Fall Play Review

As I’ve never seen any of Cheshire Academy’s plays before, and had only heard interesting (and negatively biased) stories regarding them, I went to go view The Dead with an optimistic mindset. I wasn’t expecting anything amazing, but I wasn’t expecting anything absolutely terrible.

The Dead itself is an odd story. Revolving around a group of friends, the first act features a lovely Christmas party where these friends engage in singing, a late drunken arrival, dancing, and cake. In a strange turn of events, however, the second act shows the aftermath of the party, culminating with the elderly host dying in her sleep, and then focusing on a married couple who discuss their reaction to the untimely death of the husband’s aunt, and argue on how the wife still retained latent feelings for a childhood friend from very long ago.

The actors themselves do a wonderful job, in my opinion. They portray their various characters in unique ways, and while I may be unable to remember the names of the characters, I could certainly describe how each played their own in such a distinct way. You could easily see how each character held different opinions or sentiments towards another. One prominent example was in how both Grace Greene and John Jiang were both regarded by Abby Zuckert’s character, where both attempted to offer her a hot bottle on her soon-to-be deathbed, and how she turned down her character’s sister but gladly accepted it from her loved nephew.

My biggest issue with this play was simply that I couldn’t find much...value in the story that was presented. While I found myself really enjoying how the actors were able to present unique personalities, I didn’t enjoy the story as much. It was hard to find a potential moral to the story that was presented, and the second half presented such a drastically different tone and experience from the first. If I were forced to come up with any sort of conclusion, it would probably be along the lines of, “The dead are dead, and we must learn to live on.”