The Taming of the Errors

By Iyan Sandahl

A low hum fills Harbor Hall as people slowly file in through the doors. We listen anxiously from behind the curtains. The final production is upon me.

On April 25th and 26th, Dalat Drama put on a double feature featuring two plays by the famous playwright William Shakespeare. The plays in question, “The Comedy of Errors” and “The Taming of the Shrew,” represented the culmination of months of hard work put in by the entire drama cast and crew. It also represented the climax of the many hours we seniors had poured into Dalat drama over the years.

As usual, the first read-through left everyone dying of laughter when Ms. Mary Geiman first brought out the scripts that we would be hearing over and over again for most of the semester. The Comedy of Errors is essentially “family reunion goes wrong” just with a lot more complex language, several arrests, two identical twin mix-ups, and a sword fight. The Taming of the Shrew tells the story of two sisters, one considered to be the “ideal woman” and the other considered to be undesirable, and their suitors. Essentially, two suitors, Hortensio (John Pham) and Lucentio (myself), who are both competing to win the youngest daughter Bianca (Edyn Roylance). Unfortunately, her father Baptista (Joshua Conklin) will not marry her off until a husband can be found for his older daughter, Catherine (Nadia Book). Hortensio and Lucentio come up with a plot to find a husband mad enough to marry Catherine, and they bring a man named Petruccio (Michael Silverstein) to the scene, who attempts to (and eventually succeeds at) wedding Catherine and taming her head-strong nature.

As has become a drama tradition whenever we do a double feature, we named the drama group chat as a combination of the names of the two plays: “The Taming of the Errors.” It summarizes the drama experience quite well actually. Ms. Geiman worked with us over the coming weeks to iron out all of the “errors” until opening night arrived. My favorite parts of drama are tech week and the production. 

John Pham says his favorite thing about production week was “Hanging out with the entire cast during meals and downtime.” 

After wrapping up closing night, we all could claim that we tamed the errors successfully. As Joshua Conklin said, “I think my favorite memory from drama was closing night. It was by far our best showing, and had the right mix of fine-tunedness and energy.” All of our hard work really paid off.

I was particularly excited about getting to end my time in drama doing another Shakespeare. I still remember way back in my sophomore year when we put on Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” and it was one of the most fun plays I can remember doing. One thing I really enjoyed getting to explore during this semester’s production was playing a very different type of role than I normally play. Crafting Lucentio’s mannerisms, gestures, expressions, and tone became a fun challenge as I strived to become the character on stage.

In addition, I also doubled as a merchant in The Comedy of Errors, which was a lot of fun because I got to sword fight with Drew Mattson who played Antipholus of Syracuse, one of the Antipholus twins. Pulling off the sword fight was a lot of work and it took a lot of practice rounds to become comfortable with it. Nathan Thompson used his knowledge of sword fighting to help instruct Drew and I on how to do it and make it look good on stage. As a result, I finally got to cross off a long-awaited item on my “things I really want to do in drama” bucket list.

It was definitely a great way to cap off my drama experience and I am sure I will look back on Dalat drama as the most fun thing I ever did in high school.