There’s been Rogers and Hammerstein and Kander and Ebb.

There’s even been Siegfried and Roy and Rocky and Bullwinkle.

Right now in Lynchburg’s theater scene, it’s all about Harris and Hart, as E.C. Glass and Heritage high schools come together for “Loving,” a special add-on production to both school’s seasons that opened Wednesday and runs for four performances.

Last year, Larry Hart, director of Heritage’s Pioneer Theatre, pitched an idea to Tom Harris, who directs the theater program at E.C. Glass: a joint collaboration of “Loving,” a play based on the story behind the landmark civil rights case Loving v. Virginia, which legalized interracial marriage across the country.

The play, he told Harris, not only features a Virginia story, but it would give their students a chance to better understand an event in recent U.S. history and the implications it has on life today.

Although Hart says the schools collaborated during Lynchburg City Schools’ summer theater program in the 1990s, “Loving,” which was also the subject of a 2016 feature film, is the first joint production Glass and Heritage have worked on during the school year.

Hart says the decision to team up came about naturally when he realized he had the perfect student to play the female lead, Mildred, but not one for her husband, Richard, as many of his male actors participate in spring sports.

Richard Loving, a white man, and Mildred Jeeter, a black woman, married on June 2, 1958, in Washington D.C., only to be arrested five weeks later for violating the Racial Integrity Act of 1924, which made interracial marriage illegal in the commonwealth of Virginia.

According to Mildred Loving’s 2008 obituary in The New York Times, Virginia was one of more than 24 states to have such laws.

“It even says in the script that the U.S. was the only country that still had anti-interracial marriage laws after World War II,” says Heritage senior Crystal Haley, who plays Mildred Loving. “If you think about it not being that long ago —”

“It’s kind of, like, surprising,” adds Holden Wakefield, the Richard to Haley’s Mildred, who is in his final year at E.C. Glass.

With the help of the American Civil Liberties Union, the Lovings, who escaped jail time by agreeing to leave Virginia for at least 25 years, appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.

On June 12, 1967, the Supreme Court overturned the Virginia law, effectively striking down the last remaining segregation laws — those banning interracial marriage — throughout the country.

The production of “Loving,” which documents the events of this landmark case, comes at the tail end of both schools’ theater seasons.

Hart and his crew closed “The Crucible” about a month ago, while Harris has jumped into rehearsals straight from “The Matchmaker,” which finished its run a mere two weeks ago.

Because of this, Hart says the cast will only have had about three to four weeks of rehearsal time.

Despite the rush job, Haley and Wakefield already have the rhythm of a married couple in their dynamic. During an interview at the end of rehearsal last week, they banter back and forth, crack jokes, reminisce about the good old days and build on each other’s sentences.

This familiarity dates back to the seniors’ time in the theater program at Paul Laurence Dunbar Middle School for Innovation, something Haley says is true of most of “Loving’s” cast, which, like the leads, is made up of a combination of students from both schools.

While Glass and Heritage may be cross-town rivals on the football field or basketball court, this doesn’t translate to the school’s theater programs, Harris says. The students continue to support each other, attending each other’s shows and seeing their competition performances at the Virginia Theatre Association’s (VTA) annual conference, Hart adds.

Meshing a cast from two schools and working together have come quite easily for Harris and Hart, who each bring a different directorial approach to the piece. As a former dancer and choreographer, Harris approaches a story from the movement side, while Hart, who writes plays, looks at blocking to serve the script as closely as possible.

“We make a good combination,” Hart says. “If I can serve the needs of the script, give it to him and give it a bit of a flow, then we would have a hell of a [production].”

Working on “Loving” has been much more exploratory and collaborative between the directors and their students, the Heritage director adds. On more than one occasion, he has incorporated a cast member’s suggestion into the production.

The biggest challenge of the joint production has actually been the stages themselves.

“Loving” is being performed inside E.C. Glass’ black box theater, but at Heritage, it’s being staged outside in the courtyard. Heritage has an elevated stage, Glass does not. Glass has a center partition and side walls while Heritage only has a partition.

This means elements of the staging will not directly translate from one location to the other, but the directors and their cast, who adapt performances when they travel for VTA and Virginia High School League competitions, are used to tweaking productions to fit a space, says Harris.

It’s “not so intimidating, it’s just trying to get the set pieces and the props and all that thrown in together,” Haley says.

As they get ready for the curtain to rise on their final production in high school, Wakefield and Haley are finding the connections between Loving v. Virginia and life in 2018, exactly what Hart hoped his cast would discover when he mentioned the play to Harris.

“I have a Hispanic boyfriend and we walk in the mall together and we get dirty looks from people,” Haley says. “I have friends who are in relationships with African-Americans and they talk about the looks that they get, the racial slurs and slanders that they get still.”

Wakefield says he also receives pressure to date within his race.

“I’ve been told, ‘I think you should marry a white girl,’” he says. “I’m like, ‘Why?’ They don’t really give me a good answer.”

The themes of the play are still relevant in 2018; especially when it comes to LGBTQ rights, Haley says.

Now that they’ve found the connections, Haley and Wakefield hope their audience will too.

“I hope they go home and just think about it,” he says.

“I hope they are impacted in a way that they would encourage others —,” Haley begins before trailing off.

Wakefield finishes for her: “Encourage other people to marry who they love.”