Graduation: World Premiere of 'The Crown'

During finals week, the first final I had was for my literature class, which was my favorite class that I took there at Columbia. I’ve talked about them before, but that group of people I became closer to than almost anyone else during my time there. For our final paper in that class, Prof. Muller had encouraged us to do something creative and outside the box if we liked, so I chose to write a play. During this literature class I came in contact with what became my favorite book, Dostoevsky’s ‘Crime and Punishment’. Since I have a whole post about that book, I won’t rehash it again here. I knew I wanted to use that book, and I knew that my other favorite book for that semester had been Shakespeare’s ‘King Lear’. My play, ‘The Crown’, is an imaginary conversation between Raskolnikov, the main character of C&P, and King Lear.After reading it, it was Prof. Muller who suggested we get the class together and stage a reading of the play. (When she was talking to the class about the idea, she said after reading the play that it was “damn good”, which is very high praise from someone who is as well read as herself. It also meant a lot to me.) I thought the idea was a little silly at first but to my surprise people were genuinely enthusiastic about it, and we got almost the entire class together.Reading through it as a class, with my classmates and my friends was really graduation for me. We met up over at Talia’s place, which was near the campus, had wine and crackers, and did a reading of the play together. In this picture are (from upper left moving down & around) Justin reading the part of Watchman #1, myself reading Lear, Liz reading Raskolnikov, Prof. Jill Muller reading Razumikhin and who unfortunately is hiding behind Benjamin Muller’s head, who read Svidrigailov (and is no relation to Jill), Talia who hosted us and read Dunya, Aries who narrated for us, and Pi-Ta who I think wasn’t reading. Even though the official ceremonies were 5 more days away, it was after this extraordinary afternoon that I truly felt I’d finished school. My play was the project I’d completed there I felt the most proud of. It was the perfect ending to an amazing class that I won’t ever forget.

“To the players of Room 402. All my best times were spent here.”