Stardate: 11/24/2007 English Plays at the Kharkiv Polytechnic

For the last several weeks, I have been working with the Freshman group 067A on their play, The Weirdest Honeymoon Ever. I have shown up for 3-4 practices, and the students have shown up for 3 practices. So, I was a bit worried about their performances going into the English Theater event held by the English Translation and Interpretation Department called, “The 5^th Season.” Sergey, the Brit, asked me to assist the freshmen with staging and performing their plays and the sophomores with choosing an appropriate play to perform. I found, purchased, and gave him two plays to consider for the sophomores: Wilde’s Lady Widemere’s Fan, and Priestley’s An Inspector Calls. They ended up not using them. They did Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest. Many of the videos are on www.youtube.com/Katerey523

Because of the chaos of getting to practices and the seeming lack of student interest and diligence, I was tired of helping out. By the time of the performances, I was ready to be done with this. Group 067A were not prepared and the lead male, Sergey, had not memorized his lines. They didn’t have any props, sound effects, music or costumes the day before the performance when they did their on-stage practice. On the Thursday before the plays, I was at their chaotic practice and told them that they must show up at my apartment at noon to practice their lines and to work on acting their parts (non-verbal actions associated with the lines, etc). They, I am glad to say, agreed.

At noon on Friday, about 13 students came over to the apartment and Maddy was tickled pink! She loves them and played and performed for them all afternoon. We practiced our lines and gestures/expressions, downloaded sound effects and music and berated Sergey into memorizing his lines. At about 2:30pm, they left for the University’s Students’ Palace up Pushkinskaya in order to practice more.

I arrived at the Students’ Palace with about 3 minutes to spare (the tram was running late), so I wasn’t able to give the sound coordinator the 4-5 additional sounds that I had downloaded for them. But I was in time to receive my judge’s form for each of the entrants. There were musical and/or dance numbers, plays, and comic skits. All the students did a wonderful job. It was such a pleasure to see how each and everyone of them pulled through to make a visually engaging and high energy series of diverse performances. I saw hip hop dancers, classic rock songs, rap, a funny skit akin to who’s on first (GW Bush and Condie Rice: Wu’s the President of China. That’s what I’m asking. Who’s the President of China, etc.), and several plays that ranged from well-done to bizarre.

The students were competing against each other according to class. My 067A group won 3^rd place for their play, but they could have won first had they practiced more and prepared in advance. I was proud of them nonetheless. The two lead actors (Sergey and Natasha) won for best English use. My 067B group won for person we most want to watch, Ruslan, who was hysterical as a parrot who turns into a prince. The freshman 067C group won second place and the first place was won by the sophomores who performed Earnest and who won last year. It as hysterical, when their narrator announced the title of the piece, he said, “We will perform the Impotence of Being Earnest.” A and I literally laughed our asses off. We were the only ones in the theater to understand the slip, so we were the only ones laughing!

All in all, it was super fun to do the whole thing, and I’m glad that I spent my time on it. The kids were very excited about the whole thing and they had a lot of fun. I forgot how much fun it is to do something like this. It’s been since high school for me. I’ll post some videos on youtube.com for folks to check out their performances.