Photos by Jared Soares The Roanoke Times

A group of young actors and actresses performed "They Chose Me!" Thursday evening at William Fleming High School. The musical touches on themes including foster care, parental loss, gay adoption and multicultural families.

The cast members of "They Chose Me!" are between the ages of 10 and 19, except for Anette Lloyd, 26. The Fleming drawing and sculpture teacher was adopted as a youngster and portrays a counselor in the musical.

It's not central to the actor's craft to share traits with his character. After all, many of the great Shakespearean roles require killing another person.

But consider Anette Lloyd, the 26-year-old who plays the only adult in the local production of "They Chose Me!" a musical in which 10- to 19-year-olds represent adopted children telling their stories. Lloyd was adopted as a child, and she plays a central role in the play that opened Thursday at William Fleming High School.

Her personal life, much like that of Sarah Cook, the counselor she portrays, tells a lot about the struggles for acceptance and direction that many adopted children experience. It's a timely embodiment for National Adoption Awareness Month, which is being marked now.

"The play is very real," director Larry Van Deventer said. "It shows the ups and downs of adoption. There's love. There's anguish."

"They Chose Me!" is an amalgam of conversations that adoptees have with their counselor, played by Lloyd, touching on varying circumstances: foster homes, parental loss, gay adoption and multicultural families.

In the hallway outside Fleming's auditorium, local organizations set up tables Thursday so people could learn about the nuts and bolts of adoption. For example, a coordinator from Children's Home Society of Virginia laid out pamphlets about pregnancy counseling, temporary foster care and infant adoption. Lutheran Family Services of Virginia hung 11 posters with photos of children looking for a home. Among them, Clevon, a 14-year-old with a playful smile who likes Big Macs, the guitar and football; and Katie, a 12-year-old with pink cheeks who likes writing in her journal but doesn't like math.

They're real people. And so is Lloyd. She was adopted as an infant by a Roanoke emergency dispatcher and a city schoolteacher who raised her alongside an adopted sister, teaching the two to play the piano and to love theater.

When she was growing up she felt, like most other teenagers do, that she didn't fit in. It's because she didn't have her parents' blood, she thought. So, maybe Johnny Depp, the actor, was her biological father.

"When you're adopted, you can pretend you're from anybody," she said before the play's opening Thursday. "I thought, 'He's so talented, he's so cool ... yeah, I can be his kid.' You can pick the people you idolize."

Also when she was growing up, she was often asked impertinent questions such as, "Who's your real parent?"

"To that, I would just say, 'My mom and dad,' " she said. "I know what a parent is. It's the person who makes you clean your room and makes your supper, not just the person who carried you for nine months."

The characters in "They Chose Me!" experience similar things. In one song, "Angelina," a girl called Jane wonders about actress Angelina Jolie being her biological mother. And in "Not the Right Thing to Say," the whole cast sings about questions in poor form that people sometimes ask adoptive parents or their children.

But the closest parallel between fiction and reality inadvertently happened when the young actors, cast from schools everywhere between Botetourt County and Vinton, met for the first time in June. Lloyd, who teaches ceramics and drawing at Fleming, told the actors, all of whom were raised by their biological parents, that she was adopted and that anyone who had questions about adoption could ask her.

In the months of rehearsals, she said, she learned to be even more grateful for the sacrifices made by Al and Fran Martin, the parents she said made her believe her life had meaning.

She said, "For someone to see potential in your life before they even have you. ... You think, 'If they think highly of me, then maybe I'm supposed to do something meaningful in my life.' "

Indeed, the married daughter who now has a child of her own made Al and Fran Martin proud. Al Martin died suddenly of a ruptured brain aneurism in December, and when Fran Martin read the playbill on Thursday, she cried. In it, Lloyd dedicated her performance to them and wrote that her parents gave her "the best life imaginable."