This past Friday, Rose Scholars attended the Department of Performing and Media Arts’ rendition of On the Verge. The play follows the story of three adventurous and daring women through their journeys traveling to Terra Incognita.

The aspect of the play that stood out to me to the most was the insanely complicated vocabulary! For example, one of the main characters, Mary, said this:

“The bane of my many travels in the tropics is a bland, mucilagenous paste called manioc, made from the forlorn and despicable cassava, a tuber of dubious provenance. A vile concoction, manioc tastes, in the best of recipes, like the bottom of a budgie’s cage – and is more suited for masonry than human consumption. Manioc is the quintessential native chop, occuring circumglobularly in the tropics. For those with a taste for prussic acid, manioc may be just your cup of tea.”

This extraordinary use of words captivated my attention and left me in awe. What was equally as impressive as the script, was the execution of these lines; if the actresses messed up lines, I had no idea. Beyond the plot of the play, this piece made me remember how beautiful the English language is!

I can only imagine the amount of work that went into the memorization and execution of the script, and I would like to applaud the PMA students for putting on such a complicated piece. Bravo!