolved over time, and it was really cool to see everyone's growth.”
Celestine continues to write constantly, following her passion and talent. In addition to her work for the stage and screen, she has written her first novel and plans to pursue writing screenplays and directing when she heads to college in the fall.
She hopes that other Chapin students will be inspired to pursue similar Berendsen Scholar projects. In fact, it was another Chapin student’s Individual Study project (the program that ran from 1977-2025 that was the basis for the now year-long Berendsen Scholars program) that influenced Celestine. Written and directed by Claire Lazar ’21 in 2022, the play “Judith” is set in Italy in the 1600s and tells the true story of Artemisia Gentileschi. “When I was in Class 8, there was a wonderful playwright, Claire. I got the chance to see her play and was really inspired. I knew then that I wanted to do something similar.” Now, as a senior, Celestine has become that talented playwright who will no doubt inspire her peers.
