As I Like It
- emotionality warning -
My friend Elizabeth took me to the USF's As You Like It this evening. I got back perhaps half an hour ago. As she stood up from her wheelchair and began scooting into the passenger side of her SUV I started crying to myself. I think the emotional ambience of the theater overwhelmed me. The cast were brilliant. The crew were skilled and unobtrusive. The audience started out a little cold, but warmed up quickly after intermission. The play is as it always was - profound and funny with a cripplingly contrived ending.
I was enthralled by it. The whole experience was immersive, even the silly Irish accents of the concessions serving wenches. The evening darkness closed us all in, and the stage lights and grounds lanterns made us all part of it, all some panorama visible only from the tip of the tongue-like stage. It was just people in costumes, some vines and twigs and a couple of props, but it felt like witchcraft. We watched their barely made up faces, their shoulders and shoes. They wove some kind of illusion in dance and suddenly As You Like It was not just a comedy, it was a Romance in the literary sense.
And I wondered, keeping my half-cheerful, half-angrily opinionated conversation with Elizabeth all the while, if I am just hungry for drama. I know people hate it. I know how drama connotes immaturity and irrationality. I know that for many people, it causes stress which interferes with all the drama-free-ness which makes them happy. Drama has a place. I think we all need it sometimes, and tonight was my fix.
My friend Elizabeth took me to the USF's As You Like It this evening. I got back perhaps half an hour ago. As she stood up from her wheelchair and began scooting into the passenger side of her SUV I started crying to myself. I think the emotional ambience of the theater overwhelmed me. The cast were brilliant. The crew were skilled and unobtrusive. The audience started out a little cold, but warmed up quickly after intermission. The play is as it always was - profound and funny with a cripplingly contrived ending.
I was enthralled by it. The whole experience was immersive, even the silly Irish accents of the concessions serving wenches. The evening darkness closed us all in, and the stage lights and grounds lanterns made us all part of it, all some panorama visible only from the tip of the tongue-like stage. It was just people in costumes, some vines and twigs and a couple of props, but it felt like witchcraft. We watched their barely made up faces, their shoulders and shoes. They wove some kind of illusion in dance and suddenly As You Like It was not just a comedy, it was a Romance in the literary sense.
And I wondered, keeping my half-cheerful, half-angrily opinionated conversation with Elizabeth all the while, if I am just hungry for drama. I know people hate it. I know how drama connotes immaturity and irrationality. I know that for many people, it causes stress which interferes with all the drama-free-ness which makes them happy. Drama has a place. I think we all need it sometimes, and tonight was my fix.
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