It Worked!

I went to see the play last night, and it worked!

Scenes where no one was really reacting during rehearsal somehow came together, and the actors reacted. People who hadn't been convincing in their lines, were more convincing. And it worked as a play.

Yes, some lines were forgotten, but most people wouldn't have noticed because the other actors picked up and went on without getting flustered.

It's pretty cool, when you think that a bunch of high school students put together a pretty darned good production of a Shakespeare play in basically two weeks.

One thing I noticed looking at the program was that our students are from so many different academic backgrounds, different high schools (despite our being a fairly small community), home schooled. They worked well together, though.

And so many of them really put things together in the two weeks of camp; they began to think like actors, if they hadn't before, to think about how things work on stage, how to get audience reactions, how to interact with other actors. Very cool.

I did have one weirdness after the performance, though. One of the students who hangs around but wasn't in the play decided to tell me that the secret to Hamlet is that he's gay.

What does that mean? I think she was about to expound on some sort of psychopathology, but I cut her short with a historical question about what it could mean to be "gay" in an early modern play. And then I escaped.

There's a level of enthusiasm in SOME young actor types (similar to that in SOME ren faire types), that just weirds me out.

So now I'm off to ride my bike, with a level of enthusiasm guaranteed to totally weird out most people.