Rivalries & rituals / One December in Troy, and another thirty-three years earlier
At Emma Willard, Every Guess Gets the Same Answer: Hmm, Interesting
Each December the senior class puts on Revels, a medieval Yuletide play whose roles are kept secret until opening night. Some seniors wear the same costume their mothers wore.
At Emma Willard School in Troy, New York, the senior class play is Revels, a Yuletide celebration in a medieval manor house. The school calls it Renaissance Faire meets holiday play. In 2023 it was performed for the 109th time.
Seniors audition in September. They are cast by a mixture of personality and history: if a sister, an aunt or a best friend once played a role, a senior might take it on, in the same costume. Then each role becomes a secret known only to the cast.
For weeks before the show, seniors invite everyone else to "Revelize" them, to guess their part. Every guess, right or wrong, gets the same reply: "Hmm, interesting."
This is the only secret I know that teenagers keep perfectly, because the school has given them a sentence to keep it with.
In December 2009 the Times Union in Albany visited rehearsals. Seniors were wheeling around an alchemist's cart that turns copper into gold and being fitted as dragons and peacocks. One senior got chills putting on her falconer's costume, which her mother had worn in the same play 26 years earlier. She expected, the paper said, to dampen her well-trimmed mustache with tears if she saw her mother crying in the audience.
A girl in a falconer's costume and a mustache, worried about crying because her mother might. That is the most complete description of family I have ever read.
The paper also found an alumna from the class of 1941 who could still recite all her lines as a character called Cleverlegs. "I have no idea why it was such a big thing," she said.
The play changes. In 2023 the manor was visited by Barbie, who lit the candles, and a crowd of devils performing the "Thriller" dance. That fall, sixteen members of the class of 1961 came back for their eightieth birthdays and toured the costume room with the costume manager.
The eldest is a junior and has started keeping her college list secret. When we guess a school, she says nothing. So last week I gave her the line. I asked if she was applying to a particular college. She thought about it. "Hmm," she said. "Interesting."
She has been using it all week. Asked what she wants for dinner, asked where her shoes are, asked whether she has finished her homework. Hmm, interesting. It works on everything, especially parents.
Sources
The public records, school pages and published accounts this story draws on. Where the story imagines a scene or a line of dialogue, that is the column’s telling, not a quotation.
- Times Union: School play not just the same old show timesunion.com
- Emma Willard: Winter Traditions at Emma Willard School emmawillard.org
- Emma Willard: Inspiration for the Future, 210th Commencement emmawillard.org
- Emma Willard: Celebrating the Class of 1961 emmawillard.org