Photo Caption: Campers after a long session of viewpoints work! Don’t you just love seeing an ensemble come together?

Today’s date: Wednesday, July 13, 2022

Hi! My name is Lucy, I’m about to be a senior in high school, and I’m super excited to be a camper in the Ren session this month. Welcome to the first blog post of this session!

Today was a slightly unusual day because Lia, our camp director, was out, so our RDAs Daniel and Devlin had to unexpectedly step in to teach and guide us. Probably our most essential task of the day was to finish reading the script. After wake ups, covid testing, yoga, and breakfast, we hit the ground running with a full three-hour block of reading the second half of The Tempest. Once we had finished, we dove into a group conversation about its themes and what makes the show compelling to us. Throughout the cutting process, we’ll be aiming to adhere to and lift up these themes as much as possible.

After our lunch break, we headed to the blackbox theater in Deming for a continuation of our viewpoints training led by Devlin (who did a fantastic job in the midst of our chaos). Then, we had to make the trek back down to the dining hall for dinner (and maybe some froot loops for dessert), which we were all extremely grateful for. There were some post-dinner card games back at the PEG dorm lounge, which was definitely a good warm up for the kind of emotional turmoil text cutting can bring out.

For our final leg of the day, we listened to (and LOVED) Mia’s dramaturgy intern presentation about the history and context of the play, as well as how most of the characters fit into the five main archetypes of the time. Once we had a chance to bombard her with questions, we moved on to cutting the first scene of the script (the SHIPWRECK!!!) together. It’s definitely a chaotic process that involves a lot of focus and patience, but I’m glad to say that we were overall very successful and managed to reach our goal length with enough time left to start cutting more scenes in small groups. It was definitely a jam-packed day, which is why I’m currently writing this in my bed and didn’t work on it earlier (sorry, Devlin and Denial, I promise I will sleep).

Quotes of the day:

From us:

• “Doot doot! Mr. Skinner’s here!” – Lilly
• “You think that since I’m an actor I’d be a better liar.” – Molly, in a very heated game of BS

From the play:

• “A pox o’ your throat, you bawling, blasphemous, incharitable dog.” – Sebastian

Caption: Devlin judging our choices as we venture into the world of texting cutting for the first time as a group (pic creds to Sakura)