One thing I appreciate about classes at Yale is that they’re rarely confined to the classroom. Often, professors and teaching fellows will bring us into the “real world” to relate whatever we’re learning to our lived environment. In years past, this meant eating crepes with my French class at New Haven’s “Crepe Choupette.” Or another time, my art class went to the Yale University Art Gallery to analyze Van Goghs and Rembrandts in person.
This year, one of my favorite excursions was to New York City with the members of one of my classes, “Acting Shakespeare.” I hopped on the Metro North train, took a little snooze, and two hours later was standing outside one of NYC’s premier performance venues, The Shed, in Manhattan’s Hudson Yards neighborhood.
Approaching The Shed as I desperately try to find my classmates
Joining my class outside the building (as everyone was scarfing down bagels bought in between their trains and then), we walked into the lobby to meet our teacher’s assistant with the tickets. The show we were seeing was King Lear with Kenneth Branagh in the titular role. Once we walked into the theater, it really hit me that I was about to see something magnificent (as if seeing him previously in Harry Potter and Death on the Nile weren’t enough to make me aware of this).
The stage before the show began!
After the show, our class dispersed as everyone went their own ways back to New Haven or into the city. Me and a few others lingered in the neighborhood, though, and meandered along the High Line before returning to the train station.
“Vessel” and “Dinosaur”
This trip with my classmates was not only enriching from a “student” perspective, as I got to experience some of the highest level of modern Shakespearean performance firsthand (for free!?), but also as a global citizen. The lessons I learned about acting, storytelling, and stage design from seeing a performance at The Shed seemed just as important as getting to go down to Hudson Yards and witness massive public works of international art and architecture firsthand.
Maybe one day, a class at Yale will be offered on Coachella and fly us out to Indio, California so I can see Clairo live. With a friend who just went to Iceland for a class, it seems like any excursion can be possible when a Yale professor is the one teaching you.
