I first heard of the play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead when I was quite young by seeing a copy of the script lying around the house from time to time.  I had no idea what it was about, and I never really cared to learn.  But when I was in twelfth grade, my AP English class read it right after reading Hamlet.  I absolutely loved it.  There are a few pieces of literature that just stand out to me in some way, and this is one of them.  Something about the realtionship between the title characters, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, spoke to me as familiar from the way I often relate with friends of mine.  I read the play in a matter of a few hours.  My father and I sat together and read it aloud.  He played roughly half of the parts and I played the other half.  I loved it.

 The play is a look at the events in Shakespeare’s Hamlet from the point of view of Hamlet’s two friends, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.

It is a rather existentialist play, so the dialouge is all very philosophical and macabre, but it’s also quite funny in places.  This spring, my father put on a production of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead at JCC, and in my opinion it was excellent.  (I’m allowed to be biased, aren’t I?)  The people in it were all well cast, the costumes and sets were gorgeous, it was quite funny, enough said.

I’m so glad it went well.  I do love the play, and I also had a lot of friends in the production, so I was happy to see them do it well.

Mostly in this post I wanted to share the pictures my mother took of the show.  You can see the rest at her flickrsite, http://www.flickr.com/photos/jenniferschlick

I leave you with a nugget of wisdom from the show: 

 ”Pirates could happen to anyone!”

Twelfth Night

I haven’t written in a while, but that’s because I have recently devoted my life to the school’s production of Twelfth Night. Alison and I stopped eating and sleeping properly for this show, and I skipped a number of music classes that take place at night.  We sewed costumes all night long and then took some back to our dorms and worked on them between classes and in whatever spare time we had.  We reported to the theatre before dinner started, so we survived on cereal and Luna bars for our sustenence.  We worked on costuming and makeup all night and did our homework in the small hours of the morning.  We sat in a cramped basement for hours bending our necks over sewing projects with the hair-spray smell floating around us.

And we loved it.

I am a HUGE Shakespeare fan.  Really.  I love Shakespeare.  That’s the reason I was so involved, but really I love theatre too.

Last night as we were sitting at the “post mortem” of the show, a discussion about what worked and what didn’t logisically, the power went out.  It happened across campus, but at the time we didn’t know that.  It was totally unexpected, because while it had stormed during the day, it was much calmer weather by then.  We were in almost complete darkness.

Some of those present attributed the phenomenon to Nancy, who I can only imagine is some kind of theatre ghost.  Some of the lights started flickering and making noise until our director, Siouxsie said
“Darn-it, Nancy, I am talking!”
At which point we got flashlights and continued with our discussion.

 It was sort of appropriate that at the end of our show the lights went out in the theatre.  Very neat.  Here is a definition I found of the Twelfth Night festival on dictionary.com at the encyclopedia section:

Crystal Reference Encyclopedia – Cite This Source

The evening of 5 January, the last evening of the 12 days of the traditional Christmas festival. It was formerly marked by particularly boisterous and anarchic festivities before the return to sober normality on Twelfth Day (Epiphany, 6 Jan).

Crystal Reference Encyclopedia, © Crystal Reference Systems Limited 2006

 Perhaps the lights going out was a symbol of the theatre returning “to sober normality”.

Here is a picture of the show that I stole from Catherine’s facebook album.

From left are the characters of The Priest, Malvolio, Orsino, Viola, and Fabian.  I helped with Orisno and Viola’s pants, I’ll have you know.