Ave Maria University 

By Calah Alexander

Last night, my husband and I went to see 

the AMU (that's Ave Maria University, for 

the uninitiated) students perform As You 

Like It.  Now, I've been in love with theater 

since I was a kid. I was in a children's 

theater group for five years, from age ten 

until I was fifteen. I've played Peter Pan, 

Becky Thatcher in Tom Sawyer, Bert Healy 

in Annie, Katherine in The Taming of the 

Shrew, Gwendolen Fairfax in The 

Importance of Being Earnest, the unnamed 

minstrel in Once Upon a Mattress, and 

dozens of other characters. I've sang, danced, 

wept, and sword-fought onstage. I've seen more performances than I 

can remember,  from a high school production of Everyman wherein 

God was most unfortunately portrayed as a woman in gold lamé 

to The Phantom of the Opera in Vegas. I've seen several 

Shakespeare performances at Dallas' Shakespeare in the Park, 

including a poorly interpreted performance of The Tempest and 

a tepid performance of one of the histories that was so 

unremarkable I can't even remember which one it was. I've seen

a Dallas modern theater troupe put on a disturbing performance 

of Macbeth in which Macbeth and his lady came so close to having 

sex onstage that I felt like my brain had been violated. I've seen a 

fantastic performance of A Midsummer Night's Dream at Booker 

T. Washington high school, with a Puck better than any I could 

have imagined, and I've seen my own husband brandish his 

hand-forged sword as Fortinbras in an outdoor performance of 

Hamlet. 

         I started UD [the University of Dallas] 

with  a double major in English and drama, 

but quickly found that I wasn't the star 

actress I thought I was and stuck with my 

strength in literature. That didn't stop me 

from going to many plays, though, for UD's 

drama department was excellent. The 

student body at UD was roughly double the 

size of Ave Maria's. The drama department  

was firmly established and helmed by capable, talented people, 

and there were many talented, versatile actors and directors 

among the drama majors, including my sister-in-law and Dwija 

from House Unseen. The plays at UD were great. Some were fun, 

some were moving, some were philosophical and some were 

tragic. Overall, while the theater was modest, it was fully equipped 

to handle a variety of plays and the acting was consistently 

excellent. Thus, and here I'm going to be really honest, I didn't 

have  the highest of expectations last night.

          Ave Maria does not currently have a theater department. 

This play is being performed by Dr. Travis Curtright's 

Shakespeare in Performance class. That's one course, with only 

one section, with only about 22 students out of a total university 

population of 750. So, with such a small talent pool to pull from 

and so few resources to draw on, I wasn't expecting the caliber of 

performance I am accustomed to.

         I was so wrong.

         The students who performed last night easily eclipsed not 

only any of the plays I saw at UD, but I can also say, unequivocally, 

that I have never enjoyed a performance as much as I enjoyed 

their As You Like It.  It was remarkable. These students put on the 

play in a classroom with chairs lining three walls. The only thing 

dividing the stage from the backstage area was a long curtain. 

There was no lighting--the play was performed with the house 

lights on. The props were minimal. And still it was the best 

Shakespearean performance I have ever seen. Hands-down better 

than anything I've ever seen at Shakespeare in the Park. The 

actors enchanted the audience from the very beginning. There was 

raucous laughter, whooping, cat-calling, and so many low-pitched 

"ooooooohs" after all those incomparable Shakespearean insults 

that someone could have recorded it for a sitcom laugh track. I've 

never seen an audience so engaged.

The play was Shakespeare as he is meant to be performed. The 

actors engaged with the audience. They flirted with the girls, 

pointed out the lovers, mocked the melancholy scholars, and 

called us all fools. Orlando even turned an audience member into 

a tree to hold his horribly foolish love-poetry. The blocking was 

superbly accomplished. The actors moved so naturally and 

effortlessly that I didn't even notice how tightly controlled it all 

was, how the actors moved along diagonals and arranged 

themselves in triangles, maintaining visibility and heightening 

dramatic tension. And the actors were fluent in Shakespeare. I was 

truly astounded at how easily the words dropped from their lips, 

as if they had been speaking late  sixteenth-century dramatic verse 

all their lives. They even understood what they were saying. I 

can't tell you how many times I've seen an actor rattle off a line 

from Shakespeare with only a vague idea of what the character is 

actually saying. These kids got it. They got the jokes and the 

innuendos, and their ease with the subtle nuances made their 

characters come alive. 

            I've found some Shakespearean 

performances difficult to follow, even when 

I'm familiar with the play, because the 

actors emphasize the wrong words or move 

at the wrong time. These actors knew the 

language so well that the play was as easy to 

follow as anything written in modern 

English.  And they were good. They played 

the parts so well. Duke Frederick was 

outrageously pompous and self-important; 

Orlando was heroic and swoon-worthy and 

hysterically sappy; Rosalind packed enough spirit and sparkle to 

overshadow just about everyone on stage with her; Celia was the 

perfect balance of loving devotion to Rosalind and sensible 

skepticism of Orlando; Touchstone was masterfully executed as the 

wisest fool who ever graced Arden; Silvius and Phoebe were so 

wonderfully pathetic that the audience couldn't decide whether to 

laugh at them or pity them; and Jaques... Jacques was so 

charmingly melancholy and cynical that by the end of the play I 

had fallen in love with him. 

             But what really made the play so awesome were all the 

extra little additions. When we came in the actors were playing 

instruments and singing, and they did the same during the 

intermission. But these were no flat-footed attempts to re-create 

imagined songs that might have existed in the forest of Arden. No, 

these were modern songs, played on simple instruments and given 

the students' own musical twist. New words, shifts in harmony, 

and an homage to Michael Jackson's Thriller made me want to get 

up and dance with them. The singing was great. I was actually 

surprised by how musically inclined they all seemed to be. The 

last song and dance number, though, which the entire cast took 

part in and which was placed between the end of the play and the 

epilogue, won me over to Ave Maria students forever. I don't want 

to ruin it for anyone who might be seeing the play in the coming 

weeks, so I'll just say that there was such a spirit in that song and 

in these students that it made me want to cry. No exaggeration. 

            These students love Ave Maria University in a way I haven't 

seen since I left UD. I got that same sense from them last night 

that I always get when I go back to my own alma mater...the sense 

that they belong to this school, that it is a special, wonderful place 

like nowhere else in the world, that they love this school and that 

no matter where they go after graduation, Ave Maria will always 

be home.