Upon Graduation: Voices of Youth

copyright: Eng. Dept., SHU

 by Lydia Weng

     With the coming of the graduation season comes our annual theatrical performance to feast the eyes. Yes, the English Dept.’s play of the year. This year, seniors started from the group up by writing their own play—Voices of Youth.

     The story begins from a new semester at college where a transferred student swooped in to inspire a new attitude to celebrate their graduation and a new way to stage a performance. Chloe, the transferred student, a hard-working and all-A student, is secretly nicknamed the “Creepy Nerd” by her classmates. What’s more, her relationship with one of her classmates, Michelle, triggers people’s curiosity. People often guess and gossip about it, without knowing their relationship would be thought-provoking and lead us to think about our life journeys.

     Other characters also play out our different phases in life. Characters like William and Captain Red remind us of our dreams when they share with the audience their pursuit of basketball stardom from college to the league; characters like Chatty Alice, Eve, and Minnie, reflect on how we bear ourselves when we tend to gossip about people at a certain time; characters like Gunther and Nevaeh brings back our memory when people around us are secretly in love and how we rooted for them when we found out.

     From rehearsal to audition, from audition to staging, this play has moved a lot of hearts and most certainly left few dry eyes in the audience. What we saw in the performance was characters we could relate ourselves to and slices of memory that seemed our own. If you by any chance missed its two theatrical performances, you can only wait till its DVD comes out. But, for the head-on impacts from stage and the tears of joy off stage, you can only leave them for your imagination to go to work.