Midsummer on the Mount

I usually attempt to speak for myself and none other, but I cannot help but feel as if our time spent at St. Mary's on the Mount touched on some fundamental joy(s) of why it is we do this job of acting.

We have become very practiced at the performing of A Midsummer Night's Dream (repetition, people of the internet, might make anyone good at anything, if they practice it as often as we do this show), so the performing of it has become, for us, as much an exercise in voyeurism as it is a theatrical one. Or maybe that is what this job cannot help but be, especially within the constraints of this company's MO; when we say we can see you, we don't just mean when we're talking to you, and it's often when we're not talking at all that we get the most candid view.

One of my favorite activities as a passive, non-speaking stage presence, in fact, is to check audience responses to the jokes I've been seeing/enjoying for the better part of our time together. Watching people laugh at the polished bits of comic brilliance that constitute the Play Within a Play is probably my favorite part of my work day

So, to the matter of Mary: here we are, on a gorgeous roadside campus made up of the best kind of conflation of contemporary architectural efficiency with the looming elegance of stone-faced monastic aesthetic. It almost sneaks up on you, really. You've just passed Thurmont (a footnote on a side-scroll-landscape of American agri-monotony), and suddenly it just pops up from the fields: a golden Madonna overlooking the welfare of a campus of breathtakingly gorgeous students (no, seriously, it must be something in the food because all of these people were just plain pretty) , all wandering around what looks like the Google Campus's take on an abbey.

Like I said: Elegant.

Anyway, not withstanding the simpler joys of looking out into a sea of pretty people, doing Midsummer for these folks (three nights in a row, even) put me in a mind to consider what a bizarre and pleasant (and bizarrely pleasant) life I get to live while on the road. I get to do what I love for a living; live with people whose company I genuinely enjoy; move across the aforementioned agri-monotony with a tourist's appreciation for beauty (I mean, honestly, what excuse would I have had to visit any of these places if not through work?); and I get to meet the students and enthusiastic minds of the industry in which I'm trying so hard to keep my footing. And I'm getting paid!

It is a good time to be alive, people of the internet, and I'm glad that I get to talk about it with such a persistent grin on my face.

Thanks for reading, and we hope to see you soon.

--Daniel Stevens
(Cleomenes and Florizel in The Winter’s Tale; Florio in ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore; Theseus and Mustardseed in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.)