A Midsummer Night’s Dream: An Actor’s First-hand Account

By Sean Scott (Reporter ‘25)

Our fall production this year was Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. It was a lively and humorous production, and I enjoyed being a part of it. Auditions were on the first two full days of school. The director, Kyle Metzger, had pre-selected a mixture of monologues and excerpts of group scenes for us to read and act out for our auditions. We did not need to prepare anything in advance for the auditions; they were completely spontaneous. The cast list was shared the following Saturday, and I was excited to see that I was cast as Theseus!

Rehearsals were typically after school from 3:30 - 5:30, and each rehearsal was devoted to one or two scenes. We would read through the scenes first and later work on staging and gestures. It was a straightforward process, and every new scene staged was good progress. Within a few weeks, we had a good idea of the staging of each scene, and the focus shifted to memorizing lines and conveying the meaning of the lines through the way we were acting. As we got closer to the show, rehearsals became longer, especially during tech days. Tech days are when the actors practice running the show on the stage in order for the stage crew and other tech people (lights, mics, etc.) to coordinate with the actors about what needs to happen behind the scenes. After all of the collective time and effort that was put into the play, the time arrived to bring it all together for the preview on Thursday night.

Rehearsals were fun, but show nights definitely seemed to take the bonding and camaraderie of the cast up a notch. Our call was set for an hour and a half before the start of the show at 7:00 pm in order to leave sufficient time to get into costumes and run mic checks before the house opened at 6:30 pm. There were strong feelings of excitement at reaching the culmination of the past six weeks of work. We were all very supportive of each other, and the positive energy of us being there for each other made the shows that much more successful. It seemed like the audiences enjoyed it, too, and every laugh or chuckle was a win. We had a blast on stage, particularly during the last scene which was absolutely hilarious, and during bows when the stress was over and it was time to celebrate!

Thus concluded our production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The ending of a production is always bittersweet, but I am looking forward to the next amazing chapter of drama at FCS.