All My Sons: A Retrospective

I really can't believe it's over--after three weeks of intensive rehearsals and work, it all boiled down to three days of performance and suddenly, we're on to Earnest. I think that as a director, I focused so much on fitting as much rehearsal time into a few weeks that the actual performance dates sort of snuck up on me. But, sure enough, thursday, friday and saturday found me seated in the back row, right next to my skilled co-director, Arika, watching as our talented cast and crew made magic on stage.

Or at least, that's what we did half the time. A little secret about directors that I've found is that when we watch our own productions, we aren't always watching the show--rather, we do the best we can to keep our eyes on the stage while focusing our attention on the audience and how they're reacting. And so, night after night, we watched as people laughed, cringed, and cried along with the performances. Afterwards, friends and acquaintences congratulated cast, directors and crew alike for creating such a wonderful show.

But the most touching response came from people who almost none of us even know--the majority of our audience, senior citizens from the town of Northfield. Arika and I watched in disbelief as night after night, we saw older members of our audience in tears by the end of the show. Now, normally, I would feel bad about making old people cry, but this seemed a bit different. After the show, one man explained that he remembers his many friends who were veterans and was touched by how accurately Jared Evans had portrayed the same conflicts he remembered onstage. The more people who talked to us, the more we were made aware of how we had touched people. Making such an impression on an audience with so much more experience with the period the play took place in and the issues it deals with, an audience so much different than what we are all used to in UNCO, is something that we're all proud of.

-Ben