Final Post Show Reflection - Macbeth

My life feels so empty now, this play took up so much of my time and even though it was stressful I really do miss it. The reaction to the performance have all been really good with people saying they were amazed at what we were able to accomplish because of how difficult the text is but also because of how well it all worked. I've gotten praise for really hitting home the emotions and emotional transition from the beginning to the end, which I'm really proud of. I did, however, get several people telling me they honestly understood very little of the plot even though they enjoyed it! It's weird because to me the text seems so obvious now that i know this so well. I understand every word and its somehow weird to think that the audience doesn't. It does make sense though looking back at my own experience when i saw Macbeth in Stratford Upon Avon, where it was, even though i knew the play, sometimes difficult to to follow, so the reaction was expected. The fighting, I think, was definitely what brought this play to life and I'm so happy we added it unlike the play in Stratford. That first fight really set the stage for the audience to know this wasn't going to be just kids reciting lines from Shakespeare but an actual interesting performance.

My objectives for this activity for this activity were to overcome my fear of thinking i would not be able to perform a Shakespeare play for a high school audience and not have them writhing in their seats with boredom, and also to accomplish this feat! I was also hoping to learn about how a cast and crew can come together, moving past the actor as a singular unit, to create a dynamic and unified performance. I think overall we managed to put on an entertaining show and we definitely did the absolute best we could performing a play with extremely difficult English language to an audience where many members did not speak English as their first language. I also feel that all members of the cast and crew were able to work together to create a synergy which allowed to us impact the audience fully at all times. I also had so much fun with my cast and crew and the relationships i built with them made the entire experience worth it on their own. So in the respect I did feel that I reached my objectives and i'm happy with our final performances. There was the obvious difficulty of people not being able to understand the plot, and due to the language barrier, never being able to understand the lines no matter how well i presented them. I think that by putting on a definite spectacle we were able to keep the audience engaged visually and auditarily even if they didn't understand the exact lines that were being said. The elaborate fighting and costuming also allowed the audience to see characters advance and fall, which is the main plot of Macbeth. I learnt that anything is possible, and i remember myself sitting in the read through for this play thinking I could never learn all those lines, so accomplishing just that was truly amazing for me. The work ethic and discipline i learned from staying after school until 9:30 sometimes and still keeping up with my studying is extremely important for the rest of my life as it taught me time management and persistence even in the face of things looking impossible. I've definitely learned to value my free time, and not to waste it when I could be doing something productive.