A Night at the Theatre

Going to the production of A Midsummer Night's Dream in the fall of my senior year was very meaningful.  I had never been on a class field trip like is offered by some teachers, so going on a trip with Mr. Kiczek and the class was a new experience.  The dinner at Ollie's Chinese restaurant was totally appropriate seeing as how we were going to see a play written by an Englishman in the sixteenth century.  Sarcasm aside, it was a great chance to get to know my classmates better.
But more seriously, the production was a memorable night.  I had one very specific expectation of what the play was going to look like as I entered the theatre: the production of the same play in the 1989 movie Dead Poets Society.  I expected trees and flowery set designs.  I expected gentle music and the sounds of birds chirping in the woods.  I expected somebody who resembled Neil Perry (Robert Sean Leonard) to be playing Puck, looking like a happy little woodland creature.

Instead, the music sounded like Tarzan, the set design and props were nonexistent, and, frankly, Puck scared me.  I was confused as to how this could possibly be A Midsummer Night's Dream and wondered if the next two hours of my life were going to be wasted.  By the end, I had laughed a lot and understood more about the play than I ever could have learned by just reading it.  I had forgotten about the fact that it wasn't "traditional Shakespeare" and had been thoroughly entertained--certainly not time wasted.  I was surprised at myself.  I discovered through the performance just exactly why Shakespeare is still acted out in theaters around the world in the year 2015.  The same words can still get a laugh out of an audience.  I don't use the words 'doth,' 'art,' and 'whence' in my daily conversations, but coming from the mouths of the actors in the play, it was genuinely funny.  I'll have a lot of memories from high school, but seeing this 400 year old play on a September evening in a dark little theatre will certainly be a moment I'll look back on and say, "That experience was worthwhile."