Students Perform A Midsummer Night’s Dream

While sleep might be an important element in William Shakespeare’s play A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the audience of the EHS-performed version was kept wide awake by an energetic cast of Eudora students.

The play was performed on Feb. 21-22 by a cast and crew of about 50 students and drew an audience of roughly 400 people. The members of the performance included 30 EHS actors, 10 students on the tech crew, and nine elementary students. Also, senior Mason Kelso was a student director under the guidance of English teacher Shannon Pickett.

The play was anything but new to Pickett. She has performed in the play herself. In addition, she has taught the play a number of times in her sophomore English classes, so many students were already familiar with the play.

She said, “The sophomores always read it; it’s been a lot of fun in class. I have personally performed in the ballet version of the play, so based on my personal performance experience and teaching it in class, I started to create a vision of the play at EHS.”

Because of her background in dance, the play choice was a natural fit for Pickett. “Adding in the chorus, the younger elementary school kids as fairy/dancers and making the lead fairies more of a dancing role allowed me to incorporate my dance knowledge. Since most of the actors had already studied the play in class, they understood their roles better than just coming into the play cold,” she added.

The very dedicated cast and crew practiced for eight weeks leading up to the play. Pickett was impressed with the dedication her students put forth in making a very complicated production come together.

She mentioned that dedication when she said, “I was initially concerned about students memorizing their lines and getting to the heart of the comedic aspects of the acting. As the weeks went by, I realized that this had the potential to be a really good show. Tech week went amazingly well. Usually you have one bad night where everything falls apart, but we had consistently good practices which helped everyone to go into the performances with confidence. That vision that I had years ago came to fruition; I couldn’t have been more proud of the students!”

Although the play has finally come to a conclusion, the experience was one that everyone involved will “dream” about for a long time to come.