It’s five nights before the first play of the school year for Coupeville High School’s drama club and Taryn Ludwig has the giggles.

“Focus people!” rings a commanding voice offstage.

Peg Tennant, the drama advisor at Coupeville, has been through this drill before and knows there’s a cure for contagious laughter.

Anticipation.

When the group that calls itself the CHS Wolf PAC Theatre Troupe inches closer to Friday night’s opening performance of “Fair Exchange,” the giggling will subside and the focus will become ever sharper.

“Thursday you start to panic,” senior Bella Cedillo said.

Once the lights dim and a hush is felt inside the Performing Arts Center at 7 p.m. Friday, it’s showtime.

“With the combination of eyes staring at you and the quietness backstage … it makes it so the goofiness is gone,” junior Sebastian Davis said. “We can focus on being our characters.”

Tennant, who’s mentored drama students at Coupeville since 1996, is intrigued by this group, particularly the junior class members who’ve been tight for years.

However, success to Tennant is defined by the experiences shared from the set painter to the actor with the most speaking lines.

“We are an ensemble,” she said. “We are not a star vehicle. Everyone’s important. The actors are not better than the techies or vice versa.

“We have three rules: Safety, respect and fun. You don’t have to like each other and be buddies outside of drama, but you need to be respectful. It works. You create a culture. We are family, with all the fun a family can bring.”

“Fair Exchange” is the first of two productions the theatre troupe will perform this school year with the second play, “Swing Fever,” happening in March.

There will be four performances, all starting at 7 p.m., happening Nov. 7, 8, 14 and 15.

Written by Kurtz Gordon, “Fair Exchange” is a comedy with suspense. It involves substituting male honor students to escort female honor students at two different high schools during the spring prom.

Except, the transition isn’t so smooth.

Miranda Kortuem, a junior at Coupeville, describes the play as “a student exchange arrangement gone wrong involving a spring prom and a felon.”

The felon is played by junior Sebastian Davis, whose sinister character is a departure from the usual “romantic guy” roles he’s played since middle school.

His schoolmates tease him about smiling too much onstage.

“Sebastian is really bad at making a smug look on his face,” Koruem said. “In the last act, he’s not supposed to smile.”

But everyone is smiling on this rehearsal night.

The troupe has been practicing for their performance since before the start of school in August.

“I love it, especially show week,” senior Amanda Hoesman-Foley. “The thrill you get is so great.”