What CA Means to Me
Will
Day Student
Concord, MA
What role has theatre played in your CA education?
Landmarks—by that I mean that throughout my time at CA, I can look back and recognize who I was and what was happening by what I was doing at the time in theatre. Also pride, welcomed sleep, and sweat stains.
Describe theatre’s place in your life and what you’ve learned from your many roles.
It marks the years into months and the hours into days. It makes you a workaholic and a nervous mess. It makes you realize that you have to bust through each door you reach. If you can’t, you're forced to find some way around because you have to go forward. As I learned Macheath’s fatal weaknesses for women and luxury, I learned my own weaknesses and flaws. By the time I get to the stage all of a sudden the audience sees me, but I see the character. The two become interchangeable and I can’t realize whether I did all this for the audience, the play, or for myself.
What has been your most interesting academic assignment at CA?
The syllabus for the Advanced Latin: Vergil class was by far the most fulfilling. By reading, for instance, Dido's soliloquy I saw roots spreading into everything I've read. Walden brought me back to book two of The Aeneid and the escape from Troy. The Aeneid gave me a new perspective on how to read. In retrospect, it’s shocking how I enjoyed such a thing, having spent many nights with eyes closed off to the prospect of rest and opened to the page of at-first nonsensical text.
Tell us about Poetry Club.
It is devastatingly difficult to spark a flame in folks for poetry. Try and try, we have with some success. The result, however, is that the spark grew to a flame in me, and I spent last summer creating a bound book of my poems called Rain Catcher. I've done absolutely nothing with the book. But what can one do with a book anyway but read it or use it for fuel? So it’s not so bad.
Overall, which CA classes have most challenged or inspired you?
The Latin program (challenge + inspire)
Theatre 2b (inspire)
Precalculus: Analysis (challenge)
Thoreau and Kindreds (inspire)
Chemistry (challenge)
How does the Rock ’n’ Roll Club fit in with your goals and interests?
Rock 'n' Roll Club from time to time will throw a Battle of the Bands. They don't happen very often. When they do happen, it gives kids a reason to actually get something together. I don't think I'll pursue music professionally, but it’s a passion of mine, and it keeps me off the street, you know? The music rooms in the lower Performing Arts Center offer a perfect venue for that sort of constructive, recreational activity.
You’re involved in music, theatre, the golf team, writing poetry. With CA’s rigorous classes, what’s it like managing everything?
It bends you backwards until your head spins round through fiery rings and into certain circles. Finally you find yourself getting angry or tired or hopeless or happy or bitterly happy—hopeless in the bird’s nest while eggs are hatching all around you.
What would be your ideal day at CA?
Up and out and wind and coffee to breakfast at seven. Doze away half awake until folks come filing in for the rush of eggs come eight. To class, preferably language or theatre or photo or something that involves movement, at least of the mouth. Sunny day and quad-sitting. There would be snacks. Parkman Howe would wear blue jeans.
What have you learned from being a local Concord student in a school with peers from around the country and the world?
What a buffer Concord girds itself with. Carlisle and Acton break the wind and the waves that might blow our minds. Much of the world seems far away, though I think that might be inevitable due to CA being so small and tightknit and all that. Every now and then a needle permeates our blanket. It breaks the skin. Everything becomes very real very fast. How hopeless it would be if we didn't have those bearing the sharp needles. My needles are mostly blunt.
What did CA’s environment allow you to do that you might not have done at another school?
I know everyone's face.
