Five minutes before the play was to start, sophomore Katy Su was backstage, feeling what is common to most actors. “Nervousness,” she said. “I think it is inevitable that you will be nervous for a show. I was mostly thinking about what I am going to do when I get on stage, what kind of people are going to come, getting into character, and preparing myself to go in every time with energy as my character.”

Katy plays Hermia in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Performed by sophomores and freshmen, the play opened on Wednesday, October 29, in the Black Box Theater and continues through Friday, October 31.

Shortly after the Wednesday show, Katy reflected amid a gathering of cast, crew, family, and friends in the lobby of the Nichols Center for Theater and Dance. “I feel relieved, but this is bittersweet, too,” she said. “I’m a sophomore, and next year will be going to Stage 1.” The casts of Stage 1 fall shows, produced in the Norris Ely Orchard Theater, are primarily juniors and seniors.

“I have made so many great memories here,” Katy continued, indicating the Black Box Theater, “and I constantly get reminded how great theater is.”

A Midsummer Night's Dream revolves around the wedding of Theseus and Hippolyta and has its share of mishaps, some comedic. The audience included the parents of sophomore twins Zieozi Olen (Helena) and Phoenix Olen (Bottom). “The joy of the [cast] is infectious,” their mom, Ngozi Bolin, said after the play. Their father, Jim, had a smile as big as the parts Zieozi and Phoenix played, each time they were on stage.

“I feel small, I feel very small,” Jim said about watching the twins on stage. “What they are able to accomplish in six, seven weeks putting all this together — they’re memorizing lines, doing their classwork, and this is Shakespeare. This isn’t easy, so it is incredible what they are able to do. ... They’re passionate about this, and you can see it. You can’t ask for anything better for your children than to love what they’re doing, and if they are doing it at a place like Loomis, that’s a win-win.”

The director of the play, English teacher Will Eggers, called the experience with the students “wonderfully collaborative.” The assistant director, Hailey Young, a Penn Fellow on the English faculty, called the experience “incredible.”

“We encouraged them to take chances, and when they did, that folded into our interpretation and changed it,” Will said. “It added an element of courage. They were being courageous in their peformance, so it changed the theme a little bit. I think that's wonderful. That’s the way it should be. It’s not my vision. It’s our vision.”

Hailey felt similarly.

“The students are really capable actors, so it is more about us guiding them in the right direction,” she said. “And sometimes they would give us things or do things that would make us see the play in a different light.”

Written more than 400 years ago, A Midsummer Night’s Dream is still a popular Shakespeare play. 

“It’s the variety of experiences,” Will said. “You’ve got a wide range of classes, characters, genders, so many ideas and so many ways to interpret them. There is room for every director, cast, and society to reinvent it, setting it in dialog several hundred years in the past.” 

And on this night on stage, everyone was in the moment. The joyfulness of the performers and the delight of the audience did not end when the play ended. Accolades and bouquets of flowers were given. Yet another example of the tight-knit theater community.

“The course of true love never did run smooth” is one line from the play. The same could not be said for opening night.