Sam Ehmann AP Lit Summer Blog

It is a rare occurence in the life of Sam Ehmann that a thought comes into my head fully formed. Usually they are like a 3 year old's drawings, the general shape might kinda sorta be there, and if you really squint and stretch the imagination you can see the lion they are so proud of. But today I got lucky, and I went from desperately grasping for blog post ideas, to WHAM! An actually pretty cool concept that I can probably milk for a few hundred words. Everyone gets lucky sometimes. Dune , published by Frank Herbert in 1965, is one of the science fiction greats. It tells the story of the Atreides family, as they are placed in charge of the planet Arrakis, the birthplace of a drug called spice that grants some brief glimpses of the future, by their sworn enemies the Harkonnen. The story follows the son of Duke Leto Atreides, Paul, who is a part of a larger prophecy to lead the native people of the desert land to salvation. Now with the stage set, we get into the similarities. I...

I thoroughly enjoyed the performance of King Lear that we went and saw as a class. It did a wonderful job of taking the story we had read and providing a much needed visual element. To quote Jared DeBacker, my friend who worked on Broadway for a few years, "Plays are meant to be performed, without performance they are just weird stories with no action." To see the story performed as we did was a wonderful way to truly experience the play. I thought that all the acting performances were very good, but Lear and the fool were particularly good. The fool added significantly more raunchiness to the story through their actions and movements than I had envisioned while reading the story, and it was an addition I quite enjoyed. Additionally the actions chosen made many of the interactions involving the cock's comb much more clear in my mind, as its many references were hard to discern without a visual. Additionally I thought that the performance of King Lear was quite convincin...