What a night!

After a long, tiring Friday it felt wonderful to know that we had put on a solid group production and that all of the struggles and adversity our group experienced during this semester didn’t hold us back from producing a successful Act 4.

While waiting for the students to arrive, Molly, Allison and I assisted Dr. Bezio and the rest of our classmates with setting up props and taking care of other last minute details. We also decided who in our group would play the fairies Cobweb, Peaseblossom, and Mustardseed, and asked Dr. Bezio to give us the appropriate stage make up respective to our assigned fairy role.

When the John Marshall students showed up, we were told that one of the students could not make the production, so we needed to find another Egeus. Thankfully, Oliver offered his acting services and took on that role for us. For those students who wanted it, Dr. Bezio put on stage make up and it became clear that they were super excited to get the show started!

The only other major hiccup we had occurred when one of the students had to leave before we went on stage because she was scheduled to work. I believe she thought that we would finish earlier than we expected to finish, so her father had to come pick her up mid-show. Although we were a bit frustrated, we were more concerned that she was so upset about having to leave and wanted to make sure she was okay. We made the necessary character adjustments, and effectively diffused the situation: Ms. Ramsay got to participate in the play!

While waiting for the show to begin, we got to spend some time sitting with the students and Ms. Ramsay. It was nice to have the time to talk about something other than the production, and really get to know more about these students who we worked with a large part of the semester.

The show turned out to be a large success. It was entertaining to watch the other acts and see how everything came together for them on stage, knowing some of the trials and triumphs we heard about other groups during class. Everyone gave their best effort and it was so great to see different age groups come together to put on one show. I felt so proud of our group, especially after we struggled so much to have committed students. It was extremely rewarding to see how well all of our hard work payed off this semester, and you could tell the students loved every minute of it –That was the best part of the whole experience.