SCAENAE IN SCAENIS

short version: if you play an instrument (and it is not too inconvenient to bring it to academy), please bring it to academy.

thoughtful version:
As Magistra Carroll mentioned, Plautus was never far from Shakespeare's mind when he was writing Comedy of Errors. But what do you think was on Plautus' mind when he wrote Menaechmi? While there are possibly infinite hypothetical answers to such a question, I think we can be reasonably sure that Plautus had his audience in mind when he was writing. A play is not a play without on audience. This relationship, between the spectator and the spectacle, between viewer and viewed, is fundamental to theater, particularly Plautine comedy (not to mention all of ancient art). But a play is not an exclusively visual thing. In the ancient world, theater was unique in its capacity to bring together multiple artistic media (textual, visual, musical) simultaneously in the course of a performance.

Which brings me to my point: while we refer to Plautus' plays as "comedies," this generic label is somewhat misleading, or at least in need of some qualification. Simply put, Plautus wrote comedies in the sense that The Book of Mormon is a comedy: music is an integral element of the performance. 

Like Plautus, we will try to synthesize as many artistic forms as we can while we produce our play, but what specific artistic contributions will make up our performance remain to be determined by your individual artistic abilities. If you can do it (dance, sing, juggle, paint, summersault), it can probably go somewhere in the play. So please bring your creative self, and whatever instruments are required to express it, to academy.

​magister cavedo