Join Eagle Rock School this July for a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Allow yourself to travel into a world of fairies and mischief, love and laughter, and get swept up in the dream.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a classic Shakespearian comedy complete with love triangles, mistaken identity, fairies, goblins and magical mischief. The play begins in Athens, where Hermia (Cara Burns) is scolded by her father because she will not marry the man he has chosen for her. Distraught, Hermia and her lover, Lysander (Hernando Martinez), flee to the forest to be together. In the forest, the fairy king, Oberon (Omar Knight), and his helper, Puck (Povi Chidester), cause chaos by anointing the lovers’ eyes with magic. Others are caught in the confusion, and the fairies watch the shenanigans they created in the moonlit woods. In the end, all that was wrong is turned right again; the lovers awake in a haze to find love, although unsure of what was a dream and what was reality.
During the last ten weeks, sixteen students have worked hard to memorize lines, block their scenes, and learn how to interact with each other on stage. Students have created and developed their characters and can now speak and understand Shakespearean English. Robin Harrell, a 16-year-old student from Chicago, plays Helena. She explained, “I’ve loved finding out what the words and phrases have meant. Now with a better understanding of the text, I can interpret other parts of the play without being in that scene.”
The same students are also working as the crew of the production, gaining experience with costumes, scenery design, painting, make-up and musical aspects of the play. They have been hard at work building and painting the set and stage to set the ambiance, finding appropriate music to enhance certain aspects of the play, as well as working within a theme to find the perfect costumes. A designated class worked on the set during the first five weeks. Melvina Walker-Moore, an 18 year-old student also from Chicago, is not only acting in the play, she also worked in the set-building class. Melvina described her experience in this way: “We first read and analyzed the play so that we could come up with an image of how we felt the set
should look. We then made sure what we wanted for the set was realistic, worked on scaling it, and also worked on the colors.”
Performances of A Midsummer Night’s Dream will be held at Eagle Rock School’s outdoor amphitheater at 2750 Notaiah Road in Estes Park. The play will be performed on Thursday, July 23rd and Friday, July 24th at 7:30pm. There will also be a matinee at 2 pm on Saturday, July 25th. General admission is $5.00. All money earned will grow directly to the Graduate Fund helping students gain higher education when they graduate. Please bring chairs or blankets to make your seating more comfortable.
For more information about the play, visit us at http://erspresents.tk