Last week, I went to watch a student performance of The Trestle at Pope Lick Creek. While I enjoyed the overall performance, there were some things about it that I may have changed. One thing that was especially bothersome to me was the shadow figures. Maybe it was the limitation of the theater with the lighting, but despite being a notable part of the story, all of the hand shadows were hard to see with just the light of a small candle. Another thing that made it hard to feel completely immersed in the play was the range of actors. While the acting was good, Pace was an especially fitting casting choice, the fact that they were all students made it harder to believe the relationships between parents and teenagers.

One thing that surprised me was the amount of money that goes into these productions. When I saw Eurydice in the fall, the set included pipes that included a working output valve along with a sturdy platform in the middle. In this production, the set was primarily the underside of the trestle and it was on a pretty large scale. Additionally, the play involves breaking plates, which definitely caught me by surprise. Dalton’s mother and father started throwing a plate back and forth, and I was nervously anticipating an accidental drop. When the plate was smashed, it took me a second after one of the broken pieces actually hit my shoe that I realized what had happened and why the mother made it a point to bring in plates.

As for the content of the play, I’m not sure I really liked it. I’m just not satisfied with stories that involve a rebellious female character that changes a boy and dies. Not only that, the last scene before the intermission and one of the final scenes in which Dalton kisses the just deceased body of Pace is disturbing. One other thing that I’ve seen before but still have no personal understanding of is the need to be seen – that if no one sees you do something, that it isn’t real, that somehow you aren’t real. Perhaps this is a reasonably common thought people have, but I have never been able to relate to how the sentiment is presented in various stories. I might have to go back and read the play to get something else out of it, but I just wasn’t excited or intrigued with the plot. Nonetheless, I thought the actors did a good job, especially with some of the more unconventional actions they took.