Last weekend, Ward, a senior at Brattleboro Union High School, talked about acting in a one-woman show.
The biggest challenge for her has been simply memorizing the play.
"It's 80 pages long," she said. "Just this weekend I finished memorizing. I worked out a strategy that worked for me, but it was still time-consuming. I would read each paragraph, and then I would read it over and over again, each time trying to look at it less, until eventually I didn't have to look at it at all."
Ward has been involved in theater since she was a young child.
"I started at New England Youth Theatre when I was 9," she said. "Theater and music are really all I do. I'm in the chorus and the band here" -- she plays the saxophone -- "and I'm in Madrigals and Jazz Band."
At first she didn't get important roles.
"It's something you've got to work at," she said. "I did not get any big parts for a long time, but I stuck with it, and it wasn't until two years ago that I started getting parts that I was happier with. It's easy to give up if you don't get the lead in a show, but you get some experience, and if it's something that you're really interested in, it's worth working at."
Two years ago, she acted in Shakespeare's "The Winter'sTale"
"We did it based in Vermont, which was really cool," she recalled. "I was Hermione. She was the queen. Her husband thought she was cheating on him, so he had her imprisoned. She was pregnant at the time, so he had the baby sent off and killed."
But the play is actually a comedy," she said.
"The queen apparently dies, but in the end the king realizes that she was faking, and the baby lives -- everybody lives except one character who gets eaten by a bear -- it's that line 'Exit, pursued by a bear.'"
Ward said that she had never heard of "The Belle of Amherst," before Peter Gould suggested it to her.
"He does a show every year at NEYT in the fall, and since he's started doing that I've been in every one of his fall shows," she explained. "I'm the only actor who's been in every one, so since he's not doing another fall show this year, and he wanted to do a one-person show with me, we decided to do it now."
She said that she found her character interesting.
"She was very passionate, but a recluse -- she stayed in her house all the time," Ward said. "She was quite eccentric for the time period -- she was not religious, which was very uncommon at the time and was frowned -- upon. It's interesting how there are some paragraphs that are so fragmented emotionally -- she'll just switch from one thing to another, and it's kind of surprising.
"She stuck to her principles," Ward went on. "There's one scene where she's in a room with a group of girls who are becoming professed Christians; they rise once they've been saved. She's the only one left who's sitting -- and she never did become a Christian."
Ward said that she is planning to attend college next year, but not to major in theater.
"I'll probably do some acting in college, but not as a major," she commented. " I'm looking more toward education. I've been raised in it -- my mom's a teacher, a lot of my aunts are teachers, and I have a little sister who's 11 years younger. If I did education I would go into early education: having that experience with my sister has led me in that direction -- but I'm still deciding."
In the meantime, there's the show.
"I really like how you can just become someone else for a while," said Ward. "Usually what I like about it is the people involved; the cast, having fun with them onstage. It's been interesting this time because there are a lot of other people involved, but no one else is onstage with me. I still get the bonds that form during a show, but it's different."